Jonathan Bellamy spoke with The Centre for Social Justice to find out

Charlotte Pickles, Policy Director

Former leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan-Smith, launched a report on 20th January calling for a raft of new measures designed to give families genuine help. The Centre for Social Justice Green Paper on the family, is the latest in a series on family policy from the think tank set up by Mr Duncan-Smith. It is critical of government policies on marriage and the family and on the eve of the publication, Iain Duncan-Smith issued a dossier exposing Labour's record of family failure:

"Thirteen years of Labour misrule have inflicted grave damage on the family. All the evidence shows that children brought up in two parent families do far better in life. Yet under Labour, rates of family breakdown have soared. Over 40% of children are now born outside marriage. Intentional harm has risen 34% in the last four years. The UK has the 4th highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world. Alcohol consumption by UK children has doubled in the last fifteen years. One in four children now take drugs compared to one in twenty, twenty years ago. Children living in single parent or broken families are far more likely to experience serious abuse than those living in two parent families. Labour has scrapped all recognition of marriage in the tax system and in most official forms. It has also distorted the benefit system to make it more profitable for couples with children to live apart. Britain is the only country in the advanced world bar Mexico and Turkey not to recognise marriage in the tax system. Most shocking of all continued Mr Duncan-Smith; the government now admits that 200,000 children live in homes where there is known high risk case of domestic abuse and violence. The figures also show that a child living with a non-biological father is eight times more likely to be on the at-risk register, and fifty times more likely to die from injuries inflicted by an adult living in the home. The UK spends more public money on children than most other advanced countries and gets some of the worse results. Only by recognising and supporting marriage in the tax system and abolishing the couple penalty in the benefit system will we begin to restore the British family to health."

To find out more Jonathan Bellamy spoke with Charlotte Pickles, the Policy Director at The Centre for Social Justice.

Jonathan: First of all you'd better explain what is a Policy Director? What's your job?

Charlotte: I oversee the policy process at the Centre for Social Justice and I'm also author of the Green Paper that you've just mentioned.

Jonathan: Over the past five years, you've been examining the scale and nature of social breakdown in Britain. Do you think Britain is broken?

Charlotte: I think that certain parts of Britain are very broken. If you look at some of the social statistics and outcomes for adults and children in our most deprived communities, then it becomes very clear that we have some serious serious problems. When you then compare those to some of the - for example teenage pregnancy rates or low parent rates or divorce rates abroad in other comparable international communities - then you can see that really we do stand out as having these broken communities.

Jonathan: Now when we look at poverty, I understand five pathways have been identified which lead to poverty; they include family breakdown, economic dependency and worklessness, educational failure, addiction and personal indebtedness. You found in your research that family breakdown is often at the root of the other pathways. Why do you think that is?

Charlotte: Well one of the ways we do the research at the CSJ, is to speak to thousands of different organisations and individuals around the country, that are either facing these difficulties or are practitioners; often community workers, voluntary sector workers, working daily trying to improve the lives of people in these communities. Whenever we've spoken to them, often in their sort of anecdotal stories, whether they're personal stories or the people they're working with, when you actually track back to where a lot of these people sort of saw there problem start; for example a lot of young people talking about their problems in school will track back to an issue in the family. So for example, perhaps the death of a family member or their father leaving the home or domestic violence or something like that. If you actually see the root cause of a lot of the problems, actually they do track back to family breakdown.

Jonathan: Now hence this green paper, The Centre of Social Justice Green Paper on the family and I understand that you're behind what was written. Can you unpack a little bit more succinctly what are your main criticisms of Labour policy in relation to the family?

Charlotte: Sure. The main criticism we have is that the couple relationship has actually almost been removed from public policy. So you can see over the last twelve years, we've had this entirely child focused process, rather than looking at the family. Now we all know that a child doesn't grow up in isolation from their parent or from their family environment and yet public policy has actually removed almost the parental, the couple relationship. We can also see that marriage has also almost become a politically incorrect word. So for example the government actually removed marital status; they no longer record marital status on government forms and actually in a lot of government research they have also in their tax credit system introduced something called the couple penalty, so low income families are actually financially and materially worse off living together than they are living apart. So, normally a two parent family would act as a protective factor against poverty and social exclusion; but because of the way that the benefit system has been structured by the Labour government, what we see is actually, you are better living apart. So you are better as a lone parent, than you are living with your partner; despite the fact that we know outcomes for children with two parents are vastly better than for those with lone parents. So you've seen over the past twelve years, this kind of removal of the role of the two parents, of marriage, of the couple, from public policy and that's had an absolutely detrimental affect to the outcomes of our most vulnerable children.

Jonathan: Why do you think the government have done this? Do you think they are anti marriage?

Charlotte: I think that there has been a trend toward seeing family choices or family structure, as something which is progressive and actually that, for many people, that's a mistaken view. So if you actually look at people's perceptions of marriage and indeed people's aspirations - for example 90% of young people aspire to get married - yet for some reason the government have seen the lessening of "the traditional family" as something which is progressive; when actually it's about poverty; poverty of relationships; poverty in terms of money, in our most deprived communities; meaning that despite the fact that those people within those deprived communities aspire to get married, actually those aspirations are thwarted for the very reasons that I've just explained. So I think it's a mistaken ideological standpoint and it's also a lack of understanding about what evidence actually shows us.

Jonathan: I love your statement, you cannot mend Britain's broken society unless you support and value the institution which is at the heart of a stable society. What are your main proposals for supporting and valuing marriage and the family?

Charlotte: Well first of all we would say as an absolute must have, it's a removal of the couple penalty. So for low income families, if we're saying, which all the evidence internationally shows, that a two parent family is a protective factor, we've got to put two parent families on an equal footing to lone parent families in terms of finances. So if we can remove that barrier then that should be the first step. Second of all; we have recommended the introduction of a transferrable tax allowance for married couples, which not only sends a symbolic message that actually marriage does matter and it does have an impact and outcome for children and adults are better if there is a married couple there. But it also would mean that for those couples who specialise in their roles and by that I mean for example, a spouse decides to stay at home and raise a child; perhaps the first few years of a child's life and one goes out to work; actually your recognising that that role, that caring role has a financial value; society benefits from it and therefore why not recognise that society benefits, by introducing this transferable tax allowance. So that would be another thing. Then finally, we want to see marital status reinstated in government forms and government research; so that actually again, it's that symbolic message that marriage does matter; but also we can track more accurately the data around what are the differences in outcomes for marriage versus other family forms.