We have partnered with Marriage Care, oneplusone, and Tavistock Relationships to form The Relationships Alliance - a coalition dedicated to developing strong and stable couple and family and social relationships.
Our vision
Our vision is a future in which strong and stable personal and social relationships are seen as the basis of a thriving society.
Our mission
The Alliance’s mission is to develop and support strong and stable personal and social relationships by:
- Championing the importance of relationships so that they are valued in all aspects of public policy and across national and local government.
- Helping the media, politicians, policy makers and public service providers to understand how relationship matter.
- Generating and disseminating high quality information, insight and research on the importance and impact of supporting relationships.
- Growing the market place for relationship support so that more relationships are supported in more ways.
- Developing the capacity of the local relationship support sector so that they are able to adapt to rapidly changing public policy.
Our policy priorities
Good quality couple, family and social relationships need to be placed centre stage in Government policy and the Alliance recommends:
- Government should bring forward a new and comprehensive cross-government couple, family and social relationships strategy. This strategy should be supported by a Cabinet-level Minister for Families and Relationships and a dedicated Whitehall Department. New central government policies should be subject to a ‘relationships test’ as part of this strategy to assess their potential impact on relationships.
- Government should require local authorities to publish a dedicated relationships strategy so that couple, family and social relationships become established as a core responsibility of local government.
- The strategy should cover both the provision of information and services, as well as improvements in signposting so that individuals, couples and families can access relationship support when they need it.
- Directors of Public Health should be required to measure the quality of couple, family and social relationships to inform policy and commissioning by local authorities and clinical commissioning groups.
- Services designed to help people at life transition points such as getting married, becoming a parent, becoming a carer, retiring or being bereaved should include a focus on couple, family and social relationships, their impact on wellbeing, how to maintain relationship quality and how to manage conflict.