Earlier this year, Schools Minister, Jim Knight, issued some very interesting figures in response to a question from the Liberal democrats. He said that children living with both parents improve their GCSE performances almost twice as fast as children living only with their mothers.

Statistics show that children living in two-parent homes gained five good GCSEs and the numbers had increased from 49% in 1997 to 60% tin 2003. Children in single-mother homes  only had a 43% success rate. This makes Labour’s benefits system look a real mess; it penalises parents who are responsible and stay together. For instance, a couple on low or middle incomes would be between £69 and £100 better off if they lived apart.

These figures show how vital is the presence of a father in the home and how necessary it is for the government to encourage this to happen. The gulf between exam results of children in two-parent and single-parent homes is getting wider.

Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said:

“This is more evidence to show that children’s educational progress is affected by their home environment, and a home headed by two parents is more likely to provide the stability and support children need throughout their education. This means the Government should give every encouragement for parents to stay together and bring up children together. The problem with too much of our tax credit and welfare system is that it encourages the formation of separate households.”

A negative spin-off of this disastrous Labour policy, and one which is hardly ever mentioned by anybody, is that it contributes to the housing shortage. When parents split up, instead of living together in one house they then need at least two and, if there are older children involved, such as those well into their teens, they sometimes take the opportunity to escape from what they see as an unhappy home, and also seek places of their own. I know of one family who ended up living in four different places. All this when we are short of housing. Politicians these days seem more intent on lining their own pockets with various dodgy scams, some of them illegal, than they are in catering for the needs of the electorate