The ministerial foreword of "Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance", presented to Parliament by Iain Duncan Smith in January 2011 said:

"Too often, parents do not know where to turn for help to deal with separation and resolve what can seem like intractable issues, such as reaching arrangements for financial support through child maintenance payments.  They may feel ill-equipped to negotiate arrangements that are best for children in the long term: those that promote ongoing contact and the involvement of both parents in their children's lives, with both parents taking ongoing responsibility for their children through co-operative parenting.

This Green Paper outlines a radical re-shaping of the statutory child maintenance system to better support families going through separation, recognising the range and complexity of the issues that parents face during this difficult time.  Central to our approach to reform is an integrated model of relationship and family support services, which helps parents make their own, lasting arrangements, because collaborative agreements, where this is possible, are better for everyone involved."

On 8 February 2011 Iain Duncan Smith gave a speech at Marriage Week, organised by Richard Kane, a trustee of Time for Families, which was a prison charity and one of the recipients of funding that he claimed elsewhere would be spent on helping separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance. Present were many beneficiaries of the funding for relationship support.

“The Prime Minister addressed Relate in December of last year, outlining his support for the family and the Government’s commitment to family stability.  In that speech he announced new funding for relationship support - £30 million over the spending review period.”

On 15 June 2011 Maria Miller gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee:

“Would I like to see more money invested in providing support services in the long term? I absolutely can see that as a more attractive opposition than simply continuing to spend money on chasing arrears and the lack of payment, which is the balance of expenditure at the moment. The Child Support Agency at the moment costs the taxpayer £460 million a year, of which, from memory, around a third of the staff are chasing arrears and payments. That is a lot of money. We are as a Government spending around £30 million on parenting support through the Department for Education. Compare those two figures, and I know where I would prefer to see more money spent. It is not in simply continuing to chase the arrears.”

Labour MP Teresa Pearce was worried that the support Maria Miller wanted separated parents to use simply did not exist. But Maria Miller blithely reassured her:

“I would remind you that, as I said, we are spending £30 million through the Department for Education on helping to provide the sorts of services that our research would suggest might be effective. One of the other issues that we are trying to tackle at the moment is what the most effective services are. There is not a huge evidence base to suggest what the most effective interventions are. There is a lot of thought, supposition and anecdotal evidence, but the Department for Work and Pensions is working with the Department for Education to look at identifying the most effective ways that we can support parents. Probably, again based on the sort of evidence that we have to date, that is going to be in the area of relationship support—something that we are already spending around £30 million a year on.”

On 28 November 2011 Lord Kirkwood, addressing Lord De Mauley, was evidently under the impression that the much-touted £30 million for relationship support was going to be used to develop services to help separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance.

Lord Kirkwood fretted about what might happen if further funding to help separated parents were not to materialise after the Department for Education’s £30 million grant was used up, little realising that the lion’s share of that very £30 million was not being used to help separated parents, but had gone to people close to Iain Duncan Smith’s Special Adviser, some to provide relationship support to help couples stay together and some to help individuals buy houses for themselves.

On 22 December 2011 the Government’s response to the Work and Pensions Committee’s report into the child maintenance reforms was published.

The Committee had written: “While we support the Government’s emphasis on advice, support and mediation services, we note that mediation can often carry a cost that could be significant for lower income families. We welcome the Minister’s assurance that the Government is considering how mediation can be used more effectively for families, and request an update on progress as part of the Government’s response to this report. We also ask the Government to consider ways in which mediation can be provided in an affordable way to lower-income families. This could include making legal aid available to lower income families seeking mediation in relation to child maintenance, in the same way as for other matters of dispute in family cases.”

The Government responded: “The Government’s proposals will make it easier for parents to access support to enable more low-income families to make their own maintenance arrangements. Mediation is only one approach that we are exploring; it can be very expensive to administer and may not be the most appropriate support for all families. Families require differing support depending on their circumstances, and that is why we are already working with the voluntary and community sector in order to understand what forms of support are most effective in helping parents work collaboratively to establish enduring co-parenting arrangements.

The Government is using a Steering Group of academics and experts from the voluntary and community sector to lead on co-ordinating family support services across the country which are most effective at helping parents to stay involved in the lives of their children.

