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Home secretary David Blunkett spoke to Community Care's features editor Frances Rickford. He outlined the government's policies on the family, drugs and alcohol addiction and community cohesion.

The challenges facing families today

The problem is not only the economic pressures that families of most income levels are familiar with - the normality of trying to balance working life and family life, of trying to balance the need to have a decent quality and standard of living against that most precious commodity of all which is time. But it’s also the rapidity of social change. It’s what’s happening around us - the pressures that exist, the instant communication, the instant gratification which we’re all subject to increases those pressures very greatly indeed. It’s not just traditional gripes about what kids see on television, and what they aspire to and whether it can be afforded. It’s also the access to the internet, the information and knowledge that’s available without necessarily the back up to understand it. And it’s the pressures that exist in the broader sense of being able to cope with that rapid change and the demands that it makes. I think all of those bring the kind of pressures that have existed in one form or another in families since time began but are now stepped up.

The government’s role

I think it’s the job of government not to try to take away the responsibility from the family but to provide the back up and the support to help people cope. Policies like Sure Start which are working with the baby and the parents from the moment the child is born lay really important foundations for an understanding of how to cope, but above all they aim to engage the wider community to be part of the solution. So the mum or the mum and dad are not on their own because there are people around them that form new types of extended family where the previous family infrastructure has disappeared or is so distant from them that they are no longer available.

With the news that mental ill health among children and young people seems to be increasing significantly, what is your view of the situation facing today’s young people?

The opportunities and the challenges have never been greater for youngsters. But the risk to them has never been greater either. Drugs is a phenomenon which has changed many communities. It has created disfunctionality within the family and disfunctionality within the community - and has certainly hit the constituency that I represent, very hard.

There are two things that have changed since I was a child. One was the emergence of mass unemployment again, and something is being done about that. The other is drugs and I have responsibility now for co-ordinating drugs policy across government with the drugs unit having been pulled together under the home office. We are developing policy with the Dfes and doh firstly develop the information and education programme. Education is the foundation for life and it is absolutely fundamental. The big risk, the drugs and self-abuse side of it, is something we must root in that education process. Not just in terms of achievement which is important for confidence building and self-esteem although that is important because if you’re doing very well you are less likely to turn to something which is harmful to you. But also in terms of an understanding of how drugs destroy the social fabric more widely so I think getting that right is very important. Secondly we’ve not been good at spotting and hearing and perceiving what youngsters are shouting at us. The development of two aspects that I was involved in when I was in the Dfee as it was, one is the children’s fund where the investment needs to be carefully targeted, but it also needs to be flexible enough at local level to really do a job of work. Otherwise it will just become another professionalised route for social work which is good in itself, but isn’t what it was intended to do. And the second is the Connexions programme for teenagers, because if we could pull together as they are doing in the pilot programmes the various services, we can really look at what the mental health needs of this group are - what are the pressures that are leading to emotional disturbance and poor behaviour. Hopefully we can then link that to the 3,000 mentors now employed in inner city schools through the 'excellence in cities', and how can they do their job better by linking with the school nurse for example or with the programmes we are developing through the youth justice programme for those who have rubbed up against the criminal justice system, to intervene and stop them becoming adult offenders. Because if we can get in at that stage there is a chance we can turn things around and prevention has got to be a lot better than cure.

What about a strategy on alcohol abuse?

