House of Commons Hansard Debates for 16 Mar 1990

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these issues than me, and I beg the hon. Member for Motherwell, North not to torpedo me below the waterline, as he certainly could on these issues. He would argue that services or benefits exclusively for the poor become poor services and benefits. That has been incorrectly argued for many years.

While a great expansion of social security benefits--spread more widely and at ever higher levels--might have produced a larger constituency of social security recipients, that might not have helped the family in the end. We might have found the legitimacy of the system that had been introduced being threatened by higher tax rates necessary to pay for it and by the "Why work?" syndrome, which was highlighted clearly in the example given by the hon. Member for Birkenhead to show the effect of the taxation system on his constituents.

The final difference is probably the most significant of all, and none of us has managed adequately to pin it down this morning. Two institutions above all help individuals and children. The first is the family and the second is the state. No advanced society will ever rely solely on one of those institutions. It would be bizarre for us to argue, "This matter will be dealt with purely by the family and this will be dealt with purely by the state." That would clearly be wrong. The two institutions are not necessarily always in conflict ; why should they be? Each is there to help the other. The more that the state does to help on a rainy day, the less we need to do for ourselves, through a reliance on the extended family or on personal savings.

The pattern of cause and effect is complicated. An increased role for the welfare state reduces the need to rely on the resources of the family. Perhaps--I say "perhaps"--the role of the family in providing its own welfare services has been allowed to slip away a bit too much in post-war England without our thinking deeply enough about it, and the state has necessarily come in to fill the vacuum. Perhaps the state's increased role is simply another example of the specialisation of labour in this country. After all, we do not all bake our own bread and not as many of us care directly for our elderly parents. The elderly are very often looked after by outside providers. Those are key political and philosophical questions which nobody will ever be able to answer. If we had had a different Government with a different philosophy in the 1980s we should undoubtedly have given a much more ambitious role to the state in family matters--in the provision of finance and services. However, that would have placed much less stress on the family's responsibility for providing, or at least choosing, services. Those four differences, which are hypothetical because we know what happened in the 1980s--they might have occurred had there been a different political creed--would eventually have undermined the family even more than the family has undermined itself because of the changes of the past decade. We must resist some of those trends in the 1990s.

I have a number of points that I wish to lay before the House. The Government believe that families should be given as much independence as possible in all areas of the community, thus strengthening the family unit. I shall relate a few examples of how I believe that we have succeeded. A family with two children and one earner on average earnings has seen its real take-home pay rise by about one third in the past 10 years. That is a substantial increase. I fought my first general election campaign in 1979. If one of my minders had told me to get on to the

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platform and promise that people on average earnings would be one third better off in 10 years' time, I would not have dared. But that has happened, and it must have benefited a good number of families, even though not every family has shared in that extraordinary increase in affluence.

Mr. Frank Field : Will the Minister give way?

Mr. Patten : I will give way provided that the hon. Gentleman's question is not too difficult.

Mr. Field : I have a dummy question for the Minister. Will he give us the equivalent figures for single people on that level of income? What has been their real increase in comparison with people with children?

Mr. Patten : I will write to the hon. Gentleman.

Nearly 80 per cent. of families have children and nearly 80 per cent. of families with children pay tax and therefore benefit from tax cuts. That has been apparent from the 1980s. I am advised that two-earner couples with children--I must rely on advice from others--have on average gained about £8.50 per week from tax cuts and benefit changes over the past 10 years. However, I shall deal with the point made by the hon. Member for Birkenhead by writing to the hon. Gentleman and I will place a copy of the letter in the Library.

Dr. Reid : My question will be much easier, because I am not an expert. As the Minister is talking about tax, but confined himself exclusively to direct tax, can he confirm that, in direct and indirect tax, the average family is now paying over £27 per week more than in 1979?

Mr. Patten : No. I dispute those figures. Again, I will have to write to the hon. Gentleman and send him the relevant tables and place those in the Library, too.

