Christian Conservative MP David Burrowes raised concerns in April that the government is not focussing enough on supporting marriage in its efforts to tackle UK poverty.
Writing in an article for the blog Conservative Home, Mr Burrowes claimed that the government’s new ‘Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families’ policy paper is more meaningful than Brexit ‘for the lives lost to worklessness, addiction, family breakdown, debt and homelessness’.
He said that the government’s poverty-fighting strategy is a simple and powerful ‘restating of the case for ensuring that work is the best route out of poverty’.
Strengthening families
And he explained that government rightly recognises that ‘strengthening families’ is the ‘key poverty-fighting tool’.
But Mr Burrowes also criticised the strategy for not focussing enough on the benefits of marriage.
He said he is urging the Department for Work and Pensions ‘not to ignore the evidence that unmarried parents are six times more likely to break up before their first child’s fifth birthday, and that children in families that break apart are 2.5 times more likely to be in long-term poverty. Marriage works – and, for this reason, we must do more to support marriage with relationship support and a more targetted transferable tax allowance’.
