Senior Conservative Peer, Lord Farmer, has called on the Government not to buck its responsibility but to undertake work to strengthen families and prevent family breakdown.

Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference Lord Farmer spoke of how the UK’s exceptionally high rates of family breakdown drive and entrench social problems, leading to huge costs to the public purse in a number of policy areas. Speaking to how these problems could be addressed he said:

“Families are the building blocks of society and, while their forms are of course highly variant, the inescapable truth based on decades of research is that reliable love and healthy relationships are what matter to children and adults and they are essential for a thriving, competitive society.”

In his speech he laid out why the epidemic levels of family breakdown are so deeply problematic for society. He described the status quo policy approach in Government which has largely ignored the need to strengthen families:

“Most cabinet ministers can see that fractured and dysfunctional families are undermining their departments’ ability to make genuine progress in almost every area, but to this day there has never been a sufficient concentration of political will to address this complex, controversial and cross-cutting issue… It is a ‘known known’ in Government that no one has responsibility for families and policy paralysis is the result.”

In response to the Government’s recent announcement around no-fault divorce, he argued against the treatment of the notion of fault as outdated, stating:

“They say fault is misused by those pursuing a divorce and their lawyers. But that is like saying morality is passé, no one is really to blame when a marriage falls apart. It’s simply another example of the hyper-liberalism that treats family breakdown as inevitable.”

Furthermore, he noted:

“Making marriage easier to exit, and sanitising divorce may make it less painful to the adults involved, but it is far more likely to weaken the institution of marriage than strengthen it… It will render it more voluntaristic and more like cohabitation with its assumption that a couple need only stay together whilst it works for both of them.”

Among a number of policy proposals and solutions Lord Farmer called on the Government, as its top priority, to appoint a senior Cabinet minister responsible for developing and steering a strategy to strengthen families.

“Such a champion with the power to bring other cabinet ministers together is urgently needed to break down the departmental silos that have perpetuated the impasse across Government.”

Click here to read more about Lord Farmer’s policy proposals on how to strengthen families.