The Department for Education (DfE) is investing £30 million in relationship support services over the next four years, including their grant funding to voluntary and community sector organisations to support for separating couples. We will be working with the DfE and the devolved administrations in joining up the Government approach. In addition, the Department for Work and Pensions currently spends £5.6 million a year on information and support provided through the Commission by its Child Maintenance Options service. Over 100,000 children are estimated to be benefiting from family-based arrangements following contact between one or both of their parents and the Child Maintenance Options Service.”

On 25 January 2012 Lord De Mauley told the House of Lords:

“The CSA-based system has failed, with the statutory schemes costing around £450 million each year. That could be seen against funding for relationship support for separating parents of £30 million over four years.”

On 1 February 2012 Maria Miller told the House of Commons that a typical CSA case cost £25,000 to £40,000, and that the reforms would save about £200 million:

“That is money we can use to support families directly through organisations such as those I have mentioned, and that is why we have made up-front a very clear commitment to taking £20 million of the money that we will save and directly investing in it in beneficial support for families. That is the right thing to do with the money that we are saving.”

The organisations she had mentioned included the Centre for Separated Families and Families Need Fathers.

On 25 January 2012 the website Conservative Home, founded and run by Tim Montgomerie, a central figure on the British Religious Right, published a piece by Maria Miller, hoping to persuade the House of Lords not to back Lord Mackay’s amendment later that day that fees to the new statutory child maintenance service should be waived for mothers who had tried their best to make “family based arrangements”:

“To support parents to take responsibility and make maintenance agreements themselves, outside of the state run system, there will be a new family support service that has been designed by Relate, Gingerbread, Families Need Fathers and the Centre for Separated Families.  It will be paid for by money we are saving by reducing the scale of the CSA.”

On 25 April 2012, giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, Maria Miller announced:

“I am delighted to report to the Committee that we have made excellent progress in this area with the expert help of a large number of voluntary organisations and third sector organisations. We have had a Steering Group, ably chaired by one of our nonexecutive directors from the Agency, involving a whole host of organisations, including the Centre for Separated Families, Relate and Families Need Fathers, to name but a few; they have taken a great deal of time in developing what they believe is a longterm vision for support services in this sector. They have very much had the ability to come back to us with what they feel is correct and I think that is the right way to go forward. They believe that in the first instance what we need more than anything else is the ability to be able to co-ordinate existing support services better, and that does tally with our experience and the research that we have from within the statutory service, where many families take months-perhaps even up to two years-to get hold of the right support after family breakdowns. Better coordination of that support is a real priority. The group have defined that what would help more than ever is to have a web, helpline, coordinated local facetoface services, and a telephone line as well. I am, again, very pleased to be able to report to the Committee that we will begin to commission those services within the next few weeks.”

In April 2013 Iain Duncan Smith presented to Parliament a report called “Social Justice: transforming lives one year on”.

“We are spending £30 million to 2015 to provide relationship support for couples. The first round of funding, ending in March 2013, delivered: over 48,000 couple counselling sessions; marriage preparation and relationship education for over 6,000 couples; training to over 12,000 practitioners to help them support families experiencing relationship difficulties; and support and information for 12,000 families with disabled children to maintain stronger relationships.”

“In November 2012, we launched the Sorting out Separation web app, offering advice, help and support, as well as a diagnostic tool and signposting for specialist services for separated parents. Our £14 million Innovation Fund for Separating Families tests interventions from intensive face-to-face therapeutic sessions to web-based programmes, aimed at reducing conflict among separated parents, including targeted support for disadvantaged teenage parents. A second round will be launched in summer 2013.”

In a Written Ministerial Statement on 20 May 2013, Steve Webb said: “Our starting point is that children tend to do better when they have a positive relationship with both parents, so we are supporting both parents to play an active and positive role in the life of their child through the Help and Support for Separated Families (HSSF) programme. As part of this, we have launched the Sorting out Separation web app; an HSSF Mark; the HSSF Telephony Network; and an Innovation Fund to test and evaluate new interventions to help separated parents work together.”

Also on 20 May 2013 the Department for Work and Pensions issued a press release claiming: “Thousands have already visited the new government-funded web app Sorting out separation, which is the first ever one-stop shop for separated families. Helping with all the issues thrown up by a break up, it aims to help parents who have decided their only option is to part, minimise the impact of their break up on their children. A network of telephone services offering help with collaboration will also be rolled out later this year.”

