The problem isn’t childcare: It’s our perverse anti-family tax and benefits systems
This week the chancellor announced that from 2025 parents will be offered free childcare for their children as young as 9 months old. Whereas parents will now be able to send their tiny children to be looked after by strangers outside of the family, there is no equivalent provision to support those who prefer to […]
Family friendly Hungary
I’ve been somewhat immersed in all things Hungary during the past few weeks. Last month, I was invited to an international conference on the family by their government-backed think tank KINCS. And this week I had the pleasure of lunch in the Hungarian embassy in London with their families minister Katalin Novak. Hungary interests me […]
Online dating and divorce – READ our newsletter for November
MEETING ONLINE is now the most popular route to marriage but also raises the risk of divorce in the early years, according to our new analysis, covered in today’s Sunday Times (£) and Mail on Sunday. We have some thoughts. THE COUPLE PENALTY remains completely ignored in the budget and by policy-makers in general. Yet it may be the single […]
The couple penalty: the perverse family policy that penalises commitment
In the budget this week, the Chancellor announced a couple of things that will benefit quite a lot of families in the short term. But in failing to address the couple penalty in the welfare system that massively penalises couples who commit, to the tune of £,000s per year, he has neglected the long term. […]
Number 10 needs a Family Policy Unit
The costs – personal, social, economic – of family breakdown are vast and underappreciated. This is a social justice issue. My article for the political website ConservativeHome … A friend of ours is an amazing woman who has brought up her now teenage children on her own, having split from the father soon after their […]
A nation divided … over marriage
It’s not just Brexit. Britain is also a nation divided over marriage. The better off marry and mostly stay together. The less well off don’t marry and face a much higher risk of splitting up. New figures out from the Office for National Statistics show that the vast majority of parents start off as a […]
A simple policy on marriage for Mrs May
Government policy on marriage is lukewarm at best and downright ambivalent at worst. On the one hand, the state is terribly interested in marriage. We have strict laws on who can marry and how marriages can end, and we have special rules that favour transfers of assets between husband and wife in life and after death. But […]