Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether it remains his policy to double relationship support funding to £70 million during the course of the current Parliament.

The government is committed to supporting vulnerable children and families. Parental conflict can have a damaging effect on children, by significantly increasing their risk of poor social, emotional and educational outcomes. In the light of the strength of the damaging impact of parental conflict on children, we will soon be launching a new programme to embed proven parental conflict provision in local areas. As announced in Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families, the programme will have a strong emphasis on children in workless families as they face triple the risk of experiencing parental conflict compared with those where parents are in work. We will work with the Troubled Families programme to support local areas to improve the effectiveness of their family services to address this issue, drawing on the lessons from our Local Family Offer trial.

£17.5m was spent on relationship support services between April 2015 and March 2017. In April 2017 a further £30m was made available for the period April 2017- March 2020 for the new programme to reduce parental conflict. Precise expenditure from this allocation depends on the quality of proposals received by DWP from suppliers.