thetorydiary

One of my favourite lines in David Cameron's conference speech last year was when he said:

"We’ve got to stop treating children like adults and adults like children.”

Today, as previewed last month, the party is explaining how it will try to tackle the first of the first of the issues raised by that soundbite, namely the the premature sexualisation and excessive commercialisation of childhood.

The main points are as follows:

• Banning any marketing or advertising company in serious breach of rules governing marketing to children from bidding for government advertising contracts for three years;
• Banning companies from using new peer-to-peer marketing techniques targeted at children, including the recruitment of children as ‘brand ambassadors’ on social networking sites;
• Shutting the regulatory loophole which allows marketing through interactive games etc on corporate websites targeted at children;
• Empowering headteachers and governors to ban advertising and vending machines in schools; 
• Working to establish a new online system that gives people the power to see what others are complaining about, especially in regard to irresponsible products, marketing and other commercial activities targeted at children, making it easier for the public to mobilise social pressure quickly and effectively.

Mr Cameron outlined his motivations for the proposals on GMTV this morning when he said:

''We all know as parents - I have got two young children and there will be many watching this programme - that you do your best as parents but there is a lot of pester power going on.

''What we are saying is that you can't cut children off from the commercial world, of course you can't, but we should be able to help parents more in terms of trying to make sure that our children get a childhood and that they are not subject to unnecessary and inappropriate commercialisation and sexualisation too young. This is what this should be about.''

Clearly some of the measures above involve government action, but Mr Cameron emphasised that more anything else, it is social and parental pressure that can encourage responsibility and de-legitimise irresponsible behaviour (he cited the case of the Lolita bed) - hence it was vital that the government made it easier for parents to make their feelings known with a view to putting on that pressure.

Jonathan Isaby

Labour are today announcing plans to make it easier for grandparents to gain access to their grandchildren after divorces or family breakdown.

Nice idea - and one taken straight from David Willetts, who announced it as Tory policy at the party conference last year when he said:

"We must improve the rights of grandparents to have access to children. The courts should at least have to consider whether there should be continuing legal rights to access in the event of family breakdown."

Mr Willetts went head-to-head with Children's Secretary Ed Balls on the Radio 4 Today programme - which you can listen to here - on the day that the Conservative Party publishes the families section of its draft manifesto. You can click here to download it in full, but here are the highlights:

• End the couple penalty in the tax credit system;
• Recognise marriage and civil partnership in the tax system by the end of a Parliament;
• Increase the focus of Sure Start on the neediest families;
• Provide 4,200 more Sure Start health visitors;
• Allow free nursery care for pre-school children from a diverse range of providers;
• Extend the right to request flexible working to every aprent with a child under the age of eighteen;
• Introduce a new system of flexible parental leave to allow parents to share maternity leave between them

I’m a strong supporter of recognising marriage in the tax system.  Tim made the case for the policy on this site last week, and I’ve nothing to add to the arguments he put.  I want, instead, to write about selling the policy, rather than the ideals behind it.

Consider some figures:

• In 1991, 74 per cent of over-16s in England and Wales had been married.  By 2008, this had fallen to 65 per cent.
• In 1991, 58 per cent of people were currently married.  By 2008, this had fallen to 48 per cent.
• In 1991, 70 per cent of children were born to married couples.  By 2008 this had fallen to 55 per cent.

These Office of National Statistics figures suggest a simple picture of less marriage, more cohabitation and more births outside marriage – especially among younger people (The ONS has found that the proportion of single women aged 18 to 49 who were cohabiting rose from 18 per cent in 1979 to 35 per cent by 2001).

But hang on a moment.  The picture’s more complex.

• Yes, roughly 45 per cent of marriages ended in divorce in 2005 - up from 34 per cent in 1979.  However, it’s worth noting that some of these marriages were of course re-marriages.  I haven’t found a reliable figure for how many divorcees re-marry, although one estimate is as high as 50 per cent.
• So if 45 per cent of all marriages end in divorce, what proportion of first marriages end in divorce?  Again, I haven’t found a firm figure, though one estimate comes in as low as 15 per cent.  The ONS estimates that the breakdown rate for second marriages is around 61 per cent compared to 41 per cent for all marriages.
• ONS figures confirm that the longer a couple have been married, the lower the likelihood of divorce.  Fewer than 31 per cent of marriages that survive for a decade will end in divorce, and only 15 per cent of those married for 20 years or more end up divorcing.

Obviously, these figures are selective, but considered with others they suggest three points.

Today's Guardian splashes with an interview with David Willetts, in which he expresses his fear that marriage is in danger of becoming an exclusively middle-class institution unless action is taken to bolster it. He says:

"The aspiration of marriage is becoming harder to achieve. Instead of it becoming just what you do in your 20s, it has become like scaling Mount Everest, a sort of great moral endeavour – and something that requires a lot of time and money. We think we need to ease some of the pressures.

