The UK, as not enough people know, is the family breakdown capital of Europe and, not coincidentally, has one of the least supportive family policy offers. Indeed, family policy is mainly about maximising the employment of young mothers, despite the polling evidence suggesting that many of them would prefer help to be able to afford more time at home when children are at pre-school.
Just under half of all children (46%) do not live with both biological parents at the age of 14, compared with around 20% for those growing up in the 1970s/1980s when divorce rates were first spiking. The proportion of households with dependent children led by a single parent is 24%, in the rest of Europe it averages 13%, and it is much higher in poorer, post-industrial places like Hartlepool (30%) than Winchester (7%). Notwithstanding Jonathan Haidt’s powerful arguments about the impact of smartphones and social media on young minds, this family story must be a big contributor to the epidemic of mental fragility among young people.
It is no disrespect to struggling single parents to highlight the fact that the lower level of family resources and parental time in single-parent households can have negative consequences. Of the 30% of all children living in income poverty at age five, about three quarters are from single-parent families. Half of single parents receive means-tested state support of some kind, compared with 12% of cohabiters and 6% of married parents. The high level of single parenthood, along with a big financial sector, is one reason why the UK is at the top of the inequality league in Europe.
Moreover, as Edward Davies of the Centre for Social Justice puts it: ‘Social policy gains are actively reversed by the collapse in our home lives’. He cites poverty, housing and homelessness, educational attainment and criminal justice as areas hugely impacted by unstable family life. An unstable family life helps to push up social spending at both ends of the life cycle, as well as exerting more downward pressure on fertility, making a smaller state impossible.
There are many reasons why this litany of failure is not more central to political debate: the desire not to stigmatise non-traditional families, a healthy desire to avoid hypocrisy (it is estimated that 40% of all MPs elected for the first time in 2010 have seen their marriages fail) and the sense that what happens behind closed doors at home is somehow beyond the reach of politics. There is also the Treasury’s employment-maximising approach to growth, which favours the GDP economy before the well-being of young parents. This is despite the fact that our employment rate of 75% is in the top third of the OECD and well above many countries with higher per capita growth and productivity.
But there is a bigger reason that I spell out in my new book ‘The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality’, and that is the fact that so many negative trends – from family breakdown to falling fertility – are intertwined with positive ones, above all the greater freedom to leave unhappy relationships and the big increase in womens’ financial independence and opportunities outside the home. The challenge is to raise the status of the care work that we still want and need, both in the home and in face-to-face care jobs in the public economy, while continuing to promote those freedoms.
These are hard arguments to make and the whole political class has ducked the challenge. The Tory party has long been the party of the family in name only. From Margaret Thatcher to George Osborne, there has been hostility to stay at home mothers – it was Osborne who introduced the two-child benefit cap. There has been no interest in recognising the family properly in the tax system or reducing the couple penalty in the welfare system, let alone beefing up our miserly parental leave support or making it easier for one parent to remain at home in the stressful pre-school years which many relationships don’t survive.
Labour have long been the champions of the non-traditional family and their instinct is to not trust parents, especially those of disadvantaged children. There is a lingering association in the progressive mind between the conventional family and traditional gender roles and the subordination of women.
But society has moved on. The polling data show no nostalgia for the 1950s. Yet when Jeremy Hunt announced a £4 billion extension to childcare subsidies in the 2023 budget, chiding women not to ‘waste their talent’ on mothering, he might have noted that both parents working full-time when children are pre-school (around one third of those with pre-schoolers) is an option favoured by just 9% of the British public according to the British Social Attitudes survey.
Support for the family, and indeed for higher fertility, are often seen as small-c conservative ideas. But giving women more choice about how to combine motherhood and work and helping to reduce family instability and child poverty are ideas that liberals and conservatives can unite around.
How about big-C Conservatives? A proper family policy is surely an idea whose time has come for the party. It is popular, a bit edgy, would make the country less stressed, and it’s not too expensive if you direct the £9bn childcare subsidy direct to families to decide whether to spend on themselves, granny or nursery care (and maybe front-end child benefit too). The Overton window is even shifting a bit in the direction of beefing up the domestic realm as people worry more about the fertility bust on the economy. Kemi Badenoch says she is a champion of the family. Assuming she wins the Conservative leadership race, this would be something distinctive to build a new programme around.
David Goodhart’s latest book, ‘The Care Dilemma: Caring enough in the Age of Sex Equality’, is published by Forum Press.
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