As this website shows, both the Sorting Out Separation web app and the HSSF Telephony Network were largely designed by Karen and Nick Woodall, with Karen Woodall training helpline advisers.

On 24 October 2013 the Department for Work and Pensions submitted written evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee:

“2. Help and Support for Separated Families

2.1  The Government asked a Steering Group, comprised of experts from the voluntary and community sector and academia, to advise on how best to coordinate existing support services and consider which new interventions might be effective in helping parents to work together after a separation.

2.2  In April 2012 the Steering Group produced their final recommendations which outlined a delivery architecture which would enable parents to find the support they need, when they need it. In line with their recommendations, the Government is investing in the Sorting out Separation web app, a Telephony Network, the Help and Support for Separated Families Mark and an Innovation Fund.

2.3  The Sorting out Separation web app was launched in November 2012. It is hosted on websites which parents already access and is designed to help them work out what help they need through a diagnostic tool; give them information on both emotional and practical issues such as managing conflict, parenting apart, housing, money and employment; direct them to services and expert organisations which can provide specialist support; and promote the benefits for children of their parents working together.

2.4  The Telephony Network has been formed from existing telephone help lines providing support to separated parents. Agents working on these help lines are currently being given additional training, due to be completed in February 2014. This will enable them to provide additional elements to their conversations, promoting collaboration after a separation and providing consistent signposting to support services.

2.5 The Help and Support for Separated Families Mark was launched in March 2013 to provide confidence to parents that the support services they are accessing will uphold the principle of parental collaboration amongst separated parents. Organisations applying for the Mark are assessed against a set of standards developed by external experts in the field.

2.6  The Innovation Fund aims to identify interventions which help parents work together successfully after a separation. In April 2013, we announced the outcome of the first round, a total of £6.5million funding for seven voluntary and private sector organisations which will provide around 250,000 separated families with creative and targeted help. Projects being funded through this first round of funding range from using behavioural modelling training to help parents resolve conflicts to intensive interventions with teenage parents and their children’s grandparents.

2.7 The second round of funding will allocate up to £3.4 million to successful projects. In this round, the focus will be not just on separating and separated families, but also on projects aimed exclusively at the long-term separated audience (defined as those who have been separated for two years or longer). We expect to announce the successful recipients of this second round of funding towards the end of 2013.”

Karen Woodall and Christine Skinner were in the Expert Steering Group. Karen and Nick Woodall designed the diagnostic tool for the Sorting Out Separation website. Karen and Nick Woodall wrote the training programme for the telephony network. They trained helpline agents until summer 2013, when they fell out with DWP officials about their theories on domestic violence. They developed the Help and Support for Separated Families Mark upholding the principle of parental collaboration.

On 27 November 2013 Steve Webb told the Work and Pensions Committee:

“Let me just clarify what that £20 million is. The money is help and support for separated families, pilot projects, research, telephony networks, websites and all that kind of stuff. Just to give you a feel, because I think you want to talk about this, we have an innovation fund with roughly £10 million of projects. Round 1 is up and running and in the field. Coming back to Sheila’s point, we have projects on, for example, families that have just separated, on teenage lone parents and on particular minority ethnic groups. Coming to your point, Chair, we have some projects that are intensive face-to-face counselling and mediation, and we have some that are 250,000 people on the internet with web chats. We are trying the whole spectrum, and we are benchmarking. Is having two human beings and another person in a room talking to each other for weeks at a time the only way to make those things work, or can you do nearly as good for a millionth of the cost on the internet? We are piloting all this stuff. So we are not saying that it costs £20 million a year to provide help and support for separated families; we are saying that we have this programme designed to look at lots of different ways of supporting people and we will see what works most effectively.”

Sheila Gilmore: “I think you said that some of the support projects, pilot projects, all seem to be quite small scale. They are quite new and have not done very much yet. There is another lot to start, presumably in the early part of next year. Some organisations have suggested that charging should await the evaluation of those projects.”

