Jonathan Bellamy spoke with The Centre for Social Justice to find out

Jonathan: What about the question of intrusion. I mean, occasionally it comes up. You know, is the government too intrusive into family. What's your opinion on that?

Charlotte: I would say that government currently is about as intrusive as it's ever been, both on the good and the bad side of that. You know we've got some excellent programmes around supporting parents and developing parenting skills. On the other side of that, actually, you know all this talk for example of giving cohabiting couples the same legal rights as married couples; I mean we would view that as incredibly intrusive. If a couple have decided not to make that legal transition, why would we want to impose the same legal issues around them as a married couple. So actually what we say is, no let's just make sure that public policy supports what's in the best interest of children, adults and British society in general. Let's not be intrusive in a way that doesn't support those things, but let's recognise that actually if we want a stable society we have to have stable families.

Jonathan: What about the role of faith then and church; because church groups across the nation provide a lot of support through nursery groups, marriage courses; those kind of things. Where do you think government could improve in its work with groups such as the church?

Charlotte: We've actually done a lot of work around the role of the voluntary sector and how important community groups are and in actually having the sort of solutions to a lot of these challenges, around social breakdown. One of the things that we noticed in the work we did for one of our original reports, for Breakthrough Britain; was actually often the faith sector is almost discriminated against in delivering these sorts of community projects. We want to see an equal playing field. We believe that actually if any organisation, be it faith or not, is providing a transformative service and is actually engaging some of our most deprived vulnerable disadvantage groups and making their lives better; then actually we want to see them properly funded over a decent period of time, with less prescription and on an equal footing. So we would very very much support the work that say communities are doing and we would want to see that supported much better by government.

Jonathan: Now we're looking at an election year. How strong or strategic are the opinions and thoughts of the Centre for Social Justice in influencing Conservative policy, coming into the election, on these issues of the family?

Charlotte: We have obviously had a very good media coverage over the past week or so on the family issues. We work with anybody who wants to see these sorts of policies put in place. We're thrilled that the Conservative party have come down on the side of supporting marriage, of supporting families; of going towards a family focused policy rather than a child focused policy and are supporting the couple relationship. We will continue to support whichever party wants to go towards or go in that direction and make sure that policy does those things. So, you know we are going to carry on doing exactly what we do. We're going to carry on coming up with innovative ways of tackling poverty and social breakdown. At the heart of that will be our policies around family.

Jonathan: And if you'd like to read more about that you can go to The Centre for Social Justice website.