Tories: Marriage is key to tackling underclass
Iain Duncan Smith has led the policy group
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Monday, 11, Dec 2006 01:14
Marriage needs to be put at the centre of efforts to tackle a "growing underclass" in British society, the Conservatives have said today.
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith has led a policy group study of the issue, which concludes that the breakdown of the family is one of the main causes of modern societal problems.
The interim report suggests that drug and alcohol addiction, crime and the failure to fulfil employment or education potential can all be the result of being brought up in unstable families.
"At the heart of stable families and communities lies marriage. For too long this issue has been disparaged and ignored and its erosion has had a detrimental effect on us all," the report says.
According to the Tories, 70 per cent of young offenders come from single parent families, while over half of young offenders and a third of prisoners and have been through the care system.
Speaking on the Today programme this morning, Mr Duncan Smith said the aim of the 300,000-page report was to "shine a torch" into an area from which successive governments had shied away.
"Too often people are finding as kids that their lives are already charted ahead of them, that because of the broken nature, the dysfunctionality of their home life, some of them falling into spirals of debt, often living with alcoholics and drug-addicted parents, that they're unable therefore to achieve at school and that causes a problem," he said
"We want to try and change that, particularly for those on low incomes.
"I think what you have to do is you've got to look at, which is what we're going to do next, what works, what doesn't work. We're going to examine every single aspect, from tax and benefit policy through to issues to do with cultural change and see what it is that we think government can affect, and also rule out the things that we don't think government can affect."
And according to Mr Duncan Smith, the cost to the taxpayer of family breakdown was estimated to be between £20 billion and £24 billion.
Today's report will be followed up by a full study next summer and also notes the importance of poverty, bad housing, unemployment, debt and drug and alcohol addiction in causing social breakdown.
"In short, we need a system that understands that while material deprivation must continue to be dealt with, poverty isn't just an issue of money. While money is important, so is the quality of the social structure of our lives," it adds.
"To improve the wellbeing of this country it is necessary that we help the people of Britain improve the quality of their lives or we will all become poorer."
Providing tax breaks for married couples and more relationship advice and emotional support for couples with children are among the measures put forward by the report to address the problem.