Steve Webb: “Just to clarify, there is plenty of stuff out there now already. It is not as though we are inventing from day one the idea of help and support for separated families. We have something called the help and support for separated families mark, which is like a kitemark. Organisations that supply that sort of support are signing up to it. We have a web application that gives people the chance to do a whole journey through questions such as, “Are you a Mum? Are you a Dad? Have you got the kids with you?” That helps them to think through their options and is on the internet now. These pilot projects are in a sense trying to do new and different things. They are not as small scale as you suggest. Some of them are niche but the Relate one we are doing at the moment will help more than a quarter of a million families online. So some of them are designed to be at scale. In a sense help and support for separated families will be a journey. There will not be a day when we say, “It is all fine, we’ve got enough.” We will learn what works. But if we wait until someone says, “Yes, there is enough support out there” we will never start.”

Sheila Gilmore: “What are your criteria for evaluating something like the online support? A quarter of a million people may go on to the website and do something with it, but what is your measure of that being successful?”

Steve Webb: “Bear in mind that we have Child Maintenance Options already in place. There is a phone number for people to ring. A trained, skilled person talks them through their options, signposting them to existing services and some of these new ones. They have already helped well over 100,000 families—150,000 from memory—to set up a family-based arrangement. So a family-based arrangement is not something we have just thought of, it is something we already try to help to do, something we do in scale. We want to do it better. We want to do it for more families, hence the pilots. It is there already; we are just expanding it.”

Steve Webb said: “Some of the services are already available online and many people will prefer to do that. I am not promising a sort of nationwide network of face-to-face support for every family that needs it, and I cannot promise that.”

Susan Park, Child Maintenance Group Director, told the Committee: “We have also trained some of the existing caseworkers who answer calls on the helpline to have up front a much more positive discussion—or a discussion—about how to support parents to collaborate. We are doing lots of work with lots of different organisations—for example, training caseworkers and our people—and building our knowledge base. For example, a consortium of those organisations helped us to build the knowledge base that we use in Child Maintenance Options. They also designed and delivered the training that our CMO agents utilise. It is absolutely a two-way process.”

On 4 February 2014 Lord Kirkwood tried to warn Lord Freud:

“It is wrong to start charging in case closure until we know support systems are put in place. The Minister reminded us that there will be £40 million over quite a period of time; a £20 million-period of expenditure will end in 2015, which will set up the help and support for its separated parents pilots. However, let us be careful and think about this, as the pilots will end in 2015, and we heard earlier that this charging process and the case closure will roll out earlier than that. Therefore it is not just a question of the system being there and waiting. It is not safe for the department to rely on the fact that there are a lot of relational support services for separating parents. There are many, and they are very good, but they are designed in the main to deal with newly separated parents who are willing to work together, not people who have been apart for more than 10 years. Therefore the contexts in which those questions are tested and in which the support is offered are totally different. It is not safe to go into this new domain, where the pilots have not been evaluated; I have no confidence in it. I do not mean that the people who are doing it are acting in bad faith; I am sure that they are doing their absolute best and that they are sincere. The resources that were put behind them are inadequate for the task. If we are raising £1.612 billion over 10 years, surely to goodness we can think about spending a little more money to support those families who will find themselves in that new and challenging set of circumstances.”

Giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee on 9 July 2014, Caroline Davey of Gingerbread said:

“In order for the number of effective family-based arrangements to increase, there would need to be more and better support for parents. That is an area where the Department talks a good game on additional support being provided to parents but in practice for those people calling the child maintenance options service there is very little, if anything, in addition that they are being offered. They are just being told, “You can apply to the new service; you can apply to the court; you can make your own arrangement. We think that is probably a good thing.” It is a script-based call centre and they do their best, I’m sure.

For parents who are struggling to make their own arrangements but might get there with a bit of additional support—and James might be able to talk about some of the courses he has run that help parents get to that point—they need quite a serious intervention. That is what is missing from this process. There are some ongoing pilot projects, which will not be evaluated until the end of next year.

For parents, certainly those facing case closure now who have been separated for some time, and even for new parents who are struggling, having a conversation with a call centre operator, however well meaning, is not going to make the difference in their being able to make effective family-based arrangements.

The one thing that is important to remember is that if people do not apply to the new service, either on the basis of charges or their conversation, that does not necessarily mean that they are making a family-based arrangement. We think there is a high risk of drop-out altogether.”

