Delivering a Government Office for Family Policy

The new Government Office for Family Policy would be led by a Minister with a place in Cabinet to ensure they are able to affect cross-governmental delivery, this responsibility would be affixed to another departmental brief in the same way the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is also the lead minister for the Government Equalities Office. [...] 12 per cent of oppose it.15 Why do we need a Government Office for Family Policy? The argument for government wide leadership on family is based both on the nature of family as an issue that needs a high level of co-ordination and the seriousness of the issue to most areas of government policy making. [...] In 2018 the GEO employed 110 staff22 and had a departmental budget of £15.1 million (comprising £9.8m for programme delivery and £5.3m for administration).23 Government Office for Veterans’ Affairs: In the 2019 Spending Review the Government announced the creation of a new Office for Veterans’ Affairs with £5 million of funding to co-ordinate policy and delivery of programmes. [...] Based in the ‘home’ department of the Minister We would recommend that a Government Office for Family Policy is based in the home department of the Minister to help incubate this new function. [...] The expenditure for these three years would be £383.4m.27 However, continuing with the current rate of decline over the next three years (based on the 12% decrease) the expenditure would be £298.3m.28 Therefore, maintaining the current expenditure for the next three years would yield £85.1m29 more than following the expected decline in expenditure (a result of the diminishing population of MCA cla.