Let us consider the money spent on a whole range of benefits for the family. The figure is nearly £10 billion, which is a substantial increase of about one quarter in real terms since 1979. There has been a redefinition of poverty during the 1980s and we must strive to do more in the 1990s to help families. Strong points were made by my right hon. Friends the Members for Aylesbury and for Sutton Coldfield and by my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South about the need to make changes in the tax and benefit system as it affects children and child care. I will draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to those points before Tuesday. There has been a debate about nursery schools and nursery school provision. About 25 per cent. more under-fives now attend nursery schools than in 1980 although, as the hon. Member for Eccles said, some do so part-time. However, they may not be worse off for attending part-time. Some three and four-year-olds find nursery education rather tiring and need to go home in the afternoon. We must make flexible provision in nurseries. Overall, 70 per cent. of four-year-olds receive nursery education or help from pre-school playgroups and other organisations.

Had Lady Plowden been taking part in the debate, she might have teased my right hon. Friend on his suggestion that the only way to help three and four-year-olds was through nursery provision. She and others feel that while

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nursery provision is valuable, various other provisions, such as pre-school playgroups, can, in their way, do just as well for some children, as my daughter's experience shows.

Mr. Raison : For the record, I should say that I support playgroups as well as nursery schools and I did not wish to give any other impression.

Mr. Patten : I thought that Lady Plowden's name would bring my right hon. Friend to heel. She terrifies me and I am sure that she terrified him in his day.

My right hon. Friend asked about the work being done in the Department of Education and Science by my hon. Friend the Minister of State with responsibility for schools. She chairs a committee of inquiry, which will report in the summer, looking at the issues that concern my right hon. Friend. The group will not only deal with nursery school education, but will look at the educational value of all child care facilities available to three and four-year-olds. The group will look at nursery schools, pre- school playgroups and a range of other child care facilities. That is in tune both with the spirit of the age and what is happening out there.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South described the growth in women's employment and in child care provision. Substantial changes have been made without any Government direction or interference, local or national. It has been interesting to see the massive boom in women's employment, full-time and part-time, and to speculate where and how child care has been provided. It has been provided in different ways in different parts of the country. I welcome what the hon. Member for Eccles said about the Children Act 1989. We may differ about resources, but we agree that the Act demonstrates the Government's clear commitment to caring and providing for children.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury, the hon. Members for Motherwell, North and for Birkenhead, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury and others spoke about housing. As the House is aware, in recent months my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has been looking closely at the problems of homelessness and of those who are finding difficulty getting secure and safe housing. Further announcements are expected. I shall make sure that my right hon. Friend receives a copy of the Official Report of today's debate, so that he is aware of the strong concern that has been expressed.

The Government have introduced, and are introducing, other measures, such as setting up a Broadcasting Standards Council and ending the exemption of broadcasters from the provisions of the Obscene Publications Acts. These will help family life by curbing excessive sex and violence on television, and are measures that I regard as very important.

This has been a wide-ranging debate. We have been told about the needs in education. The National Curriculum Council is doing much valuable work to ensure that more social and personal education is built into the national curriculum. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister recently made an announcement about getting maintenance from fathers who absent themselves, which has been widely welcomed this morning by my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury and others.

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My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary has put forward proposals to ensure that parents are a bit more responsible for preventing their children from offending. That idea would have been thought outrageous 10 years ago, but it is coming into its own time. There has been little dispute from outside bodies about the need to move in this direction.

Here, in a non-combative way, I pick up the point of the hon. Member for Motherwell, North, who gave the impression that, during the 1980s, juvenile crime increased. I demurely demurred with his suggestion, whereupon he was egged on by the hon. Member for Birkenhead, who said that the figures had been redefined. The figures have not been redefined. The way that we have collected statistics about offending, including those on young offenders, has not changed during the 1980s, apart from a couple of changes made in 1980 or 1981 which inflated the amount of crime reported.

It was interesting to see the veil suddenly slip from the normally demure political features of the hon. Member for Birkenhead. We know that he is a saintly figure who floats at some height above the debate, looking down at we lesser mortals who cannot quite reach the golden mean between both sides. He reminds me of the tortured saints who one sees in the frescos of the great Romanesque churches in Ravenna, looking down in slight horror at what they see below them. For a moment we saw the politician, tooth and claw, and we were jolly pleased to see it, when the hon. Member for Birkenhead beguiled and entrapped the hon. Member for Motherwell, North into saying that there had been a redefinition of the figures.

