“What struck me when I visited Welsh House Farm and talked to the mums you have just seen on the film was the scale of the impact that parenting support has had on their lives. Of course this support has helped them with important parenting skills, but as one lady said, being more in control at home has meant she could think about studying for qualifications which will make a positive long term difference to her family’s life. We will be working with Hillary Beard at Positive Parenting, to help members of the Welsh House Farm community train to be parenting support workers themselves so that the benefits these families have seen can be built on into the future.
But why is support like this important?
The relationships we have with each other – with our children, with our families, with other members of our community shape our lives. For children, those relationships can mean the difference between achieving their potential in life and not. The evidence is clear: children who have both parents around and involved in their lives do better[10].
Helping to strengthen families - whether it is through parenting programmes or in other ways - can help give children a better start in life.
Yet in Britain we have had more than a decade of Labour failing to put families first; failing to recognise that there is something fundamentally wrong with our benefit system when it pays parents with children more if they live apart; and failing to address the fact that Britain now has one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe.
As Simon, the youth worker in Welsh House Farm said in the film, for children on that estate this means just one in ten of families will have both parents still together.
David Cameron wants Britain to be the most family friendly country in the world because supporting strong relationships and strong families will help us build a strong society.
That doesn’t mean telling parents what to do every second of the day or having a universal definition of what makes a strong family set out in yet another piece of Labour legislation. It means respecting the fact that every family is different but that there are pressure points in any parent or prospective parent’s life where extra support can help. Family networks, which we may have relied on in the past, are far more scattered. Now it is not the role of the state to try and replicate or replace traditional family networks; but it can and should have an important role in ensuring that the right support and services are readily available if and when that help is needed. Not only is this morally right but, as we have found out over the past decade, the cost to society of allowing family breakdown to spiral is felt by us all. This is very much a Conservative approach. An approach that has guided our great Conservative prime ministers from Disreali onwards and an approach that will guide a great prime minister of the future, David Cameron.
Everyone in this room will have first hand experience of the pressures on families and relationships: long working hours, the rising cost of living, the pressures to buy our children the latest trainers or the latest electronic game. All of this can put seemingly intolerable strain on family life.
I am a working mum with three school aged children; my youngest James is just six – I am afraid one of the downsides of having a parent as an MP is that they will be working long hours.
I am lucky, I can share the pleasures and the pain of parenting with my husband Iain – I cannot start to imagine how difficult parenting would be if I had to do it by myself.
It is so tragic that couples are at their greatest risk of family breakdown in the year immediately following the birth of a child. A time that is filled with joy is also a time of sleepless nights, financial worries, the recognition that as a parent your own needs are now very much secondary.
There are dedicated professionals working tirelessly to support families who are finding it difficult to cope – in my own constituency in Basingstoke I know how much the work of our local Relate team is valued and the extraordinary benefits that come out of the commitment schools have shown to delivering a wide variety of parenting support programmes. But all too often up and down the country such services are stretched thin with a lack of certainty over funding making it difficult to plan to meet the needs of the future.
The time has come to say that the support we give to relationships matters. That the balance between our home and work life matters. That our families matter. I tell you, this change in culture will only happen under a Conservative Government.
We want support to be in place whenever families come under pressure, so that rather than floundering, families have the tools available to help them thrive.
Most young couples now get married in a civil ceremony[11]. Unlike a church wedding, there is no tradition of pre-marriage preparation for couples marrying at a registry office. We want that to change. We want local registrars to start signposting couples to pre-marital education as a matter of routine. The Local Government Association who co-ordinate the role of wedding registrars, agree and I am pleased to say that they putting forward this policy so that every young couple getting married will be made aware of the benefits they would get from relationship support at this critical point in their life.
In the US, couples who have this type of pre-marriage education are a third less likely to divorce[12]. We want this type of support for couples to be routine in Britain too.
We also want families to get the support they need when they celebrate the arrival of a baby. The Centre for Social Justice, under the inspiring chairmanship of Iain Duncan Smith, has done so much to emphasise the importance of early intervention. Knowing where to get the right support at the right time can allow families to flourish, and be less dependent on the state in the long term. That is why we will re-introduce a universal health visitor service which will focus on supporting both mothers and fathers around the birth of a child – and we will give those health visitors the training they need to spot when relationships are under pressure and most important of all signpost where help is available.
Because we want families to be stronger and more resilient we are also committed to introducing our version of the Dutch kraamzorg system. We would give mothers and fathers practical support from a maternity nurse in the home in the first few days after a child is born -help with the things that need time: like establishing breast feeding, helping older children adjust to the new arrival – and the practical things like preparing meals, all of which will help the family get into the routine of having a new baby in the house. The sort of practical support which can make all the difference. It is perhaps unsurprising that whilst the UNICEF ranked the UK as the worse place to grow up, they ranked the Netherlands top.
Children need the support of both parents. Mum and Dad. Experience in Sweden proved that where fathers are significantly involved in their children’s care in early years, families are 30% less likely to see their relationship end in divorce[13]. That is why the flexible working and parental leave policies Theresa May will discuss today are so important too.
All of these policies use Conservative means – encouraging two parents to be involved in their child’s life – to achieve truly progressive ends – reducing family breakdown, improving the start in life our children enjoy, and helping families achieve the balance they want between home and work life.
Family life and families have changed. What I have talked about today is just the start of a how we want to help strengthening families in Britain today. In this changed world, making Britain the most family friendly country in the world is at the heart of David Cameron’s vision for our country. Working with our health visitors, childcare workers, family and relationship experts, I know that we can turn David Cameron’s vision into reality.”
