I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government support for healthy relationships.
It is a pleasure to be under your chairship, Ms Jardine. May I start by wishing you a happy Valentine’s day for Saturday?
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
That is probably the most famous line in British literature, but when it comes to British policy, the role of relationships seems too often to be an afterthought, yet they are the building block of a healthy society. I am the first to jump on our cultural obsession with relationships when there is a new “Bridgerton” season, but it is time that relationships became a political obsession, too.
Valentine’s day is a moment each year when the country reflects on love, partnership and the relationships that underpin our families, communities and society. With public interest high in the pressures facing modern couples and with a growing body of evidence that respect, trust and equality prevent relationship breakdown, this debate offers us a timely opportunity to consider the factors that enable healthy partnerships in Britain today.
Healthy relationships are fundamental to a number of key policy domains. Strong and stable partnerships are associated with improved mental wellbeing, reduced loneliness and better overall health outcomes, while relationship distress is linked to increased demand for NHS and social care services. In education and children’s services, the quality of parental relationships strongly influences children’s emotional development, attainment and long-term life chances. In the economy, relationship stability and equality affect workforce participation, financial security and the capacity of families to balance work and care. In efforts to tackle violence against women and girls, healthy norms, cultures and values are clearly fundamental.
Policy decisions across those and other areas have a significant impact on couples’ abilities to build and sustain equal, healthy relationships. Workplace policies, such as parental leave and access to flexible working, shape how families organise care and employment. Housing affordability and security influence relationship formation and stability. Mental health provision, early years support and the wider social safety net all play a role in reducing pressures that constrain partnerships, while legal and justice frameworks affect how society responds to abuse, coercive control and family breakdown.
The fact is that relationships today look entirely different from those just 20 years ago. Today, more than two thirds of families with dependent children have both parents in employment, meaning that the majority of households are dual income. With divorce well entrenched in our culture, one in four families with dependent children is a single-parent household. There are huge benefits to more people working, especially for women, and it is a good thing that people have access to divorce when relationships are not healthy, but we cannot just take the benefits of these improvements and not mitigate the impacts.
What happens to child development when both parents are working full time, or when a single parent has no capacity outside work and childcare? What happens to our ability to bond with each other as a couple in a romantic relationship? What happens to our capacity to engage in and contribute to our local communities? Those shifts in the roles of couples and households also have negative impacts on relationships. We could mitigate those impacts, but as yet we have struggled to do so. This Government are rightly focused on growth as the key way this country can get back to a time of prosperity, but most parents I know—bear in mind that parents make up a huge part of the working population—are exhausted, and if I know one thing as a parent of small children, it is that nothing good or productive comes of being exhausted. How can we expect great output and productivity from people in the workplace when the strain on couples is so high? We have to pay closer attention to how households are coping.
Relationship challenges impact not only what we produce in the workplace, but how we sustain our population. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education has recently highlighted our falling birth rate and has rightly highlighted actions taken by this Government to try to change that, such as better funded childcare and measures on the cost of living and housing. Couples are operating under unprecedented strain to both parent or care and to work full time, yet we barely talk about the psychological toll. Then we are surprised that domestic violence rates increase, that mental health in both men and women is plummeting and adding to our welfare bill, that special educational needs and disabilities issues are skyrocketing and that couples are deciding that one child is enough. As a Government, we give couples screen time advice and encourage them to have more children, but we rarely ask, “What is life like for you right now, and what would make your life easier as a couple and as a parent in 2026?” Let us do that more.
When it comes to domestic violence, the Government have made huge strides in developing a comprehensive strategy to combat violence against women and girls, but the fact remains that 3.8 million people experienced domestic abuse last year, and a quarter of all UK residents have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. The time when abuse starts in earnest is during pregnancy and the first 1,001 days of life. Some 30% of domestic abuse begins in pregnancy, rising to 40% in the first 1,001 days, precisely when infant brain development is the most sensitive to stress and trauma, but, terrifyingly, only 0.5% of maternity patients disclose abuse, so those numbers miss the majority of cases. Abuse during that period worsens maternal mental health, increases adverse birth outcomes and damages infants’ socio-emotional development. Those effects shift costs on to the NHS, social care, education and the justice system for years.
Relationships between parents and children can lead to stronger and more secure relationships and behaviour among those children as they grow up, but we know that currently only 55% of infants develop secure attachments, and that insecure attachment is a key driver of poor outcomes later in life. Research this month from the Centre for Mental Health and the Parent-Infant Foundation finds that expanding access to parent-infant relationship teams to support parents in the most deprived areas to bond with their babies could save the Government £1.2 billion annually.
The single most significant thing we could do in this Parliament to change all of this would be to introduce much better paternity leave—ideally at least six weeks at 90% of pay. Paternity leave in this country is truly embarrassing: two weeks is not enough. The UK’s offer of two weeks of unpaid statutory paternity leave is among the least generous in Europe, constraining fathers’ early involvement and entrenching relationship inequality. Modelling by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that six weeks at 90% of pay could deliver £2.68 billion to the wider economy, primarily through increased maternal employment and more equal sharing of care. Some 59% of people agreed that bad paternity leave made it difficult to share childcare responsibilities equally, not just in the short term, but in the long term, with patterns proving harder to shift.