By 2015 it became clearer that only a small proportion of the £30 million pound was spent helping separated parents. A press release from Steve Webb in the Department for Work and Pensions said:

“Around £30 million has been invested in relationship support since 2011 helping 160,000 people to access preventative relationship support and 48,000 couples to participate in relationship counselling.

In addition, 12,000 practitioners have been trained to help families experiencing difficulties.

Earlier this month an extra £2.5 million was announced to continue funding 16 Innovation Fund projects designed to help separated parents work together for the interests of their children.”

So, what happened to this wonderful "integrated model of relationship and family support"?

The clues can actually be found a few years earlier, in Samantha Callan's obsession with relationship support and marriage promotion.

In 2004 Samantha Callan contributed a chapter to "The Family in the New Millennium: World Voices Supporting the Natural Clan", a collection of essays by international figures on the Religious Right published in celebration of the Doha International Conference on the Family, whose purpose was to convince the United Nations to define "the family" as consisting solely of a married man and woman and their children and to exclude any other family structures as unnatural and invalid.  Her chapter was entitled "Marriage in 21st Century Britain and Europe: Setting the Research Agenda".

On 17-18 September 2008 the Conservative MP, Andrew Selous, sponsored a conference about "What Works in Relationship Education?" in the Jubilee Room in the Houses of Parliament.  Andrew Selous is a member of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, which was founded by Tim Montgomerie and David Burrowes in 1990.  The conference was organised by Care for the Family at the request of the Doha Institute for Family Studies.

This conference was pivotal in deciding which organisations would receive government funding for relationship support and education in the event of a Conservative Party victory at the next general election.  

Several influential American academics gave presentations about marriage initiatives in the United States.  Since 1996 US states have had complete discretion over how they spend federal TANF - Temporary Assistance for Needy Family - funds.  Some states, notably Oklahoma, have diverted millions of dollars away from very low income families into marriage promotion initiatives.  Four years later, Maria Miller told the website Conservative Home that "a new family support service... will be paid for by money we are saving by reducing the scale of the CSA".

In fact, £30 million was spent between 2011 and 2012 on "relationship support", but very little of it went towards helping separated parents make "family based arrangements" for child maintenance.  Most of the money was distributed between organisations with close links to CARE and Care for the Family. In this section of the website, I will analyse these links and the benefits accrued to individuals and organisations.

On 15 June 2011 Maria Miller gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, giving the impression that £30 million was being spent on relationship support to help separated parents reach “family based arrangements”:

“I would remind you that, as I said, we are spending £30 million through the Department for Education on helping to provide the sorts of services that our research would suggest might be effective. One of the other issues that we are trying to tackle at the moment is what the most effective services are. There is not a huge evidence base to suggest what the most effective interventions are. There is a lot of thought, supposition and anecdotal evidence, but the Department for Work and Pensions is working with the Department for Education to look at identifying the most effective ways that we can support parents. Probably, again based on the sort of evidence that we have to date, that is going to be in the area of relationship support—something that we are already spending around £30 million a year on. The Options service, we spend about £5 million to £6 million each year. Over the spending review period, that is obviously a significant sum of money. There is funding available and there. What I want to make sure, as I said earlier, is I, as a member of Parliament and a Minister, would much prefer to be seeing more money being spent on support services than simply having a statutory system, a third of which is simply chasing payments, when we know so many people simply do not feel that they even want to be there in the first place. There is an enormous opportunity to switch the focus here.”

On 25 January 2012, after there was almost unanimous support for Lord Mackay’s proposed amendment to scrap the proposal to charge fees for using the replacement statutory child maintenance service (only evangelical Christian Conservative, Baroness Berridge, supported Lord De Mauley in the debate), Lord De Mauley refused to accept the amendment, reiterating that:

“We have greater ambitions. We see a key part of the reforms as expanding the support for parents to collaborate.”

On 7 December 2016 Caroline Nokes MP told the Work and Pensions Committee:

“I think we have to understand the massive breadth of family-based arrangements and things like Sorting Out Separation and the support that we put into relationship support to enable people to establish functioning family-based arrangements. The Government have a total of £70 million over this Parliament to put into supporting and strengthening relationships, and that is not just helping and encouraging people to stay together but that is also for people who are separated, helping them to move on to have a functioning relationship that will support their children post-separation.”