F&H The Family and Social Policy

Question 1

What are several of the key milestones in social policies that have affected the family in the 1960s/70s?

Answer 1

• The 1967 Abortion Act: Legalised abortion in the UK and made it available through the NHS
• The 1967 Sexual Offences Act: Partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. The age of consent was set at 21 by the Act.
• The 1969 Divorce Reform Act: This Act reduced the previously high cost of divorce and made the legal process of getting a divorce a great deal simpler through the ‘irretrievable breakdown’ clause.
• 1970 Equal Pay Act: made it illegal for employers to pay women less than men employed in the same jobs - ‘encouraged’ women, especially mothers, to enter the workforce in large numbers.
• The 1975 Sex Discrimination Act: Act (which outlawed discrimination against women by employers in the workplace)
• Availability of the contraceptive pill: The pill became first available on the NHS to married women in 1961.

Question 2

What are some of the key policies introduced under Margaret Thatcher & John Major that were heavily influenced by the New Right? (1979-1997)

Answer 2

• The Children Act 1989 – a piece of legislation that clearly outlined the rights of children and safeguarded them from harm. Major emphasis was put on the role of the family and less on local services
• The Child Support Agency, 1993 – established to ensure absent fathers paid maintenance for the upbringing of their children (this included chasing down fathers where there was no longer contact etc.) This also meant that, where possible, money to support lone parent families came from absent parents as opposed to the government.
• Section 28 – The government introduce a rule, in 1988, that prevented local government from “promoting” homosexuality and included the provision that schools could not teach “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” Here the government went beyond promoting the ideal of the traditional nuclear family to directly attacking and indeed denying an alternative family structure.
• Proposed changes to divorce rules – there was a wish on the part of the Thatcher government to make divorce more difficult. There was a moral panic in the 1980s that too many British marriages were ending in divorce. The plan was to have an enforced “cooling off” period of a year between separation and divorce, however, the plans were never actually put into practice, partly because of opposition to the idea, and partly because of the impracticality of actually enforcing it.

Question 3

What are some of the more socially liberal policies introduced under New Labour? (1997-2010)

Answer 3

• Child Tax Credit Policy - This meant that depending on the amount of children you had it reduced the amount of tax you paid slightly. This is paid to the main carer of the children, usually the mother. Morgan (2007) argues that the government’s family policy undermined both marriage and the traditional family because it was biased towards single parents, dual-career families and gay people, at the expense of single-earner, two-parent nuclear families.
• Paid paternity leave - From 2003, men were able to get two weeks of paid parental leave.
• Adoption and Children’s Act (2002) - allowed same-sex couples to adopt children (as well as allowing unmarried heterosexual couples and single people to adopt too). There were other major advances in gay rights, such as an equal age of consent in 2001 and the repeal of Section 28 in 2003.
• Civil Partnership Act (2005) - allowed same-sex relationships to be legally recognised on the same terms as marriage (these were effectively marriage in all but name).

Question 4

What are some of the more socially conservative policies of the modern Conservative Party?

Answer 4

• Removed the so-called couples’ penalty - This was done so that the benefits system did not include a perverse incentive for couples to break up in order to receive more benefits.
• Troubled families programme (TFP) - After the London riots (2011), many Tories were worried about broken families and the quality of family life. In 2012, the Coalition introduced the TFP which identified 120,000 households who were involved in crime, anti-social behaviour, truanted from school, have adults long term unemployed, are a high cost to the state. The gov aimed to use the programme to get them back into work and educate them.
• The proposed Dementia tax - One of the reasons why Theresa May’s Tories fared so terribly in the 2017 GE was due to her proposed social care policy dubbed the “dementia tax”. This policy would have forced elderly people who have assets (money & housing) worth over £100,000 to pay for any social care they recieve as they get older. Previously, unless you had more than £23,000 in your bank you would be entitled to free social care from your council.
• Child tax credits restricted to two children. Child tax credits are only available for two children (and the equivalent for those on universal credit). Some ministers have specifically suggested this is designed to change behaviour and discourage people on low incomes from having too many children, although it is also clearly a cost-saving measure.
• Free school meals - During the Covid 19 pandemic, the government initially did not want to fund the extra money needed to provided free school meals over school holidays (summer and winter). This would not normally happen, but during the tough times of Covid-19 many saw it as a no brainer to feed children whose parents earned a certain amount of money.