The Government believes that strong and stable families of all kinds are the bedrock of a strong and stable society. They are an important element of the Big Society and play a vital role in achieving many of the outcomes that characterise freedom, fairness and responsibility.
The Cabinet Office has made welcome early moves to flesh out some of the elements of what it means to build the ‘big society’. The strength of communities and civil society, and the exercise of responsibility, is needed to provide the supportive context within which families can flourish. Mechanisms to increase openness, empowerment and control have been identified. But as well as empowering communities and civil society, it is important that there is also a clear strategy for families with identifiable responsibility for developing an integrated response throughout government.
The contribution of the family to priority outcomes
Families, as part of the big society, have intrinsic importance for the sense of connectedness, support, identity and belonging they enable. They contribute directly to well-being – a key government goal.
Families are also a means to other outcomes. Healthy family relationships help: weak and dysfunctional family relationships hinder. Government has an interest in strengthening family relationships that are more likely to support:
- Improved education outcomes through early years cognitive and social development, greater resilience, and better support for the negotiation of key transitions (e.g. between primary and secondary schools)
- Reduced welfare dependency with fewer young people becoming excluded from education, employment or training and more households with at least one income
- Reduced anti-social behaviour and improved community safety through addressing the relational causes of crime (e.g. unmediated peer influences or impaired affect regulation)
- Improve public health due to reduced incidence of disease (e.g. cancer, stroke and coronary heart disease), improved recovery rates, as well as lower incidence of health threatening risky behaviour.
- Increase the quality and availability of personal and social care (e.g. for elderly people and people with disabilities) provided within families.
- Longer term plans to reduce demand pressures on public spending and enable fiscal sustainability. We estimate the costs associated with relationship breakdown as £41.7 bn with the positive contribution of families in terms of health, care and business development being significantly greater than this.[1]
The evidence base for how the nature and quality of family relationships contribute to these and other outcomes has grown significantly in recent years. How stronger family relationships are best promoted is less well understood.
The Government’s approach – influencing not delivering
Stronger families cannot be legislated into existence or delivered by spending departments. There are many factors that influence the choices and behaviour that shape families. There is now a much greater body of knowledge about how these factors work. The coalition programme for government has thus promised to shun ‘the bureaucratic levers of the past’ and find ‘intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.’
The wide range of influencing factors also means that family should not just be seen as a narrow agenda of couple and parent relationships, with such associated policies as working time, child care, family law and tax credits and benefits. While the coalition’s programme for government has many welcome commitments with regard to families and children, the Government is right to recognise that ‘building this Big Society isn’t just the responsibility of just one or two departments’ and that it is ‘the responsibility of every department of Government, and the responsibility of every citizen too.’
Policy and government actions in many areas can influence people’s motivation to form and conduct various types of family relationships, their opportunity to do, and the available support for this.[2] In making the family a cross-cutting theme of government that is not the responsibility of any one department, the Government should consider the following elements of an approach to implementing the commitment ‘to strengthen families and encourage social responsibility’:
1. New overall measures of national progress should include social, as well as economic and environmental indicators. The Coalition’s programme for government notes that ‘tackling the deficit is essential, but is not what we came into politics to achieve.’ Clear overall measures of progress are an essential framework of accountability – enabling people to see whether a ‘bigger society’ is being built and that key outcomes such as greater social mobility are being achieved. Given the need to reduce the deficit, greater transparency in spending decisions is rightly being promoted. But if there is not equal transparency in quality of outcomes then the wrong incentives may be created. We believe the idea to ‘develop a measure of well-being that encapsulates the social value of state action’ is an essential foundation of any overall strategy.2. Where specific policy goals are being reviewed these should include assessments of the extent to which family relationships are either intrinsic elements of those goals, or important means to achieving them. So, for example, a review of child poverty should include data on relational as well as material deprivation. The nature and extent of available social support can be as important as income levels in buffering adversity and enabling mobility and well-being. Better identification of the causes and distribution of relational poverty will inform better interventions and support strategies.3. Government should consider tracking the capacity of family relationships to support desired policy outcomes more systematically, using this data to inform projections about future service demand pressures and outcomes. The future of social care, for example, will be significantly influenced by the family circumstances of older people and the willingness and capacity of family members (as well as friends and local community) to contribute to their care. Social norms about care responsibilities, as well as the opportunity and capacity to exercise them, are as important as tracking demographic changes.4. Increase the relational literacy of policy-making. The government has already indicated its intention to ensure that the lessons of behavioural economics are applied more thoroughly in the policymaking process. Better understanding of organisational and personal relationships will be essential in maximising the capacity of all sections of civil society to make a positive contribution, as well as in ensuring that decisions are ‘wise’ with regard to implications for family relationships without becoming dependent on cumbersome assessment processes.
5. Review the impact of key influencing factors on the family. These include, among others, finance, time, place and social norms. So, for example, a review of finance and the family would consider the extent to which finance was putting relationships under stress (e.g. consumer debt and the incomes of family carers), empowering the conduct of relationships and buffering stress, incentivising or disincentivising relationships (e.g. any couple penalties in the benefits system), and whether the appropriate institutional mechanisms are available to enable the desired financial relationships (e.g. personal budgets for those with disabilities, or mutual savings/insurance schemes for extended families).[3] Similar review of the impact of time, place and other key factors should be considered.6. Government should also consider proofing individual policies for their influence on the family. The Relationships Foundation has recently set out a mechanism for doing this.[4]7. Identify where specific interventions may be needed. If any of the initiatives above identify particular areas of concern – i.e. that family relationships are weak and a limiting factor on progress in other areas – then government should specifically consider how the motivation to form or conduct relationships in specific ways might be increased, how the opportunities for such relationships are increased, or where specific support is needed. Examples of the latter include relationships education, or the increase support for the families of vulnerable early years children through health visitors and other agencies.
In developing a strategy for family relationships as part of the ‘big society’ it must be acknowledged that both language and moral sentiments can give rise to disagreement and conflict that hinders effective action for the common good. Policy that is both honest and rigorous in its use of evidence, that is humble about the capacity and appropriateness of state intervention, yet acknowledges responsibility for the consequences of actions is essential.
As part of its responsibility for overseeing the Big Society, and in tandem with its programme on community and civil society, we suggest that the Cabinet Office should establish at an early stage clear responsibility for the oversight of how the work of all Government departments contributes to the task of ensuring that strong and stable families are the bedrock of a strong and stable society.
Relationships Foundation
20 May 2010
[1] The Relationships Foundation estimated the costs resulting from relationships that go wrong and the benefits of relationships that go right in http://tiny.cc/WhenRelationships The costs have been recently updated inhttp://tiny.cc/FailureCost[2] The Relationships Foundation’s recent publication, The Penumbra Effect – Family-centred Public Policy, demonstrates how the family both influences and is shaped by a wide range of policy areas: http://tiny.cc/Penumbra [3] The Foundation’s report on finance, relationships and wellbeing provides an example of such an approachhttp://tiny.cc/Investing
[4] Towards a Conceptual Framework for Family Proofing Policy http://tiny.cc/FamProofFrame