Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection

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Sunday Times (London), Sept. 27, 1998

Blair launches personal carers to save family

by Stephen Bevan and Michael Prescott


TONY BLAIR is to signal sweeping changes to family
policy in his speech to the Labour party conference this
week. The government is considering proposals to appoint
secular "vicars", paid for by the state, to give pastoral care
to families.

Ministers said yesterday that because the traditional
churches no longer performed the role of keeping the
family together, the state would do so by providing an
alternative system of care.

Government sources disclosed that the initiative would
appear in a green paper next month. It will propose that
registrars of births, deaths and marriages should become
"secular vicars", offering pastoral advice and urging parents
who do not attend church to put their children through a
"civil naming ceremony".

Registrars will also find their job description changed so
that they act as "community linkmen". This will mean
putting couples in touch with marriage guidance services
and offering parents a telephone helpline.

A state-approved network of "mentors" will be established
under which adults who can act as good role models will
be asked to spend time with adolescents on slum estates.
Ministers are impressed with a London scheme where
black entrepreneurs have been visiting jobless black
youngsters.

A government source said the scheme was a "rap across
the knuckles" for the churches. "They are seen as too
preachy. Parents and newlyweds don't want that, but they
do want help. They need to feed off the type of community
links that churchgoing provides."

In a draft of his keynote party conference speech obtained
by The Sunday Times, Blair pledges to use the
government's power to strengthen the family. "A family -
mother and father bringing up children - is important,"
Blair's draft speech says, "a sense of responsibility; a belief
that if you father a child, it's got something to do with you."

Blair warns against the type of reactionary moral campaign
that the last government launched with its "back-to-basics"
initiative: "The sexual revolution won't be replaced by a
new Victorian era. Women won't give up the chance for a
career as well as children. Gay people aren't going to go
back to the days when everybody knew about it but
nobody admitted it, and we called it morality."

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