We’ve got agreement with the doh that we need to move rapidly to putting together a programme on alcohol and related abuse alongside the developing strategy on drugs. We’ve decided to take a look at the 10-year drugs strategy in the light of the evidence that has emerged over the last two years, the rethink the way we want to link harm minimisation with education, reshaping the targeted areas to focus heavily on category A drugs without losing sight of the overall messages we need to get across. We need to reinforce those both through the application of law, because if kids can pick it up easily and that’s true of alcohol in off licenses or going to the pub then we’ve got to deal with that. And though government needs to accept its responsibility for getting the framework right, and the investment, and the messages and policy right, there is a responsibility all the way down the line, through parents themselves through what we do in schools, to the way in which industries perform. One of the biggest challenges that has hit parents with teenagers is alcopops where the industry has not only made it easier to get hold of alcohol, but very much more attractive and less painful. There are real pressures and come-ons now that didn’t exist before, reinforced by the image of life that people see on telly including satellite broadcasting which opens up things that weren’t available before. So there are pressures there. I think we’re only at the beginning of this process. We are seeing - and this is being reflected in the home affairs select committee deliberations on drugs - the beginning of a holistic approach to these issues. But we are a long, long way off getting it right. It’s about changing what is seen as acceptable behaviour. This is not just about self esteem and confidence because I appreciate there are quite a lot of high achievers who like to play with these things and experiment. I think that ‘s why the question of harm and understanding about self harm is very important. It’s why the inclusion of health in personal and social education was very important, and also the development of citizenship education so that people could see their role in society and what substance abuse does to themselves and others. We’ll never ever eliminate these things because we all do daft things at different times of our lives and we all make mistakes. But it's trying to put it in the context firstly of dissuasion and secondly of early intervention because if we spot that something’s going wrong we can get in very quickly as parents as teachers as health workers or youth workers in the Connexions service. People can spot it and do something that redeems the position, that stops them being dragged in. In drugs for instance, young people’s involvement with criminality - robbery petty burglary, things of that sort - is often linked into the fact that they’ve been hooked into having to get the cash to buy the product And often they get into pyramid selling because they start to sell on the drugs to other people in order to pay for their own habit. So we’ve got a really big challenge to break that cycle and therefore break the demand because that in the end will be the effective bit. We can disrupt the supply, and custom and excise are capturing more crack and heroin than ever before - twice as much as last year. But it doesn’t affect the supply on the streets because while the demand is there they will find a route.

Community diversity and family policy - how do they fit together?

You can have diversity with stability. You can have the integration of people of different backgrounds, religions, persuasions, family structures and still have stability.

The development of our active communities unit and the reach out which will come from establishing a unit in the department to concentrate on social cohesion are important. And we can shape our family support grant system to link up with what is going on in other parts of government and other agencies. Because we only have small money on these programmes. Other people have quite big sums that they don’t always think are relevant to these areas. So if we can join up a bit more using our grants as a facilitator for best practice, for development of ideas, including what’s working across the country we can get others to see that their bigger budgets are relevant to this then we can make a difference. And in the end it is the individuals and families who make up all sorts of communities. Because community today is not quite the geographic entity that it was. It is made of interest groups - people make connections at work, or because of a particular interest about their kids, or because of a social outlet that they go to - but they are still communities of interest and if we can reinforce those, support them, see that as part of the job of government, then we’ll get somewhere. We declared last December that social cohesion was a government policy area, and it had never been so before. We have a role but not the primary role. It is a supportive, enabling role because the primary role must come from leadership within the neighbourhood or interest group itself. We can reinforce that, we can support training for people in all sorts of ways, we can reinforce as we are doing with community champions through the Dfes. We can develop community leadership programme schemes, we can develop the neighbourhood renewal programmes that have been working and beginning to give confidence to turning round communities. But in the end it will be people in those communities that make the difference. Not what we do.

Will family support be a priority in the forthcoming spending review?

The discussion about prioritisation in the spending review is a very interesting one. What we’d like to do and I think what the Chancellor would like to do is to see that instead of pigeon holing particular spending areas and particular programmes, we ask the question what are we trying to achieve, what are we trying to do, and join those up between departments as well, I have to say, as within departments because that’s not always the case. I am slightly tentative about anything that creates new bureaucratic structures as an endeavour to do that. We have agencies that have to be regulated, we have strategies that have to be supported, we have structured that have to be staffed by people who should be doing a job of work instead of meeting each other in meetings. There are so many meetings taking place locally and nationally that it’s a wonder that people have time to turn up at work at all. So we’ve really desperately got to avoid the development of the great strategy rather than the funding, resourcing and backing of action on the ground and I’m a real advocate of this. I think there’s a danger that at the centre, where you’re detached from that delivery process you think that a strategy is the delivery. And it isn’t.

There are concerns that the government’s preventive programmes like Sure Start are triggering a big increase in referrals of families in crisis to social services which they cannot meet, because they don’t have the resources.