Mr. Frank Field : I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his description of me--although he may think it damaging here, it will no doubt boost the vote in Birkenhead.

The point that my hon. Friend and I were seeking to make was not that the Government had been caught with their fingers in the till and had literally fiddled the figures, but that the problem is so serious that, increasingly, our constituents do not report to the police cases that they would have reported five or 10 years ago. That is why it was right to say that it is difficult to read trends into the figures because we do not know whether there has been a change in reporting crimes or a real change of substance.

Mr. Patten : I must dispute that. We have two sources of information --the annual criminal statistics, the calculation of which has not changed in the past 11 years except in two minor and inflating ways that made the crime figures worse than they were in the early 1980s, and the British crime survey. That survey is taken every four or five years and it has shown that the reporting of crime went up substantially during the 1980s. Although I am the first to admit that there may be regional differences and that the incidence of crime may be greater in one town than in another, we are much closer to the real figures on domestic violence or violence against children than we were in 1980. I accept that there is still a lot of hidden crime, but the figures are better owing to people's increased willingness to come forward to report crime.

More needs to be done in the 1990s to help the family, and this morning hon. Members suggested many changes to the tax regime. The Conservative Family Campaign and

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the National Family Trust are debating how such changes can be made. Others believe that much more can be done through social security to help the family.

Above all else we need to take a long, hard look at divorce, which has been spoken about at some length this morning. I do not intend to repeat the argument brilliantly led by my noble and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor in another place, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury drew attention. I concur with the ideas advanced by my noble and learned Friend.

We shall need to keep the conciliation services under review. My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South referred to the good work done by Relate. A number of other bodies help with marriage guidance, including the Catholic marriage body and its Jewish equivalent. We try to support all those organisations. Last year, at the request of Relate, we made available to it an extra £600,000 which it welcomed publicly and privately.

Throughout my speech I have stressed the importance of working with the natural pattern and grain of our community--that point was made plain by my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury. We must let individuals take responsibility for their acts and recognise the importance of local communities that stand in a free society between the individual and the state. No set of policies can do more to satisfy those requirements than measures designed to confirm the role of the family as the building block upon which our community is founded. That is why the House should be extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury for his notable contribution in getting that debate going this morning.

1.14 pm

Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent) : I have already told my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) that an engagement in my constituency means that, alas, I cannot stay to the end of the debate. I thank him for initiating such a valuable debate. There is more to a family than what the Scots call "Ma, Pa and the weans". It is a multi-generational family. Indeed, that has been brought home to me today because my family is wrestling with the sad and uncomfortable problem of helping my mother to adjust to being in a residential home. In addition, my daughter telephoned in a rage this morning because we will not be there when she gets home this evening. The fact that that unfortunate latch-key child is eighteen and a half is a sign that parenting continues for a great deal longer than many of us expected when we set out on that road.

There are a number of important elements in the crisis that has already been discribed by hon. Members. One of the advantages of being called late in the debate is that I do not have to use many of the statistics that I had originally chosen to illustrate my points. One reason that families are under pressure is the very much greater mobility that now prevails. People change their homes every five to seven years and firms expect families to uproot and move to other parts of the country.

Another reason is that to an increasing extent, the older generation are withdrawing from the nuclear family--not through any malice aforethought, but, as Titmuss pointed out at the beginning of the century, the gap then between the last child leaving home and the mother dying was 10 years. The gap today may be 45 years. Of course, the

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healthy, fit and, in many cases, relatively affluent older generation move house and pursue their own avocations. They are glad to see their grandchildren when opportunity permits, but they are often many miles away. That is a further pressure on the family. Another pressure is that of the two wage packets. I could not endorse more fimly the view expressed across the Chamber--which I know my right hon. Friend the Minister practises--that there must be a change in the masculine role in the family. It is absurd to imagine that we can simply load on to women- -whether or not they are willing to accept the load--the additional role of a major wage earner in the family, on top of all their other roles.

