Parents of truanting children could have benefit stopped, says Michael Gove

Parents who fail to ensure their children attend school regularly could have their child benefit payments stopped, cabinet minister Michael Gove has suggested.

The levelling up secretary said the radical benefits idea was originally considered by the coalition government under David Cameron but was blocked by the Liberal Democrats.

Speaking at the Onward think tank, Mr Gove suggested that it could now be re-considered as part of a drive to restore “an ethic of responsibility”.

He said: “We need to, particularly after Covid, get back to an absolute rigorous focus on school attendance, on supporting children to be in school. It is often the case that it is truanting or persistent absenteeism that leads to involvement in anti-social behaviour.”

“So, one of the ideas that we floated in the coalition years, which the Liberal Democrats rejected, is the idea that if children are persistently absent then child benefit should be stopped.”

His comments, during a Q&A session, followed a wide-ranging speech on the future of Conservatism in which he stressed the need to rebuild a sense of community and the “pirate society”.

In an attack on so-called “woke culture”, Mr Gove warned that an “increasingly powerful and destructive force” of radical social activism and identity politics was undermining support for traditional values.

“The desire to impute guilt and the demand, in particular through cries for decolonisation, that the current success of free societies like ours should be seen as solely built on expropriation and exploitation is intended to delegitimise our shared values,” he said.

“If the United Kingdom is seen as a pirate society then our pride in our democratic traditions can be depicted as misplaced. Our national solidarity, the wealth we owe to free markets and the openness to inquiry we owe to free speech, can be seen as counterfeit.”

In a reference to the controversy over trans rights and self-ID, Mr Gove said there was a clear need for “objective scientific truth” in human biology.

“Emotion can’t change your chromosomes. No cause is so noble that you can manufacture the evidence. The authority of reason and the integrity of truth must be upheld.”

He said that trust and confidence in many of the country’s most important institutions – attacking museums and theatres “ambivalent about our national culture” and charities which “seem susceptible to sectional political campaigning”.

Mr Gove also criticised Britain’s “butler economy” – saying one based on attracting international capital through “no-questions-asked property transactions and a bias towards rentiers can never be truly resilient”.