A lesson from Australia – are the Conservatives about to be hoodwinked by the Local Government Association over marriage preparation?

The Honourable Kevin Andrews was elected to the Australian Parliament in 1991. He chaired the House of Representatives Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee (1996–2001), which published 'To Have and to Hold' in 1998. He also served as the Australian Minister for Ageing (2001–2003); Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations (2003–2007); and Minister for Immigration (2007). He is currently Deputy Chairman of the House Economics Committee and Chairman of the Coalition Policy Review. He is married to Margaret, and they have five children. He delivered an address at the International Conference on a Conservative Vision for a Free and Just Society, sponsored by The Heritage Foundation and held in Washington, D.C., on November 19–20, 2008. It was published on the web on 23rd April 2009.

• Kevin Andrews concluded “.... there is one lesson that clearly emerges from the events of over a decade. It is that marriage breakdown and child support are the tail that wags the body of family policy. As a consequence, government support for marriage education has been caught in the crossfire of debate about the causes, meaning, and consequences of family breakdown over the past four decades. Numerous inquiries have been conducted, and hundreds of millions of dollars are now expended on the consequences of marriage breakdown. Despite the fact that marriage breakdown costs the nation billions of dollars each year and leaves both men and women substantially worse off, little is spent by way of comparison on prevention. Yet the research indicates that programs of prevention, education, and skills development can enhance the prospects of successful marriage.”

Politicians around the world – with notable exceptions, like Kevin Andrews – are inclined to discount the evidence that supports the efficacy of preventative education. They prefer to spend billions on the consequences of relationship breakdown rather than small sums on prevention.

In the UK, the Local Government Association represents local councils with large workforces. These include many people who work in social services, schools and colleges and are dealing with the consequences of relationship breakdown. In addition to these, police and health workers respond to the consequences of domestic violence and truancy and the other results of disaffection including drug and alcohol addiction. There are vast armies of people whose jobs now depend on - or whose significance is substantially enhanced by - the consequences of relationship breakdown.

Search the web sites of the Local Government Association and its subsidiary LACORS and you will be very pushed to find a reference to any work being done or contemplated to prevent relationship breakdown.

It was surprising, therefore, when a new policy was announced by Maria Miller MP, Shadow Minister for the Family, at the Conservative Conference on 30th September 2008:

• "Most young couples now get married in a civil ceremony. 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 (are) 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. We want this type of support for couples to be routine in Britain too."

More predictably, a spokesman for the LGA said recently:

• “I believe Maria Miller MP misunderstood the LGA’s position on this. We are broadly supportive of the notion that as a society, we should do more to support committed relationships, including marital ones but not only those, and that this would in particular benefit children where couples are parents. LACORS …. is the part of the LGA that deals with regulatory services and provides information for registrars. Colleagues in LACORS are putting together some guidance for registrars to help them provide information to couples on pre-marriage advice services available in their area. This information is, I understood, due to go out in May this year [2009].”

To return to the experience of Kevin Andrews; he continues in his address:

• “In 1980, my wife Margaret and I, along with a small group of like-minded couples, established the Marriage Education Programme in Melbourne. In almost 30 years, we have provided marriage education courses to some 20,000 people. The work is undertaken on a voluntary basis, apart from the employment of an administrative assistant. We receive a small grant from the federal government. Otherwise the work is self-funding. It is an example of a group of people recognizing a need and responding to it. It is an example of how government can support the voluntary sector.
• Following the election of the Howard government in 1996, I established an inquiry into strategies to strengthen marriage and relationships in Australia. The resulting report, 'To Have and to Hold', noted the significant costs of marriage breakdown for individuals and society and recommended increased funding for programs of education, skills training, and prevention. The publication of the report was seminal in the discussion of marriage education policy. It was the first time that a legislature had undertaken a thorough review of the field, and it became a stimulus for other policy discussions.
• The report led to increased government funding for marriage education and related services, but suggestions for a more equitable basis for the funding were ignored. A pilot scheme of education vouchers was introduced and, although successful, was never implemented universally. More recently, the Howard government established 65 Family Relationship Centres around the country to act as a gateway to family support services. Their introduction had its origins in the ongoing dispute about child support.
• Soon after the introduction of a child support scheme in the late 1980s, there was an ongoing campaign against what was seen as an inequitable system, especially towards non-custodial parents, invariably fathers. Soon after my election to Parliament, I was appointed to an inquiry into the scheme. The crossparty committee agreed that there were inequities that should be remedied. Yet within an hour of the release of the report, the then Minister categorically ruled out any substantial change. Apart from the substantive issues involved, the curt response was unproductive.
• It was part of the reason, I believe, why child support remained a political issue for so long.The issues had not been resolved when the Howard government was elected in 1996. On regular occasions, government MPs would raise the issue in the Party Room. Many of the MPs complaining about the inequity were women. As a consequence, further inquiries were established, leading ultimately to further reforms and the creation of the Family Relationship Centres.
• Whether these centres will fulfil the expectations for them remains to be seen. The government set out a series of key performance indicators at the time of their introduction against which future judgments can be made.”