The belief of some hon. Members that families are best served by mothers staying at home pays far too little attention to the technological revolution. Most women can complete their domestic maintenance chores in an extraordinary short percentage of the week. The result is that wives, who are often in smaller and smaller accommodation, are frequently surrounded by neighbours with whom they find it difficult to form a relationship, for all sorts of reasons. Large numbers of people now think of their front doors as a barrier to the hostile outside world, rather than as an entry into congenial society. Women want to get out and meet people. They want to be in more congenial circumstances. They become claustrophobic at home. This is an area in which the Government can use their hortatory role to assist. There must be more flexible working hours for both women and men. There is absolutely no reason why men should not enjoy the benefits of job sharing in exactly the same way as women. I want to see job sharing extended much more rapidly. The difficulties that my wife encountered in achieving a job share were an object lesson in the rigidity of attitudes among many employers.

It would be valuable to look again at the shape of the school day. There is nothing sacrosanct about the hours that schools operate. They are set just by tradition, and almost every country in western Europe has a different idea about the times at which schools should be open. I would not wish to see here what I understand to be the position in Switzerland where, consciously or unconsciously, there are extreme variations in school hours between different areas and, indeed, between one school and another. That has had the effect of imprisoning women in their own homes because they have a child at one school and another child somewhere else and are incapable of doing anything but treat the home as a base.

A consequence of the changing emphasis between men and women means that the courts will have to look much more carefully at the assumption that the mother should always have custody of the children. That is being looked at, but we need to do a great deal more.

As a result of pressures on the family and the break-up of many families, there has grown up a tendency to rely upon professionals to provide the support which, in an ideal world, would come from the family or the local community. As professionals always do, they extend the frontiers of their responsibility until they can no longer police it. Police forces and social services departments are at last admitting that the problems of discipline among the young are beyond them. We shall have to find alternative resources and I shall return to that matter.

It would be appropriate, for the sake of the children, for divorce not to be an option until the parents, except in exceptional circumstances, can show that they have taken

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measures to receive assistance about reconciliation. It would be perfectly reasonable for divorce courts to ask whether the parents have taken any steps to bring about a reconciliation. It is entirely reasonable that there should be a cooling-off period.

It might make sense to have some kind of addendum to a marriage contract that makes arrangements about what should be done with the children in the event of a breakdown. That could be done before the children are even conceived and may well be sensible, rather like making a will. There is no doubt that a will diminishes family rows over where property should go, and some statement about what should happen to the children in the event of a family breakdown might be of assistance.

The debate has overlooked the fact that having a child is probably the most frightening single event that can happen to a family. It is exciting and often a pleasure, but it is frequently--usually--a very frightening experience. Legions of young women who have children are given a rudimentary education about how to feed and clean the child, and that is about it. They go home from hospital, often alone but frequently with an equally frightened husband, to try to set out on making a home for the child. They assume only too easily that they are doing it worse than anyone else. When a child cries through the night, they think that it must be their fault. It is common for such a couple or individual not to seek help because they think that, if they do, they will be blamed for the failure.

We must look carefully at the support services available to young parents. Fears are diminished ludicrously easily when drop-in centres are set up where there are a number of young mothers. The support the women gain from one another, and from older women and men coming in and telling them that they are not the worst parents in the world, is extraordinary. They point out that they have all had the same experience. That is important and the Government could do much to encourage such centres, especially with the use of volunteers, many of whom would be happy to assist in that way.

One of the most horrifying features of many of the terrible stories about child abuse is that, in a curious way, the children are seen not only as instrumental in family quarrels, but as adjuncts. They are not seen as a value in themselves. It is vital to encourage people to see that children are of value in themselves. The debate about tax allowances confirmed the view that people think that their car is of more value than their child. Parking spaces are more important than spaces in day care centres. People do not kick or scratch their cars, but they are willing to do all sorts of unpleasant things to their children. That is sad, but common. I want to illustrate the importance of support for young people from a study, which is now old, in which I took part when I was a lecturer at Edinburgh university. It was the first study of which we knew that looked at young couples who had come to the Scottish Marriage Guidance Council. We studied 300 such couples, one of whom had to have been under 21 on marriage and both of whom had to be under 30.

