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Parenting

My Lords, it is a particular privilege to follow that very caring and, if I may say so, passionate maiden speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge. She brings to this debate and your Lordships’ House not only her eight years’ experience representing Richmond and Barnes in the other place but important roles in that place on the Front Bench, especially as the Liberal Democrat spokesman for children. As she mentioned, she brings also her professional role as a doctor specialising in family planning. So we welcome her warmly to your Lordships’ House. She will clearly have much to contribute and we look forward to hearing her views on many occasions. I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady   Massey, for giving us this opportunity to debate a very important subject. Successful parenting is the   key to a successful and, above all, stable society—indeed, a stable and successful country. All the more so as our UK birth rate is declining, parents need to be supported and valued for every aspect of their important role. As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, pointed out, most of us are not born with the skills necessary to ensure that we play that role satisfactorily. Thankfully, most of us have supportive family and friends—and, yes indeed, grandparents—who help us to do a relatively adequate job. Too many others are not so lucky. For children from deprived or dysfunctional backgrounds, the kind of support we are discussing today is essential. For them, that has two extra distinct appeals. First, it will help to ensure that they can fully   develop their abilities and personalities—for the   nation’s economic benefit as well as their own. Secondly, and almost more importantly, it will hugely reduce the probability that such children will end up in prison, with unfulfilled lives and at enormous economic cost to taxpayers. During the 20 years that I spent as a juvenile court chairman, I saw many occasions when the right support at a critical stage in a child’s development reduced the probability of their later entry to prison. That is why, as others have said, government programmes such as Sure Start are important and why we must insist that they continue to be properly resourced now that they have been subsumed within Children’s Trust. That is also why my noble friend Lord   Northbourne, with my enthusiastic backing, has previously urged in this House that parenting should be prominent in citizenship courses. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, emphasised that. I fear that we remain concerned that far too little   attention is given in these courses to family relationships. I do not just mean helping young people to communicate better with their parents, important though that is, but raising in young people—boys as well as girls—an early awareness of the responsibilities, and the joys, that parenthood involves. Of equal importance is the need to take a hard look at the changes that have taken place during your Lordships’ lifetimes and, in particular, their likely impact on that all important issue of family stability. I shall concentrate my questions to the Minister on the impact of just two of those changes and how the Government plan to respond to them. The first is the considerable change in the structure of families and the second is the impact of the now almost accepted equal opportunity employment environment on the pattern of family life. Clearly, for the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, for most of us and, certainly, for me, marriage is the most favoured family-rearing partnership for men and women. But living together and raising children without what used to be called ““benefit of clergy”” is becoming increasingly popular. And—whether of marriages or of those less formal partnerships—the percentage of family break-up is increasing alarmingly, especially—and worse still—when children are young. One figure that I came across is that today 25 per cent of our 12 million UK children have experienced either the separation of their parents or have parents who have never lived together. We all talk about the best interests of the child being paramount. Yet, in practice we almost ignore the damage that parental break-up can do to a child’s development, particularly, as we all know, to his or her subsequent ability to form trusting relationships. So it would be helpful to know if research is confirming the significance of this upward trend in family break-ups and, if so, what the Government plan to do, not least in terms of damage limitation if the numbers continue to increase. I now turn to my second, and final, point; the consequence of our emerging equal opportunities culture, of which, as your Lordships will appreciate, I am a firm supporter. In the 30 years since the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts were passed, much, if not all, of what we could have hoped for—and certainly not all as far as equal pay is concerned—has been achieved. It is the structural changes which result from those developments—later marriages, and later and fewer children—that need our attention. I would be the first to acknowledge that in this field this Government have already achieved a great deal. The latest commitment of an extra £680 million to encourage an increase in the number of ““extended day”” schools will be of considerable help. However, strains on families, particularly those with young children, remain. It is still very much expected by employers that it is the mothers rather than the fathers who will wish to take post-natal time out of employment or to work flexibly or part-time. One excellent by-product of the past 30 years has been the growing wish, particularly among the younger generation of fathers, to be equally involved with, and responsible for, their children’s upbringing. EOC research shows that something like 79 per cent of new fathers are happy to stay at home and look after their children. What is urgently needed now is all work/life balance options to be available to both parents on equal terms. If we can achieve that, not only—