Jonathan Werran is Chief Executive of Localis.
When writing about family policy, it is by now standard procedure to quote the opening lines from Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
If we are to reduce seemingly inexorable demand for public services, our primary goal must be to nurture and support happier, as in stronger and supportive families, which in turn produce resilient and independent children.
These tend to more successfully make the transition from school to adulthood into well-paid jobs, contributing actively to society and not burdening the probation, prison, probation, NHS, mental health, or drug dependency services.
Contra Tolstoy’s dictum, stronger families won’t necessarily all be alike, any more than dysfunctional ones. But the diversity of need amongst the latter is a fact, and any strategy to tackle entrenched intergenerational problems around education, work and health must take it into consideration.
A warning from local government
As many councillors or former councillors will sadly attest, some families have complex and special statutory needs that are the despair of local government budget-setting. Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) is a regular fixture in constituency mailbags and at present an unresolvable nightmare for many councils.
One senior Conservative council leader lamented how the various regulatory cul-de-sacs around health, care and local government spending and assets, and planning and housing militate against any freedom to innovate.
Town halls are the canary in the coalmine for this series’ thesis: inexorable increases in council tax fund high-demand social care services, at either end of age spectrum, which most residents don’t benefit from. If we don’t act, national government will follow the same trajectory.
Ministers will have to bite the bullet: this won’t necessarily be cost-free. But an ounce of upstream prevention, especially in early years, will be more effective in killing a pound of future pressures. But there is plenty that could be done.
We already have examples to follow. A national evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme – a Cameron-era initiative designed to reduce an estimated £8bn of reactive spend by putting 120,000 dysfunctional families on track – estimated the cost benefit analysis for the later 2017/18 iteration at £2.28 of benefits for every £1 spent on the programme.
This figure is modest in monetary terms. But the report said it had “significant cost implications through demand reduction on high-cost acute services, particularly in children’s social care and the criminal justice system”.
In March 2021, the Government announced the continuation of the programme with a rebrand as the Supporting Families Programme (SFP), with “a refreshed vision, strengthened objectives and an even stronger momentum to tackle barriers and create lasting change.”
So, in prevention there is a prima facie evidence case. But how much more could be gained through well-targeted intervention – and how much can we afford to invest?
A place-based approach
Strong and happy, unhappy and troubled families alike are all citizens of somewhere. And since they live somewhere, let us look at some of the place-based elements of how we might support stronger families – and in so doing not just ease pressure on the public purse but stimulate economic growth and wider social benefits too.
In the demographic and intergenerational battle for resources, families and working-age adults have consistently played second fiddle to the pensions triple lock and its fiscal consequences.
But on the basis, we want to support family life, how might we better use the benefits and tax system to alleviate financial pressures, housing policy to give them space to dwell, and make sure that levelling-up policies create local environments in which they can thrive?
Childcare
Childcare costs remain cripplingly high compared to other developed countries. The UK came third from bottom out of 40 in an OECD study – based on two-parent households, both earning 67 per cent of the average wage, and with two children aged two and three.
Jeremy Hunt’s decision to expand provision of 30 hours a week of free childcare for one and two-year olds showed that the Government understands the need for retail offer on childcare. The question is: what trade-offs can we make elsewhere in the welfare budget to move further in the right direction?
One way to make progress, whilst reducing direct demands on the state, could be to make sure any industrial strategy includes measures, such as tax breaks or other inducements, to spur employers toward making it easier for workers to balance their job with the demands of being a parent.
Housing
Stronger families are going to need somewhere they can afford to live, with social infrastructure within reach. A planning system which addresses their needs, and recognises their essential role in a thriving community, is essential, both to tackle the cost-of-living crisis and foster a sense of place.
Increasing supply affordable housing would alleviate some pressing accommodation needs and get the country back to exceeding 300,000 homes for the first time since 1969 – and there are ways and means of doing so without onerous expense to the state.