The one overriding finding from the study was that it was not promiscuity or permissivenes that had led to the marriages running into trouble, but the fact that these young people had frequently gone steady from an absurdly

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early age. They might have been going steady since the age of 11 because they wanted someone to go to the pictures with them. They then found no way of breaking off what was increasingly becoming an unsatisfactory relationship. They frequently had a child to try to paper over the cracks, but as they grew up, they were separating. Those young people did not know about human relationships and had never tried a human relationship with anyone else. That was one of the fundamental reasons for the break-up. Why do people go for such relationships? The reason is that they are alone, frightened and unsure of themselves. Their parents or their broken homes have failed to give them a sense of self-value. It has made it extremely difficult for them to face the difficulties of saying no, of having a row or of risking having a disagreement with someone else. I speak from personal experience. I am the child of a divorced couple and, sadly, I myself have been divorced. One of the last results of that is that it takes a long time for one to risk upsetting the apple cart by asserting oneself. The idea of causing someone to be angry is horrifying when one has had to endure the business of being dependent on the good will of people who are not one's own parents, and it necessarily creates real problems. We must take seriously the need to use whatever means we have--I fear that the education system may be one--to enable young people to learn a great deal more about marriage and human relationship. If that sounds like a wishy- washy response, I do not think that it is. A recent study has shown that very young children are interested in the question. It showed that they are far more interested in human relationships than their parents or their teachers thought they would be.

I endorse the remarks about the importance of conciliation services being properly funded and supported. Active citizenship is one means by which to support people with children. If there are no grandparents, they could be given advice on how to raise their children. Many older people would value the opportunity to support a family. We must also encourage people who are living on their own in a house with more accommodation than they need to provide a home for a mother and her child. That would be to their mutual benefit. The older person might come to rely heavily on the energy and companionship of those young people.

It might be worth exploring a different set of divorce laws for couples without children. I should like couples with children to be compelled to say that they have at least sought a reconciliation. Divorce should not be allowed until after the arrangements for the children have been sorted out. When no children are involved, the position is different.

As for older members of families, technological advances in the medical profession have led to many people living far longer than they wish to live. They are becoming a great burden on their families. It places immense pressure upon them and leads to great financial burdens.

It often leads to families being unable to build up financial resources for their own old age.

I wonder whether it might be possible to introduce a system of mortgage in reverse, under which it would be possible for someone who has been moved into a home for the elderly and whose house is no longer needed by the family to dispose of it. The purchaser of the house would pay for it month by month. That money would pay for the

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care of the elderly person. When the elderly person died, the house would be owned in proportion to the contributions that had been paid by the purchaser. Such a system might ease the difficulties that many young people face when trying to buy a house.

If we want fathers to be responsible for their children, could not the national insurance number be modified to show that they are parents? Everyone has a national insurance number. If a stroke were added to show that that person had children, it would be much harder for many fathers, who seem to disappear off the face of the earth, to pretend that they do not have a family. That might be a practical way of dealing with the problem.

The cost of our present policy paralysis runs into billions : the National Health Service, the schools, the prisons and many other institutions are victims of our failure to devise and execute an effective way of supporting the family. We cannot afford to ignore the problems any longer.

1.30 pm

Mr. David Amess (Basildon) : I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) on securing today's debate. Having read the Hansard report of last November's debate on the subject in the other place, I feel that ours has been equally interesting. My right hon. Friend's speech showed great wisdom ; I disagreed only with his remarks about the Catholic view of divorce. I am glad that, at long last, someone has had the guts to persuade the House to discuss this matter seriously : we have heard some splendid speeches.

If I made the remarks that I had intended to make about women going out to work, and if my hon. Friends the Members for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie) and for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) happened to charge back into the Chamber, they would probably handbag me. As two or three more hon. Members wish to speak, however, and as my hon. Friends, having seen my name on the monitor, may indeed charge back in, I shall not say what I was going to.

