More than one million children growing up without a father

According to the Centre for Social Justice report, to be published this week, lone parent families are growing by more than 20,000 a year and will reach two million by the next general election.

The report says that absent fathers are linked to higher rates of teenage pregnancy, crime and disadvantage.

The centre’s director Christian Guy warns of a ‘tsunami’ of family breakdown and said that the response from politicians on the Left and Right has been ‘feeble’.

He also criticises the Government’s troubled families scheme for failing to identify the families that need the most support. The report estimates that the cost of family breakdown is £46 billion a year and is rising.

Mr Guy said, ‘For children growing up in some of the poorest parts of the country men are rarely encountered in the home or in the classroom. This is an ignored form of social deprivation that can have profoundly damaging consequences on social and mental development.’

‘There are "men deserts" in many parts of our towns and cities and we urgently need to wake up to what is going wrong.’

One in four primary school teachers in England and Wales has no male teacher, the CSJ says.

The report includes league tables to show the areas with the highest number of lone parent families – although this does not mean that children have no contact at all with their father.

According to the report, Liverpool has eight out of the country’s top 20 areas with the highest levels of fatherless households. In one area of the Riverside ward in Liverpool there is no father in 65 per cent of households with dependent children.

The CSJ condemns the Government for failing to stem the rise in family breakdown, which it says is more to do with the rise in cohabiting couples and their high break-up rate, than an increase in the divorce rate.

It claims that cohabiting parents are three times more likely to separate by the time a child is five than married couples.

It calls for steps such as transferable tax allowances for married couples to encourage more couples to marry.

The report says that marriage is not a ‘right-wing obsession but a social justice issue: people throughout society want to marry but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspiration.’

But the charity Gingerbread said that the number of single parent families had remained stable and that the report painted ‘a melodramatic picture’.

Although the charity shared some of the report’s concerns it said that the biggest risk to children was the rise in child poverty.

Gingerbread chief executive Fiona Weir said, ‘The facts are that single parent families make up 1 in 4 households with children – a proportion that has barely changed in over a decade – and the vast majority of children in single parent households grow up perfectly well.’

She added, ‘Digging behind the headlines, the data shows that only 0.7 per cent of areas have more than 50 per cent of households headed by a single parent – hardly a "tsunami of family breakdown".

‘Although two-thirds of children have regular contact with both parents after separation, we share the concern that too many children don’t get either the emotional or financial support they deserve from the parent they’re not living with, and would like to see Government take more steps to encourage both parents to maintain responsibility after separation.

‘The biggest risk facing children growing up today is poverty, which costs us £29 billion each year, yet the IFS forecasts child poverty will rise significantly over the next decade. The Government’s priority must be in tackling child poverty and ensuring that all children grow up with the financial means necessary to have the best chance in life.’