Prime Minister David Cameron will today commit to put family life at the heart of policy, setting out new measures to help families.
Cameron is set to pull on the heartstrings of voters, saying: “For me, nothing matters more than family. It’s at the centre of my life and the heart of my politics. As a husband and a father I know how incredibly lucky I am to have a wonderful wife and three amazing children”.
The new measures will include a doubling of the annual budget for relationship counselling to £19.5 million; additional help for parents in ante-natal classes and from health visitors; an expansion of the current ‘troubled families’ programme from 120,000 to 500,000 families; and extra pupil premium funding for children adopted from care.
Given the limited success the troubled families programme has had in reaching the original 120,000 families target, the additional funding and capacity would need to be matched by a scaling up in efficacy.
A “family test” on all government policies will be formally introduced into impact assessments as part of the new measures, which will see every domestic policy examined for its impact on the family. Policies that fail to “support family life” will not be allowed to proceed.