Although I cannot compete with my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), I have three small children and my wife is expecting our fourth in two weeks' time. At the moment the poor woman looks rather like a barrage balloon. When Members of Parliament debate family life they lay themselves open to criticism : our lifestyles are not conducive to a normal family existence. Every hon. Member, whether married or single, must know the stresses and strains that the job involves. Husbands and wives have a pretty rotten deal. Unfortunately, Members of Parliament are regarded as the lowest of the low nowadays, but the majority are conscientious and hardworking, and their families too make many sacrifices.

I was born in the east end of London, with a very happy family background. We were very poor--if my wife were here she would probably get out the violin at this point--and lived in a small terraced house with no bathroom, an outside toilet and a tin bath hanging on the wall. There was nothing special about that ; it was very common at the time. Nevertheless, as I said, we were very happy. I am a great supporter of the Conservative Family Campaign : in my view, the family is the cornerstone of society.

There seems to be a division of view between the parties on individual responsibility and the role of the state.

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Grandparents were fundamental to east end family culture, and the people living in our road had various responsibilities. One person was responsible for delivering the babies, another for counselling those in marital difficulties and a third for laying out the body in the sad event of a death. There was a wonderful community spirit. We did not have to lock our doors ; people helped each other, and society was generally very well ordered. Sadly, however, the planners came along, the high-rise blocks were built and the happy family life of the east end was spoilt.

I am saddened by the lack of parental responsibility in certain quarters. My right hon. Friend the Minister of State has already drawn our attention to the fact that the peak age for offenders is 15. That in itself is a dreadful thing for us to contemplate. We must ensure that there is more parental responsibility.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) said that having children is an enormous responsibility. We do not have any help with our children, and until we had small children we never realised quite what a responsibility it is. It is an enormous strain being woken up at 4 o'clock in the morning by one's son jumping into bed wanting to talk about dinosaurs. Then the youngest baby jumps in, and then, after having three or four children in the bed, one has to spend the next day washing up, hoovering and tidying. Having said that, we must have more parental responsibility now. It is not good enough for youngsters to play late at night, causing great disturbance in the neighbourhood and then, when the parents are tackled, saying that they simply do not want to know. We must address the fact that many parents do not even go to court with their children.

I commend to the House the excellent book that my right hon. Friend's Department was involved in producing, "Practical ways to crack crime". It is an excellent publication that contains many ideas that I hope the Home Office will develop in the next year. Although it will not be easy, I hope that legislation will be introduced in the next Session to deal with parental responsibility.

My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury spoke about abortion. I shall not bore the House by developing my views on that subject. I note that the right hon. member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, (Sir D. Steel) presented a petition to the House this morning on the subject of embryo research and abortion. Although I accept that no woman undertakes an abortion lightly, I regret the fact that 2 million babies have been aborted since the right hon. Gentleman's Act was put on the statute book. It is crazy that we have special baby care units trying to save the lives of babies born after 22 or 23 weeks' gestation, yet abortion is available up to 28 weeks. That does no good for the stability of family life in Britain.

I am appalled at the concept of the abortion drug RU486 being allowed into chemists in Britain, as it will help to destroy family life. I was disappointed and angry at the debate on the subject in the other place. The idea that we shall be able to police laboratories so that research on embryos stops at 14 days is absolute nonsense. I wonder where such research will continue.

A few weeks ago I introduced a ten-minute Bill about adoption. Anyone who has looked at magazines with advertisements showing little boys and girls who desperately need to be adopted cannot fail to be moved by the trauma involved in adoption. For example, one boy had been moved 36 times within just 13 months. Obviously

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that will have an effect on him in later life. I hope that the Government will take on board the suggestions in my ten-minute Bill so that we co-ordinate adoption rather better.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South mentioned divorce. She did not mention that as a newly elected Member of Parliament I tried to amend that Bill. Of course, as we know, the House is more or less dominated by lawyers.

Mr. John Patten : Not any more.

Mr. Amess : Perhaps these days the House is not dominated by lawyers, but it certainly was in the past. I was tied up in knots on that occasion and was told that we had to do something to reduce the period after which a divorce could be obtained.