The Family Relationship Centres can be accessed through Family Relationships Online which:

• “provides all families (whether together or separated) with access to information about family relationship issues, ranging from building better relationships to dispute resolution. It also allows families to find out about a range of services that can assist them to manage relationship issues, including agreeing on appropriate arrangements for children after parents separate.”

‘Building better relationships’ presumably includes marriage preparation, but it is clearly a minor service in the mix of ‘dispute resolution’ and ‘arrangements for children after parents separate’.

As Kevin Andrews says

• “.... there is one lesson that clearly emerges from the events of over a decade. It is that marriage breakdown and child support are the tail that wags the body of family policy.”

In the UK the Local Government Association spokesman said:

• “Colleagues in LACORS are putting together some guidance for registrars to help them provide information to couples on pre-marriage advice services available in their area.”
  

LACORS have commissioned One Plus One to provide this information. It will be interesting to see whose views it reflects.

Kevin Andrews again:

• “I remarked earlier that there is a danger that government can seduce community groups into becoming its mouthpiece. There is also a danger that government will see the voluntary sector as just an extension of itself.”

Organisations working in the field of family relationships can all too easily be ‘seduced’ into following the government line. Some charities in the UK are little more than government sponsored quangos.

Let us hope the Conservative Party learns the lesson of what occurred in Australia and makes sure that its policy is not just “broadly supportive of the notion that as a society, we should do more to support committed relationships” but actually promotes marriage and preparation before it.

On the one hand, David Cameron said at their recent Spring Forum in Cheltenham:

• “For example, when it comes to poverty, Labour’s approach is just to treat the symptoms by spending more money.
• Our approach is to understand why people are stuck in poverty in the first place, and help them break free by tackling welfare dependency, addiction, debt, poor schooling and above all, family breakdown.
• There is no way this country will prosper in the twenty-first century, let alone deal with the debt crisis if we keep asking taxpayers to foot the £100 billion a year bill for the broken society.”

But on the other hand, in 'Rising to the challenge' - The Conservative local government response to the recession – [launched at the same Forum by the Conservative Councillors Association] the report suggests [page 26]:

• “Looking at social care for families, for example, there is clear and unequivocal evidence that early, targeted intervention into the lives of families at risk yields better results and has the potential for major savings to the public purse. Under the current system, however, families on the border of social exclusion can be the subjects of multiple interventions from several professionals over the course of years. The results of this failure to solve problems are depressing and the cost to the taxpayer is immense.”

It begs the question “So what do you do when 50% of babies are born to unmarried parents, 200,000 abortions occur each year, and the UK tops the European league tables for most of the statistics that reflect fragile or broken relationships and promiscuity?”

It is a bit late in the day - when there is already a pandemic - to be reacting by relying upon ‘targeted intervention into the lives of families at risk’.

It is surely high time the Conservatives started to explain and - indeed, to implement policies in local councils they control - showing how they propose through prevention to bring about a wholesale cultural revolution to overturn the “every choice of lifestyle agenda” of the Labour government, instead of just bewailing the social and fiscal consequences of the pandemic which have been manifestly obvious for a long time, anyway.

The unequivocal promotion of preparation for marriage would signal a good start towards cultural change, provided that the LGA does not try to subvert the policy and revert to the “every choice of lifestyle agenda” of the Labour government - and its recent predecessors - which has proved such a catastrophic failure.

Families in Britain: an evidence paper

The DCSF web site reports, "The family dominates public and policy debate and there is much discussion about the state of family in Britain. This paper assembles the key trends and sets out a framework to think about the family. The paper aims to provide a framework to take stock of family life in Britain and map recent trends and changes as well as explore future pressures on families. It also aims to understand what lies behind headline trends and to understand the implications of these. This paper and the family policy principles it sets out will hopefully stimulate further discussion which will continue to inform the Government's work and underpin the ambition for a truly family-friendly Britain."

My comments on 'Families in Britain: an evidence paper' [December 2008] are set out below. It was published recently by the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit and the DCSF and includes the following:

Page 85 - Marriage is associated with successful outcomes
Page 86 - Lone parenthood is associated with less successful outcomes
Page 87 - Stepfamilies are associated with less successful outcomes than biological two-parent families
Page 88 - Parental separation is associated with a range of adverse childhood, adolescent and adult outcomes for children e.g. in terms of cognitive development, education and labour market disadvantages

Page 85 [married couples] are happier, less prone to depression and suicide and live longer.