"There is quite a lot of evidence coming from America about how we are in danger of heading towards a society where middle-class people get married and people on low and erratic incomes don't get married, and that in turn leads to a divergence of a whole host of other outcomes.

"In my view it would be extremely dangerous if marriage became something only for the affluent elite and that is what will happen, unless we try to get some kind of policy that restores it as a more widespread institution as we had in the past."

He said that the current rate of family break-up was "a disaster for children", although according to the report:

"Owing to budgetary pressures it was unlikely that recognition of marriage in the tax system would appear in the Tories' first budget, but it was important to establish the principle, he said."

The paper reports that the party's forthcoming green paper on the issue will propose:

• Home nurse visits for new families with greater emphasis on help for the father;
• Relationship guidance at the time of a civil marriage similar to that given by a vicar, hopefully spreading the model of the Bristol community family trust that provides relationship courses to 30% of new mothers in the city;
• After a couple split, fathers should be given access to tax credits if they are looking after the child more frequently than the mother;
• Grandparents should be automatically considered for placements if both parents are not deemed suitable to bring up the children, with grandparents also to be considered for access to the child following a divorce.
• Children's school reports should be sent to fathers as well as mothers in cases of breakdown.

Read the full interview here.

Jonathan Isaby

Labour believes that Tory support for marriage is an electoral weak point. Harriet Harman was hysterical on the subject at the weekend.

David Cameron addressed the subject yesterday in a speech to Gingerbread, the leading pressure group representing single parents in the UK.

Repeating a phrase first used by David Willetts he insisted that the Conservative Party would never be at war with lone mothers:

"The discussion about families is often reduced to a black and white debate. You’re either for one model of the family or another. You’re either an evangelist for the 1950s nuclear family or you think that traditional structures are redundant in the modern world. I say that families come together in many different ways and we should be there for all of them.

Indeed I stood up at our party conference a few years ago and said that as far as I am concerned commitment matters whether it’s between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and a woman. To me, a strong family is defined most of all by the love that’s in it.  I don’t think this is incompatible with our support for committed relationships.

Most people don’t start a relationship with the hope it will end. So I believe we need to do more to help where we can. That’s why my Party will back marriage in the tax system and end the couple penalty that pays people to live apart rather than together.

But – and let me be very clear about this – the flip side of this coin isn’t disapproval of those who don’t stay together. I get the real world.  Sometimes, however hard you try, a relationship is not going to work. That can be very sad – but it would be cruel and callous to compound that sadness by treating single parent families in any way differently.

So I want to be completely clear: lone parents will not be on their own with the Conservatives. There is not – and never will be – a war on single parents. In fact far from taking the Conservative Party back into some comfort zone, I have expressly explained that we will give practical, meaningful support to every family in this country in a range of different ways, including through positive state action...

…indeed my claim that we will be the most family friendly party is because we are prepared to combine state action with social action and action on tax and benefits, with helping both at work and at home.

Just to give you a couple of examples, we’re going to increase the number of health visitors, so that parents have the support of a professional in the home – particularly during those first few months with a new baby. And we’ll improve Sure Start so that it better involves community groups and charities and sharpens its focus on the most vulnerable."

PDF of the whole speech.

Today's Daily Mail has an interview with the party's spokesman on the family, David Willetts, in which he signals that the next Conservative Government would grant unprecedented rights to grandparents.

The paper summarises his plans:

"The law will be changed to ensure they do not lose contact with their grandchildren after a family separation, divorce or bereavement. They will also be put at the front of the custody queue if their grandchildren face being fostered or taken into care."

Grandparents currently have no access rights to their grandchildren after a couple break up and almost half reportedly face being cut off from them completely.

Mr Willetts tells the paper:

"Grandparents are fantastically important members of strong families and they do an increasing amount, particularly in terms of childcare. Lots of parents rely on the support they give. They also help with the family finances, where there are big flows of support from grandparents to parents and grandchildren.

"And, very interestingly, they are often a good source of advice for teenagers. There is fascinating research about which members of their family they would talk to about a problem, which showed grandparents often scoring above parents. But there's little or no recognition of the role of grandparents in the way the Government has constructed its family policy. A Conservative government would change that."

"The legal framework at the moment is that the interests of the child must come first and of course that is right. But we must improve the rights of grandparents to have access to children. The courts should at least have to consider whether there should be continuing legal rights to access in the event of family breakdown. It's also wrong that only half of local authorities have a policy that families should be considered as a first option before a child is fostered or taken into care. Grandparents must have a right to be the legal guardians of the child."

Jonathan Isaby