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By Root 3124 0

on strengthening the traditional family. The statistics told their own story. One in four children were born to unmarried parents. No fewer than one in five children experienced a parental divorce before they were sixteen. Of course, family breakdown and single parenthood did not mean that juvenile delinquency would inevitably follow: grandparents, friends and neighbours can in some circumstances help lone mothers to cope quite well. But all the evidence — statistical and anecdotal — pointed to the breakdown of families as the starting point for a range of social ills of which getting into trouble with the police was only one. Boys who lack the guidance of a father are more likely to suffer social problems of all kinds. Single parents are more likely to live in relative poverty and poorer housing. Children can be traumatized by divorce far more than their parents realize. Children from unstable family backgrounds are more likely to have learning difficulties. They are at greater risk of abuse in the home from men who are not the real father. They are also more likely to run away to our cities and join the ranks of the young homeless where, in turn, they fall prey to all kinds of evil.

The most important — and most difficult — aspect of what needed to be done was to reduce the positive incentives to irresponsible conduct. Young girls were tempted to become pregnant because that brought them a council flat and an income from the state. My advisers and I were considering whether there was some way of providing less attractive — but correspondingly more secure and supervised — housing for these young people. I had seen some excellent hostels of this sort run by the churches. Similarly, young people who ran away from home to sleep on the streets needed help. But I firmly resisted the argument that poverty was the basic cause — rather than the result — of their plight and felt that it was the voluntary bodies which could provide not just hostel places (which were often in surplus) but guidance and friendship of the sort the state never could.*

We were feeling our way towards a new ethos for welfare policy: one comprising the discouragement of state dependency and the encouragement of self-reliance; greater use of voluntary bodies including religious and charitable organizations like the Salvation Army; and, most controversially, built-in incentives towards decent and responsible behaviour. We might then reduce the problem over the next generation rather than increase it, as the last generation had done. But our attempts to rethink welfare along these lines met a number of objections. Some were strictly practical and we had to respect them. Others, though, were rooted in the attitude that it was not for the state to make moral distinctions in its social policy. Indeed, when I raised such points I was sometimes amused to detect ill-concealed expressions of disapproval on the faces of civil servants under the veneer of official politeness.

In spite of all the difficulties, by the time I left office my advisers and I were assembling a package of measures to strengthen the traditional family whose disintegration was the common source of so much suffering. We had not the slightest illusion that the effects of what could be done would be more than marginal. Nor, in a sense, would I have wanted them to be. For while the stability of the family is a condition for social order and economic progress the independence of the family is also a powerful check on the authority of the state. There are limits beyond which ‘family policy’ should not seek to go.

That is why I considered it important to encourage voluntary bodies which had the right values and vision, like Mrs Margaret Harrison’s ‘Homestart’, whose six thousand voluntary workers were themselves parents and offered friendship, common sense advice and support in the family home. I preferred if at all possible that direct help should come from someone other than professional social workers. Of course, professionals have a vital role in the most difficult cases — for example, where