Maria Miller “personally invited” a number of people onto an “expert” steering group” to design a new system of support to help separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child support.
Christine Skinner claimed to be the “sole academic”.
Matt Buttery.
Charlie Pickles - Centre for Social Justice, Unherd, Eric Pickles’ daughter? (It would follow in a tradition of their children working at the CSJ.)
Token feminists from Mumsnet and Gingerbread.
Evident aggravation between Karen and Nick Woodall and the representatives of mothers.
In April 2011 Civil Service World reported that: “[Philippa Stroud] has been joined in the DWP by the CSJ’s former policy director Charlotte Pickles, who has been seconded to the department as an expert adviser.”
In March 2010 the Centre for Social Justice’s Green Paper on the Family, authored by Charlotte Pickles, who popped up a year later in the Expert Steering Group for child maintenance reform, claimed that:
“Women and children are significantly more vulnerable to violence and neglect in co-habiting rather than married families; family breakdown dramatically increases the risk of domestic violence.”
It’s somewhat alarming that policy makers believe that staying married to an abusive husband is the best way to avoid domestic violence. It is well known that domestic violence frequently escalates around the point of separation and afterwards, in retaliation to women’s escape. But most people - the Centre for Social Justice, fundamentalist religious types and men’s rights activists excepted - would not advise domestic violence victims to remain with their abusers in order to avoid worse abuse. This is a perennial obsession of Harry Benson, as well.
“I regret that I ever wasted a moment of my time on the Steering Groups for the DWP and DfE.”