Earlier in the year, in a report written for Localis and the Housing and Finance Institute, Peter Bill and Jackie Sadek outlined an opportunity for bottom-up initiatives, stimulated by local authorities but executed by the private sector.
The report, Public Rental Homes, represents a fresh approach which flips the present private sector appraisal methodology. Instead of asking “what percentage of affordable homes can we afford to provide?”, the PRH model asks, “what percentage of private homes must be provided in order to produce the size and type of public rental homes those on our waiting lists can afford?”.
Harold Macmillan, when housing minister, allowed local authorities to build as many council homes as they had applicants on their waiting lists. The result, in 1953, was new 250,000 council homes. Given that only 4,000 council homes were completed in the 12 months to March 2021, there is scope to do much better.
Localism
All families live somewhere specific, and their lives are moulded by it. Improved local services, and fostering stronger local identities and pride, is thus an important aspect of making families more resilient.
Sometimes just doing the basics better makes a huge difference. A zero-tolerance approach to visible deterioration in a neighbourhood and its services can create the foundational blocks of a stronger community and more prosperous local economy.
Better integration of disparate parts of the public sector (local government, health, police, etc.) which have hitherto been either unwilling or unable to collaborate is already delivering visible improvements. We need to build on that.
Devolution may be part of the answer. It need not consist of complex and time-consuming governance deals; more trust between Whitehall and town hall, and more freedom for the latter to innovate and tailor their policies to the demands of their area, could go a long way to tackling many issues, from public health to housing to truanting, that are undermining family growth and stability.
Striking the balance
There is, of course, a tension inherent to trying to find bureaucratic and technocratic policies aimed at that most private and varied institution, the family – and a danger that empowerment and support lapses into pursuit of a narrow range of official metrics.
Given the sheer size of the state’s role in modern life, however, there is little choice in the matter. Either our tax, housing, welfare and other policies support family life, or they undermine it.
But we must ensure that any policy is designed sensitively, reflecting the needs of individual families and the particular character of the places they live.
Jonathan Werran is Chief Executive of Localis.
When writing about family policy, it is by now standard procedure to quote the opening lines from Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
If we are to reduce seemingly inexorable demand for public services, our primary goal must be to nurture and support happier, as in stronger and supportive families, which in turn produce resilient and independent children.
These tend to more successfully make the transition from school to adulthood into well-paid jobs, contributing actively to society and not burdening the probation, prison, probation, NHS, mental health, or drug dependency services.
Contra Tolstoy’s dictum, stronger families won’t necessarily all be alike, any more than dysfunctional ones. But the diversity of need amongst the latter is a fact, and any strategy to tackle entrenched intergenerational problems around education, work and health must take it into consideration.
A warning from local government
As many councillors or former councillors will sadly attest, some families have complex and special statutory needs that are the despair of local government budget-setting. Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) is a regular fixture in constituency mailbags and at present an unresolvable nightmare for many councils.
One senior Conservative council leader lamented how the various regulatory cul-de-sacs around health, care and local government spending and assets, and planning and housing militate against any freedom to innovate.
Town halls are the canary in the coalmine for this series’ thesis: inexorable increases in council tax fund high-demand social care services, at either end of age spectrum, which most residents don’t benefit from. If we don’t act, national government will follow the same trajectory.
Ministers will have to bite the bullet: this won’t necessarily be cost-free. But an ounce of upstream prevention, especially in early years, will be more effective in killing a pound of future pressures. But there is plenty that could be done.
We already have examples to follow. A national evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme – a Cameron-era initiative designed to reduce an estimated £8bn of reactive spend by putting 120,000 dysfunctional families on track – estimated the cost benefit analysis for the later 2017/18 iteration at £2.28 of benefits for every £1 spent on the programme.
This figure is modest in monetary terms. But the report said it had “significant cost implications through demand reduction on high-cost acute services, particularly in children’s social care and the criminal justice system”.