The legislation has had a traumatic effect in Basildon, but I pay tribute to Relate. Many people have said, "We did not realise that a divorce could be obtained so quickly". As my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury said, the divorce figures are staggering. We should be ashamed that we are not doing more to counsel people to stick together. It is not easy to be married. One has to work at these things. I admire the many Basildon women, and some men, who valiantly battle on as single parents. They have not deserted their children but accept their responsibility. It is a difficult task and as a local Member I would wish to do all that I can to support them. Housing has been mentioned. All of us meet young couples at our constituency surgeries who say that they need a house. I have referred to the east end spirit. In the past, when there was also a great housing need, why did we not have the serious problem that we now face with family break- ups? In the past, often mum and dad would give a room to a young couple until they could move on. I am not entirely convinced that the argument is as simple as some have made it.

I am appalled at what is happening in Basildon. The word is going round that if one has a baby, one gets accommodation from the council or the Commission for the New Towns. Any officer or individual who peddles that myth should be ashamed of himself. It is disgraceful to bring a child into the world because one believes that one can thereby get accommodation. I do not believe that any responsible person would say that, but large numbers of people say that that is what happens in Basildon. If so, it is wrong and I hope that the local authorities and the CNT will address that matter.

Three weeks ago, there was a terrible tragedy in Basildon involving a Hong Kong couple. The gentleman came home from work and found that his four childen had been suffocated. That incident has had a traumatic effect on the community in Basildon. The media immediately wanted the inside story on what went on between the two people. Everyone tries to apportion blame, but I am not having any of that. We must deal with the facts. This terrible tragedy has happened, four tiny lives have been lost and somehow the working relationship that should have existed between the family structure and the state was not effective. I hope that in due course we shall act on the report of the inquiry.

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Family life is fundamental to everything that we hold dear. I look to the Church to be much more outspoken about family life. I look forward to the Government's excellent policies continuing to underpin family life.

1.44 pm

Mr. Harry Greenway (Ealing, North) : It is a great honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon (Mr. Amess). Like him, I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Raison) on his excellent motion and the good debate that it has produced on the centrally important matter of the family. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie) is not here. When she spoke of working mothers she was clearly referring to women who leave home to do a job. It is absurd to pretend that they are the only mothers who work ; mothers at home seem to work equally hard. That should not be forgotten and mothers should not be disparaged for staying at home.

When my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon spoke of his personal contact with the east end of London, I thought of when I lived there for quite a long period and how much I grew to love it. He was absolutely right that when the miles and miles of terraces of small houses were replaced by tower blocks the neighbourhood changed completely, the spirit of one person being the next door neighbour's keeper went, and the sense of family in the east end community was dissipated. That spirit is still there to some extent, but is nothing like it was, which is a great tragedy.

Like my hon. Friend, I am a supporter of the Conservative Family Campaign and I commend a good deal of the work that it does. I shall amplify what he said about Churches. They have a particular responsibility which the Church of England sometimes--not always--fails to discharge. Any Church should see itself as the family of the people of God and encourage individual families to feel that they are a reflection of that one family. --Too often, Churches and Church leaders simply engage in political diatribes which are useless and unhelpful for families, who want leadership, saying, "Let us have an end to easy divorce and let us put children first in marriage and in every way." That is what Jesus taught. He was not concerned with the illegal immigrant who broke the law 15 times and was expected to be deported from a church in Manchester back to Sri Lanka. That was not the business of the bishop of Manchester, who should be teaching his flock the word of God, the gospel and how that relates to family life, and the relationship of the broad family of God with the nuclear and wider family.

Delinquency by the age of 21 is twice as high among young men and women whose parents divorced while the children were under five. Eighteen-year- old men from divorced families are much more likely to be unemployed. If couples consider splitting up for fairly facile reasons, as sometimes happens when they are not striving to stay together for the sake of their children, those statistics should give them cause for thought.

Of all those who go into prison, or other custodial institutions, between the ages of 15 and 22, no less than 80 per cent. return. Giving young people the stability to enable them to keep out of prison, particularly up to the age of 22, is of great importance to the individual and to society. We should never forget that requirement because it is of such central importance.

