Social Policy & Families

• There are various ways in which governments can impact on family life through their policies
• Policies have determined who can get married, at what age, who can have children, what rights those children have, etc.
• In the past, policies have had very dramatic impacts on family life, such as the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and in other countries, such as China's infamous one child policy
• New Right perspective


  Influenced Conservative governments' policies on families, 1979-1997
• New Right perspective on families

  • Preference for traditional nuclear families
  • Encouraging individual and parental responsibility (especially paternal responsibility) and also responsibility for elderly relatives, etc.
  • Encouraging mothers to stay at home
  • Concern that the welfare system might encourage non-traditional family forms and irresponsible behaviour
• Margaret Thatcher (1988): 'The family is "a nursery, a school, a hospital, a leisure place, a place of refuge and a place of rest" as well as "the building block of society"'
• This is a very traditional and, some would argue, idealistic view of the family, which echoes much functionalist and New Right thought
• Policy developments under Conservative governments, 1979-1997

  • The Children Act 1989
  • The Child Support Agency, 1993
  • Married Men's Tax Allowance
  • Proposed changes to divorce rules
  • Section 28
• The "Back to Basics" campaign under John Major did not translate into clear policies
• Considering how important family and traditional family values was said to be by New Right politicians in the 1980s and 1990s


  There was actually not a huge amount of ground-breaking new policy in this area
• Marxists argue that the New Right is really an ideology to justify policies that benefit the ruling class and capitalism
• The governments of this era were swimming against the tide


  Their ideology was to protect the traditional family, but this was the period when there was the largest growth in family diversity, the largest increase in divorces, the largest reduction in marriages, important changes in attitudes to sexual orientation, etc.
• Trying to encourage a particular family form through tax and benefit changes is a questionable idea
• When prime minister Tony Blair came into power in 1997, there was an expectation that there would be a wholesale change in focus for social policy
• Blair was strongly influenced by the late modernist Anthony Giddens
• One might have expected a focus on acknowledging and facilitating family diversity under New Labour
• New Labour's social agenda included a continuation of the New Right approach in some areas
• New Labour policies on families

  • Cuts to lone parent benefits
  • Working family tax credits
  • Paid paternity leave
  • Civil Partnership Act (2005)
  • Adoption and Children's Act (2002)
• While the New Labour governments did legislate to acknowledge family diversity, they did not create it and their official position was still that marriage (and at that time marriage could only be between a man and a woman) was the best basis for family life
• Critics would suggest that New Labour's approach to work replacing welfare was simply an approach for cutting public spending on welfare
• The coalition government came to power in 2010 when David Cameron's Conservatives were the biggest party in parliament but failed to get a majority, therefore forming a coalition with the liberal democrats
• Coalition government policies on families

  • Removing the so-called couples' penalty
  • Shared parental leave
  • Equal marriage
• There does not appear to be a consistent thread of social policy relating to families during the period of the coalition government
• The introduction of same-sex marriages while leaving the option of civil partnerships on the table has created a new, rather unusual inequality in UK law
• Surprisingly few fathers are taking advantage of additional parental leave beyond the two weeks they were already entitled to
• Current Conservative government policies on families

  • Married couple's tax allowance
  • Child tax credits restricted to two children
• Both the coalition and the Conservative governments have made a number of changes to the benefits system that embeds the idea that children are the responsibility of their parents until they reach their mid 20s
• Social policy inevitably links with power as only those with power are able to get their policy made into law
• The nature of policy and who is likely to benefit from it tells us something about who holds power and what they choose to do with it
• This links with theoretical perspectives, as Marxists and feminists would expect to see power wielded in the interests of the groups they identify as powerful, while postmodernists would expect to see a more complex picture