Government Ministers have become so accustomed to parroting the mantra "we shall not promote one type of family structure over another", that no matter how strong the evidence to the contrary, they are blind to it, even when it is in their own documents.

Ironically, of course, the government doesn't adhere to this mantra, as it tries desperately to halt the increase in teenage motherhood and the spread of sexually transmitted infections with ever increasing quantities of contraceptives.

If the evidence does not endorse teenage motherhood as a good basis for healthy outcomes for children, why not promote the structure which does, rather than the alternatives that have outcomes closer to those from teenage motherhood?

(The National Statistics [published on the web 28th February 2008] 'Trends in suicide by marital status in England and Wales,1982-2005' Abstract states, "A protective effect of marriage has been observed in a number of previous studies .......... despite changes in marriage patterns over the last 25 years, those who are married still have the lowest risk of suicide, and there has generally been no obvious decline in the difference in suicide rates between those who are married and those who are not.")

You might think with the evidence from a number of studies about the "protective effect of marriage" that the Ministers promoting a report entitled 'Families in Britain: an evidence paper' would want to draw attention to the "protective effect of marriage", but, not a bit of it, the Ministers use the opportunity in their Foreword to calmly spin the evidence away from married couple relationships - which the evidence supports - towards 'diversity', which it does not.

A further example of spin is on Page 99, with "Life Event Marriage/cohabitation"; this is a conflation of two entirely different events, only one of which is to a publicly committed and enduring relationship.

This conflation of marriage and cohabitation lies at the heart of what some bishops are complaining about when they speak of policies that are 'morally corrupt'.

The Rt Revd Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, is reported as saying, "the breakdown of the family is a crucial element in the difficulties of our present society .... The Government hasn’t given sufficient support to that because it is scared of losing votes.... Labour’s failure to back marriage and its “insistence on supporting every choice of lifestyle” ha[s] had a negative effect on society."

An example of this 'negative effect' has been revealed recently: the banks bought into the Government's "every choice of lifestyle" agenda - and created the toxic debt - which now they are too ashamed to acknowledge by publishing mortgage arrears figures by marital status. The previous generation of bankers would never have lent money to cohabiting couples with inherently unstable relationships in the amounts which have been advanced in the last decade. Toxic relationships are behind the toxic debt and the financial meltdown.

On a practical level, the MPs, Graeme Allen and Iain Duncan Smith, are jointly promoting 'Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens'. Please ask your MP to support this initiative.

There is common ground developing across the political spectrum in welfare reform with direct payments and 'Self-Directed Support for every child and young person' as described in "A whole-life approach to personalisation". These principles could be applied to supporting marriage and family life.

Strengthening our society

David Cameron said in a speech recently:

“The number one challenge we've got in this country today is to strengthen our society. There is no more important way of doing that than strengthening families, and there's nothing more important to families than the strength of their relationships...........”

This might be considered to be self-evident, based - on the one hand that much of the press and other media are preoccupied with celebrity weddings and marriage and relationship breakdowns, and - and on the other by the number of bleeding heart journalists and other dignitaries demanding the government tackle child poverty, single parent poverty, fuel poverty, pensioner poverty etc. and then arguing that poverty is the main cause of broken relationships.

If David Cameron is right – and I believe he is – about “strengthen[ing] our society” being “the number one challenge”, and “there's nothing more important to families than the strength of their relationships”, one might expect the press and other media to be equally interested in the possible solutions that are being tried and the research that has been done into them.

Not a bit of it; the last thing with which the press and media are concerned is solid research: volatile opinion polls, “Yes”, but hard evidence, “No”!

Despite protestations to the contrary, politicians are not much better than journalists. Take for, example, Maria Eagle, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice in a written answer about domestic violence:

“There is no evidence available regarding the effectiveness of accredited programmes, which are delivered within England and Wales. The drop out rate in the year 2007-08 was 37 per cent. This is an improvement from previous years. We do not hold information for local projects.”

A 37% drop out rate for expensively government funded relationship education programmes with “no evidence available regarding the effectiveness”!

One is entitled to ask why the government is promoting such programmes in preference to marriage preparation and relationship education courses to couples visiting register offices. The drop out rate from marriage preparation programmes is minimal, though the better the research base behind the programme, the higher the chances that between 10% and 15% of the couples will defer or cancel the wedding. The research shows that these couples have a profile similar to those who marry and divorce within three years.

