New Welfare Secretary accused of watering down pro-marriage message

Crabb changes set-piece speech to avoid linking single-parent families to host of social problems

THE new Work and Pensions Secretary has been accused of failing to promote the benefits of marriage after he “watered down” his first major speech.

Stephen Crabb was expected to say that the Government would be doing children in England a “huge disservice” if they were “neutral on family structure”, and to warn that those brought up in a “lone-parent family” were more likely to struggle in life.

But the former Welsh secretary, who replaced Iain Duncan Smith last month, cut the lines from his speech, in which he talked of the “vital” and “foundational” role of family relationships in providing children with economic se- curity and “essential role models”. He said that he was not talking about “some idealised model of a self-contained nuclear family”, because society was much more “complex” than that.

In an earlier version, Mr Crabb had been due to say that the Government should “not ignore the evidence that where children come from a lone-parent family or have chaotic upbringings, they are far more likely to fail at school, turn to crime or fall into substance abuse”. He was to add: “We do the children of this country a huge disservice if we are neutral on family structure.”

Laura Perrins, the co-editor of The Conservative Woman website, said: “All the evidence shows that children brought up with married parents have better outcomes economically, socially and emotionally.

“If you care about economic inequality then you care about marriage and it should be held up as an ideal even if all people don’t achieve it. The fact that they watered down the speech shows how useless the Conservatives are at promoting marriage.” Mr Crabb told a meeting of the Early Intervention Foundation in London: “Family is the training ground for life. And a good start provides a great platform for a fruitful life.

“In contrast, family life which is chaotic, violent, broken, damaged, turbulent ... leads so often to a life characterised by educational failure, crime, poverty, and where the cycle is repeated in another generation.”

He pointed to estimates which suggest that the cost of relationship breakdown to society is as high as £47 billion. Mr Crabb also used the speech to highlight the battle his single mother faced to get from a “position of crisis and dependency to a position of economic independence”. He has spoken in the past about how his mother brought him and his two brothers up single-handedly and described her journey as “absolutely the model of how the welfare system should work”.

Mr Crabb did not comment when asked why he changed his speech.