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Since 1979, the Conservative governments in Britain have developed an interest in the issue of family responsibility, notably as it impinges on the scope of state responsibility and in particular on the amount of expenditure involved. A rhetoric of family behaviour has been developed in which certain themes, such as individual responsibility and the undesirability of dependence on the state, have become central to the aim of restoring or revitalizing family responsibility. A major preoccupation has been the area of parental responsibility. The Conservative interest bears the mark of a lobby known variously as neo-traditionalist, moral, and ‘family values’. This lobby is internally heterogeneous, but shares a concern with the decline of the marriage-based family. A central preoccupation is the problem for government and society of the rise in lone-parent families, especially where mother-headed. For this group, the …