According to the government’s own estimates, domestic violence:

- accounts for 16% of all violent crime
- will affect 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men in their lifetime
- 77% of victims of domestic violence are women
- has more repeat victims than any other crime (on average there will have been 35 assaults before a victim calls the police)
- on average, two women are killed every week by a current or former male partner
- one incident of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute

The estimated total cost of domestic violence to society in monetary terms is £23 billion per annum. This figure includes an estimated £3.1 billion as the cost to the state and £1.3 billion as the cost to employers and human suffering cost of £17 billion. (Walby 2004).

The estimated total cost is based on the following:

- The cost to the criminal justice system is £1 billion per annum. (This represents one quarter of the criminal justice budget for violent crime including the cost of homicide to adult women annually of £112 million).

- The cost of physical healthcare treatment resulting from domestic violence, (including hospital, GP, ambulance, prescriptions) is £1,220,247,000, i.e. 3% of total NHS budget.

- The cost of treating mental illness and distress due to domestic violence is £176,000,000.

- The cost to the social services is £0.25 billion.

- Housing costs are estimated at £0.16 billion.

- The cost of civil legal services due to domestic violence is £0.3billion.

The statistics collated by Walby above are recognised as an under-estimate because public services don't collect information on the extent to which their services are used as a result of domestic violence ......... The cost of domestic homicide is estimated by the Home Office at over one million pounds: a total of £1, 097, 330 for each death, or £112 million per year.

This is the same Maria Eagle who said:

“we shall not promote one type of family structure as opposed to another”

David Cameron, however, is looking at the evidence:

“In 1996, President Clinton introduced funding for projects that "encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families." And President Bush continued, setting up the 'Healthy Marriage Initiative', which funds 'marriage education services' nationwide. For too long, politicians here have been afraid of getting into this territory, for fear of looking old-fashioned or preachy.......

Family breakdown is of course not the only cause of our present social problems. But let me give you just two figures. A child whose parents have split up is twice as likely to live in poverty. And they're seventy-five percent more likely to suffer educational failure.........Of course not every couple needs relationship support - but many more do need it than actually get it. If you have a nagging headache, you go to the doctor. And I want us to de-stigmatise relationship support so people feel completely comfortable, if they have a nagging difficulty in their relationship, in getting help .......... One way is to start early - and insist, for example, that there's no sex education in schools unless it includes relationship education.

...... it's about creating a positive social norm. In plain English - it's about understanding that one of the biggest influences on our behaviour is what we think is expected by the society around us, and what we see other people doing.”

An example of this – a result of the US 'Healthy Marriage Initiative' - includes

“The healthy marriage initiative in Texas is intended to promote free, skills-based marriage education and provide couples with the tools they need to manage the challenges inherent in relationships. Extensive research has shown that couples who receive relationship education have more stable relationships, thereby increasing favorable outcomes not only for themselves, but for their children.

Classes will be taught in various venues around the region and include eight hours of training focusing on communication skills, conflict resolution and the elements of a healthy marriage. Classes will benefit couples who are seriously dating, engaged to marry and those married for any length of time.

Beginning Sept. 1, engaged couples completing the class will have the added benefit of having the $60 of their marriage license fee waived, and they will not have to wait 72 hours to get married.”

It is excellent news that David Cameron is expecting to tackle the issue of relationship education at a much earlier stage than the present government, including its delivery with sex education, which will not be promoted as a single topic.

However, since the Conservatives control the majority of local authorities, what is there to prevent this process of early provision of relationship education from starting now?

Social capital - more children in care, despite 'early intervention'

Children in care: Telford numbers rise despite use of early intervention by Sarah Cooper, 25 April 2007 [Children Now]

"Telford & Wrekin Council has seen a rise in the number of looked-after children on its books despite using early intervention.

The figures go against Government thinking spelled out in Every Child Matters that early intervention schemes would reduce the numbers of children in care. But professionals believe this does not mean the system is not working and instead say it is proving more efficient at helping families in need......."

"But Ian Johnston, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, said he is not surprised the numbers of children in care have increased. "Government policy is too simplistic and one of the problems with political parties is they look for the quick fixes." [my italics]

"The rise in numbers was revealed at last week's Looked-After Children: Early intervention and specialist services conference run by Priory Education Services. Barbara Evans, head of safeguarding and corporate parenting at the council, said there were 198 looked-after children at the year ending 31 March 2006, while at 31 March 2007 there were 231."

The problem with evidence like this is that to be properly understood it needs to be put into context and studied over a suitable period of time, probably several years.

All the more reason, it seems to me, to keep pressing for a Social Capital Index of which the increase or decrease in children taken into care should be one component.