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During my long years as a teacher I saw children of every kind of background and I saw the difficulties of those who came from single-parent households or divorced backgrounds where their parents were constantly fighting, sometimes physically. I know the difficulties and strains that such circumstances placed on children. The House should remember that and find ways of preventing such occurrences, although that is not easy.

When we look beyond those difficulties to parents who are trying hard, and succeeding, in their marriages and bringing up their children--sometimes fairly strictly--we should not discourage them from being firm and strict. Too often, schools are in conflict with firm parents and sometimes society at large is in conflict with them. That is wrong. Recently, we had a court case because a parent had smacked a child three times with a wooden spoon even though there was nothing to see. A national campaign has been launched to dissuade parents, and if possible to prevent them by law, chastising their children. That is monstrous and will lead to serious social problems just as the abolition of moderately and reasonably applied corporal punishment in schools has led to difficulties. In some schools, no alternative method has been put in place, and that is why the children are seriously out of hand. Take away the occasional physical sanction that can be imposed on a child by his parent and one creates more difficulties in the home than one solves. I am not saying that children should be beaten up, and I shall come to the question of child abuse in a moment, but the occasional tap or smack does no child any harm.

Child abuse is an immensely serious problem in Britain. Not long ago, I had the sad experience of meeting a young lady who had a son, now aged 12, by her father. She was obviously in the most anguished state. Her father was about to go to court and the complete hatred with which she spoke of him was most upsetting. We need to talk more specifically than we do about child abuse and to give the nation examples of what happens to the child who has been abused and deal with his relationship with his parents. Then perhaps society would feel more strongly and take a more determined attitude to the question. One sometimes has to hold up a mirror to society to show people the results of their actions because only then will they change.

A number of hon. Members have referred to housing. It was a great wrong that until last year only one marriage partner could claim tax relief on the couple's mortgage, whereas those who were living together--sometimes wilfully and in sin--could both claim mortgage interest relief. It is greatly to the Government's credit that they ended that.

It will help family life that we now have separate taxation for married men and women. I should like to pick up a point made about community charge which, in my

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opinion, has not been sufficiently amplified. I shall refer to one particular injustice, whereas the Opposition criticise the whole charge and never say what they would do. I have worked out that the roof tax and local income tax that they propose, when applied to a house worth £80,000 in my constituency--many houses are worth a great deal more--would cost £1,500 a year, compared with a community charge of £435, which is already much too high. Labour's proposals do not bear thinking about ; they are awful.

If it is right to tax couples separately, however, it cannot be right to lump pensioner couples' savings together for community charge purposes. The community charge must be amended and if that can be achieved through regulation, all well and good. Each elderly person, whether or not he or she is married, should be entitled to have savings at the permitted maximum level which at the moment is £8,000. If the combined savings of a married couple mean that they must both pay the full community charge, that is wrong. It is unjust and illogical when those people may be taxed separately as married people.

The care of the elderly is too often neglected and has hardly been referred to today. We have talked a great deal about children, and that is right because they must come first. However, we are all aware of instances in which old people, who have done a wonderful job bringing up children, sometimes single-handed and sometimes in happy marriages, have been forced into nursing homes or old people's homes in old age while their children live just down the road, but never visit them.

I emphasise that family relationships are lifelong. My grandmother lived to be 99 years and 50 weeks of age. One of my greatest pleasures was being with her regularly until the day she died. I would not have had it any other way.

Mr. John Patten : She taught my hon. Friend how to behave.

Mr. Greenway : She certainly did, and that might mean that I will live to be 99. No doubt my right hon. Friend the Minister will be about the same age if I live that long, and good luck to him. I hope not to be a burden on the state. I will do my best to be useful to my descendants and have a good relationship with them. Even if I do not, I hope that they will love me enough to keep in touch even in old age and not live down the road but fail to visit me. We must accept that families are the most cohesive unit in society. If people are not part of a happy family, that is their great misfortune. As I am a member of a happy family, I sympathise with those people and I would do anything I could to help them. Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House believes that the family is as vital an institution as ever ; and calls for the further development of policies designed to support it.

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