My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 4 and 12. It is a privilege to follow the eloquent noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, and I shall concentrate on one or two aspects of her comments. As regards the need for these exemptions, someone commented to me that the poor have always had the largest families. The austerity that we are experiencing is due in large part to the fact that some vastly wealthy people made some very poor choices. Yet today we are looking to penalise the poorest in our society, and most especially their children, by taking money away from them. Therefore, I support very strongly the noble Baroness’s call to make the exemptions as wide as possible.
Last Friday a report on the education of children in care was launched at the Nuffield Foundation. The Children’s Minister, Edward Timpson MP, addressed the launch. The report highlighted the fact that the educational performance of children in care was still a long way behind that of the rest of the general population of young people. That is a matter of concern. However, children in need who have stayed with their families
and not been taken into care, fostered or taken into a children’s home do far better once they are taken into the care of the state than those children who have not been subject to intervention by the state. We all know that due to pressures on local authorities, the threshold for being taken into care is quite high. Many more children in need live in fairly dysfunctional families but those families are not dysfunctional or abusive enough for the children to be taken into care, and those children are struggling. We need to think about families in which the parents grew up in deprivation, not just financial but emotional deprivation. Often the parents will have had issues around drink and drugs, and have not been able to show the children very much love.
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I have been trying to put a face on the sort of families who will be affected by the Bill. I think a significant number will be those that I am familiar with, coming through the care system, and those who have grown up in need. What I hear again and again from people who have come through the care system is that it did not meet their need to learn how to relate comfortably with other people. They feel uncomfortable around people, they feel uncomfortable about intimacy. My fear is that we are penalising people who struggle anyway to make and keep relationships, making it harder for them to keep their families together.
This takes me to the other point that the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, raised. I hope I understood her correctly. She was pointing out that these proposals actually discourage single parents from joining another single parent to make a two-parent relationship. She said that she did not want to place any particular value judgment on two-parent families, but we know that boys, particularly, growing up without a father in the family, are much more likely to get involved in criminal matters. Some of your Lordships may have read the speech by President Obama, made when he was a senator, talking about his experience of growing up in a lone-parent family and reflecting on the fact that so many young men in America were growing up without fathers.
There are real consequences to the Government’s proposal. The OECD’s report on family formation—from 2010, I believe—highlighted the fact that in about 2030 or 2035 we will overtake the United States in the numbers of children growing up without a father in the household. I think the Prime Minister is quite right to be concerned about supporting two-parent families. We should look very carefully at what this Bill does to disincentivise parents joining together to bring up their children. I look forward to the Minister’s response.