Who Cares about Family Policy in the UK?

This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of Social Policy by Mary Daly.

On the face of it family policy seems quite straightforward. The goal surely is child welfare, avoiding poverty, and supporting family well-being. Well, yes and no. In actual fact family policy raises quite profound and broad-ranging questions such as: What are the respective responsibilities of the state and the family? How far should the state intervene in family life? What are the limits of gender equality as a goal of family policy? Where is the balance between individualisation of entitlements and channelling services and income to the household, family, or couple?

How Should We Understand Family Policy?

Family policy defies easy political classification. We can recognise, somewhat crudely, left and right positions. Left-leaning actors tend to favour individual rights for family members, policies addressing poverty, and a supportive set of family services whereas conservative actors are more cautious about state intervention, endorsing a policy that supports and protects the traditional family as the institution for care. Over the last decades, right-oriented positions have arguably dominated. Today we see especially radical right interests calling for interventions to ‘protect’ the family in its traditional, paternalistic form, allied in many cases to supports for ‘native families’. The inter-mixing of goals indicates the tensions involved in family policy. We have a left-right political faultline centred on socio-economic redistribution and anti-poverty measures while at the same time family policy involves socio-cultural tensions on factors such as appropriate gender arrangements, generational equity, family values, and questions about deservingness and national identity.

My article offers a framework to understand these complexities, suggesting that they can be captured by seeing family policy as engaging with three sets of relations. The first is the relation between the family and the state which rests essentially on the degree to which the family is seen to be a ‘private’ institution autonomous from state intervention. The second relationship is that between the family and the economy, evoking such matters as the economic form and well-being of the family. Of concern here are factors like the participation of family members in paid work, levels of living, patterns of child-rearing, and, via these, work-life balance. Thirdly, family policy shapes the social role of the family, concerned about the moral functions of family and the family’s role in maintaining social stability and the normative order. Family policy has to navigate around very different views on these issues and achieve rather delicate balances between the amount and forms of support and values and ideologies.

Appraising the Last 30 Years

Applying this framework to analyse the recent history of family policy in the UK – New Labour’s period in office between 1997 and 2010 and the different Conservative administrations between 2010 and 2024 – shows that each of these relationships motivated reform in what was a very vibrant 30-year period in UK family policy. New Labour’s was the more broad-ranging approach, showing elements of universalism, a high commitment to redistribution and at the same time recognising the family as playing a key positive role in individual and collective well-being and social order. The Conservatives’ policy generally eschewed redistribution, undoing much of New Labour’s income support policies, and made problem families the focus of intensive disciplinary policy interventions.

The analysis also reveals a number of surprises. First, it shows a major break with the past in the degree of prominence and resources given to family policy in the period covered. What was remarkable about successive New Labour and Conservative administrations was the prominence not just of family in their vision for the UK but the moral grounding of this. A second surprise was the degree of common ground between the two. It was New Labour that sowed the seeds of concentrating on ‘problem families’ as deviant for example, which later came to define the Conservatives’ family policy. The New Labour policy is the harder to understand, especially from a left-right framing, until one realises that it was grounded in moral concerns, enlisting family policy to improve social cohesion while keeping a distance from individualisation and individual rights.

What Is the Situation Today?

It is the Conservative policy vision that prevails today. After a 30-year period of reform, the UK stands out internationally for its family policy, which is particular and underdeveloped in comparison to other European countries. Comparatively, the UK spends less on family policy, has no universal elements of income support for children, penalises low-income families especially those with larger numbers of children, has a maternalist-oriented employment leave system and a set of family support services that is underdeveloped apart from those targeted on the so-called most ‘troubled families’. And the mood is against greater investment in family policy.

The current Labour government has stalled on family policy unlike its predecessors. While it finally took the decision to eliminate the two-child limit for income support purposes through Universal Credit, it did so only when placed under huge pressure by a very well-coordinated campaign led by civil society actors. So even the anti-child poverty motivation doesn’t have the same resonance. This is not just because of its position on public spending for welfare purposes. It is also because Labour is stuck on moral questions in regard to what individuals and families deserve from the state and public resources. In the meantime, the Reform Party is trying to occupy the space – calling for policies that help British people to have children. This is essentially a nativist fertility policy. The populist anti-migrant wave washing over the UK (and England especially) might well help to advance especially in the context of relative stasis on family policy from the other main political parties.

Reference

Daly, Mary. 2026. “A Framework for Analysing Family Policy and an Application to the UK.” Journal of Social Policy: 1–16. doi: 10.1017/S0047279426101500.

About the Author

Mary Daly is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Oxford, UK.