In March 2021, the Government announced the continuation of the programme with a rebrand as the Supporting Families Programme (SFP), with “a refreshed vision, strengthened objectives and an even stronger momentum to tackle barriers and create lasting change.”
So, in prevention there is a prima facie evidence case. But how much more could be gained through well-targeted intervention – and how much can we afford to invest?
A place-based approach
Strong and happy, unhappy and troubled families alike are all citizens of somewhere. And since they live somewhere, let us look at some of the place-based elements of how we might support stronger families – and in so doing not just ease pressure on the public purse but stimulate economic growth and wider social benefits too.
In the demographic and intergenerational battle for resources, families and working-age adults have consistently played second fiddle to the pensions triple lock and its fiscal consequences.
But on the basis, we want to support family life, how might we better use the benefits and tax system to alleviate financial pressures, housing policy to give them space to dwell, and make sure that levelling-up policies create local environments in which they can thrive?
Childcare
Childcare costs remain cripplingly high compared to other developed countries. The UK came third from bottom out of 40 in an OECD study – based on two-parent households, both earning 67 per cent of the average wage, and with two children aged two and three.
Jeremy Hunt’s decision to expand provision of 30 hours a week of free childcare for one and two-year olds showed that the Government understands the need for retail offer on childcare. The question is: what trade-offs can we make elsewhere in the welfare budget to move further in the right direction?
One way to make progress, whilst reducing direct demands on the state, could be to make sure any industrial strategy includes measures, such as tax breaks or other inducements, to spur employers toward making it easier for workers to balance their job with the demands of being a parent.
Housing
Stronger families are going to need somewhere they can afford to live, with social infrastructure within reach. A planning system which addresses their needs, and recognises their essential role in a thriving community, is essential, both to tackle the cost-of-living crisis and foster a sense of place.
Increasing supply affordable housing would alleviate some pressing accommodation needs and get the country back to exceeding 300,000 homes for the first time since 1969 – and there are ways and means of doing so without onerous expense to the state.
Earlier in the year, in a report written for Localis and the Housing and Finance Institute, Peter Bill and Jackie Sadek outlined an opportunity for bottom-up initiatives, stimulated by local authorities but executed by the private sector.
The report, Public Rental Homes, represents a fresh approach which flips the present private sector appraisal methodology. Instead of asking “what percentage of affordable homes can we afford to provide?”, the PRH model asks, “what percentage of private homes must be provided in order to produce the size and type of public rental homes those on our waiting lists can afford?”.
Harold Macmillan, when housing minister, allowed local authorities to build as many council homes as they had applicants on their waiting lists. The result, in 1953, was new 250,000 council homes. Given that only 4,000 council homes were completed in the 12 months to March 2021, there is scope to do much better.
Localism
All families live somewhere specific, and their lives are moulded by it. Improved local services, and fostering stronger local identities and pride, is thus an important aspect of making families more resilient.
Sometimes just doing the basics better makes a huge difference. A zero-tolerance approach to visible deterioration in a neighbourhood and its services can create the foundational blocks of a stronger community and more prosperous local economy.
Better integration of disparate parts of the public sector (local government, health, police, etc.) which have hitherto been either unwilling or unable to collaborate is already delivering visible improvements. We need to build on that.
Devolution may be part of the answer. It need not consist of complex and time-consuming governance deals; more trust between Whitehall and town hall, and more freedom for the latter to innovate and tailor their policies to the demands of their area, could go a long way to tackling many issues, from public health to housing to truanting, that are undermining family growth and stability.
Striking the balance
There is, of course, a tension inherent to trying to find bureaucratic and technocratic policies aimed at that most private and varied institution, the family – and a danger that empowerment and support lapses into pursuit of a narrow range of official metrics.
Given the sheer size of the state’s role in modern life, however, there is little choice in the matter. Either our tax, housing, welfare and other policies support family life, or they undermine it.
But we must ensure that any policy is designed sensitively, reflecting the needs of individual families and the particular character of the places they live.