London, (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Barely anyone has heard of the Family Test. It’s a ghost policy that haunts Whitehall, sometimes seen but never heard of and almost never applied to actual policy decisions. The test was introduced by David Cameron in 2014 to ensure every government policy was tested against its impact on family functioning. It was a bold declaration of intent at the time,with a senior minister even put in charge of making sure officials across government departments delivered this new test.
It is a classic tale of a big statement made by a Prime Minster:a shake–up of government and things will change for the better. The reality is very different. One recent government advisor with a strong interest in helping families stick together recently admitted to me that the Family Test was barely, if ever, applied to any policy in his department. This is something that a 2018 investigation discovered to be largely true across Whitehall. Two curious parliamentarians, an MP and a peer took it upon themselves to ask each government department how often they applied the test. The general response was lukewarm, with some departments scratching their heads for any instance in which they had considered families when putting together new policies. The business department even responded that the family was nothing to do with their work, a bizarre response for a department in charge of family–friendly working practices.
Strengthening family life should always be a priority for governments. Stronger families improve outcomes for children, and the break-up of family relationships is often the quickest route into poverty. It should be a much bigger priority for ministers than it often is.
Almost a decade on from the introduction of this test we now have a completely dysfunctional approach to helping families stick together. There is a minister in the Department for Work and Pensions who has responsibility for the Family Test, a minster for ‘families’ in the Department for Education and a ‘family champion’ in the cabinet, yet to be announced but historically nothing to do with the Family Test. There is even a full–time government advisor on the family who is a quarter of a mile down the road from civil servants charged with overseeing the Family Test. Imagine a government where there was a minister for trains and another for train tracks, with a minister for signals to boot.
In response to the lacklustre approach to helping families stick together and a collective shrug of the shoulders across Whitehall, a committee was formed. It is hard to tell if this has had the transformative effect that might have been hoped for. It is probably time for someone to finally kill off this failed experiment, but it shouldn’t be the end for departments thinking about helping couples, particularly when times are hard. It is well known that family breakdown more than doubles the chances of living in poverty – a challenge that comes with a big price tag. The government spends a lot of money picking up the pieces as result of broken families. It might be easier to ignore the issue, and advisors with an eye on avoiding a Twitter pile on will counsel against talking about the role of families, but it stalks every part of government policy whether it is politically convenient to say so. The back–to–basics fiasco of the mid–nineties casts a long shadow on British politics.
Instead of the tepid test, rarely applied and largely ignored, we should go back to basics, but quite differently to the way in which John Major meant it when he used the phrase. A re-booted Family Test should turn its attention to the mammoth data crunching capabilities of government. Minsters and their advisors are understandably fearful of talking up the importance of family life and families sticking together. In an age of the instant scandal, wagging your finger at some group in a disapproving way is likely to incur the censure of keyboard activists. This can quickly spill over into real world calls for a minister’s resignation. It is much easier to leave this issue alone and sign off press releases, spending yet more government cash.
Every day the government produces data on subjects from farming to school exclusions and everything in between. There are hundreds of data analysts crunching numbers and huge data sets. It’s the gold standard of data analysis with high expectations built into the system. One of the three government family ministers should re-write the Family Test with a new focus on data; we should require officials producing official analysis to spend some time looking at the role of family breakdown in whatever issue it is they are investigating that day. Thinking family should be a requirement before any new data is published. This geeky exercise of data exploration would most likely uncover an avalanche of new evidence that family breakdown really does matter. Over time it would be hard to ignore and would in itself encourage action from reluctant ministers.
Some will argue that producing evidence is the job of pressure groups and think tanks, and the job of departments to consider this evidence. This ignores the reality of how policy is made and how ministers defend decisions made in government. Departments churn out hundreds of data sets each month, each with an official government crest. This data is a function of the policy process, allowing minsters and advisors to claim some objective truth through ‘official statistics’. Building the evidence on family breakdown isn’t just about re-hashing what we already know but presenting the evidence in a way that is almost impossible to ignore, both inside and outside of government.
This isn’t a big bang approach to mending families; it doesn’t lend itself to a big speech or an eye–catching press release. We have had many of those over the years. Instead, it will slowly but very surely provide the security politicians need to speak up for the family and in time do something about our record–breaking rates of family dysfunction.
Frank Young works for a Westminster think tank and is writing in a personal capacity.