Well there’s some truth in the suggestion that the government’s endeavour to do the right thing actually does lead to the opening of a Pandora’s box, not just in terms of aspirations about what might be done but also in revelation about what is not being done. So we are looking through a window and discovering what we knew. We perceived that if we didn’t first of all appraise and secondly do something about the problems that people face we would then pick them up later on in life in other forms of spending. Whether it was major health and recovery programmes, whether it was the criminal justice system, whatever. How to switch the resources from remedial action when it's too late to prevent and early investment to get in at the ground floor, at the root, is a 24 million pound question. I just feel that we are only exploring this at the moment. And we are calling on other services that are already overstretched saying to them is there any space for you to help now to prevent you doing with other families and other cases later in life what you’re having to do at the moment because we didn’t have a Sure Start programme, and we didn’t look at the moment the child was born when the parenting skills were most needed. Now that’s a full circle if you like and I think we’ve really got to think that through as to how much can we do to meet that need. Partly social services should pull out the strengths of the community as well as the weakness. I accept entirely that it is revealing crises in families and desperation, a cry for help. And the minute you say you are there to help people rightly expect you to. They want something more than they’d expected before. The expectation and aspiration within different communities has actually been very low. They’ve not expected a lot of other people. Now they are beginning to realise that they should, and we’ve got to be able to do that. But we’ve also got to be able to say within such communities are great strengths, there are survival skills that are amazing. We need to be able to work with them rather than think that a traditional pattern of casework crisis intervention is the only way of doing it. Because otherwise I think everyone will be swamped and what happens then is a return to lethargy and despair where we all think there’s nothing can be done.

Where there is despair there also has to be real hope of change.

We know that families are changing rapidly, that many children now live in different sorts of families at different times during their childhood and that more than one in four live in a lone parent family. Is there a link between family change and the problems we’ve been discussing, and is it the government’s job to try to influence how people behave in respect of their family lives?

I think there is a relationship between family change and things like mental ill health and drug use. I am judgmental about myself as well as other people in the sense that if I do something that is amiss then I’m responsible for that. But I would expect, as I would in my own family, that we as a society would be able to support and work to be able to help with that. I see the job of government as firstly trying to reinforce what people want for themselves. They want a better life, they want stability, they want to be able to function well. So we should help with that. So helping one-parent families into work has been a positive exercise, not a threat. 122,000 people getting a job has got to be a good thing for their own independence, dignity, self reliance. The ability to support families through universal nursery education, which I’m very proud of and it gets no publicity at all. Yet 10 years ago no-one would have believed it was possible. The transformation in terms of being able to provide working families tax credit, which the chancellor has brought in and which makes work worthwhile and enables families to cope better. Overcoming basic child poverty which is a clear goal of the government. These are major contributions by government. In the end however people will live their own lives, and all we can do is ensure that the social as well as the economic policies we follow reinforce the ability to function well, and create some stability. What we can’t do is determine who lives with whom, what their relationships are and how they manage it because that’s down to all of us as individuals. I’ve never preached and I’m not preaching a back to basics. I’m only talking about reinforcing what we all want for ourselves rather than seeing that disintegration accelerated by what we do.

Parents need a lot more support. We’ve got Parentline, and we’re looking at broader policies that reinforce what works. Our family support grants for next year will be put out at the end of this month. Since the general election we haven’t had the time to bring about radical changes so there won’t be a radical shift but the ability to try to relate to what is required. Work with young fathers is a way of responding to new needs. To reach out to people who have not been in the spotlight before - people have not worked with them. I want to change the nature of support for parents so it doesn’t just focus on parenting orders when something goes drastically wrong but on a similar but tailored schemes for parents full stop. We do it in colleges but we want also to make it available when we all need it.

God forbid we should have a strategy for families. Save us all from Blunkett’s diktats on what we should do - I’m not interested in that. I’ve learned quite a lot over the last decade about what we shouldn’t do as well as what we should. But there is a hell of a lot more we could do to see that what we do in one area is instrumental in helping in another. I’ll leave it to Mary (MacLeod – chief executive of the National Family and Parenting Institute) to institute the broader intellectual thrust.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I haven’t mentioned the word partnerships during the interview, not because I don’t believe in it but because it’s so overworked at the moment.