It looks like the good times have come to an end. Families who up until now have not been worried about their finances are suddenly finding themselves concerned about paying the bills.
A third of people (29 per cent) in Britain in a survey we have just carried out with YouGov say that their family is rowing over money and a slightly larger percentage (35 per cent) say money worries are giving them sleepless nights.
The Family and Parenting Institute asked YouGov to question more than 5,309 parents of under-sixteens about the money they spend and how worried they were about the future. We asked about fears for redundancy, but also about their overall debt and the bills they were having most difficulty paying. The average household income of families in our survey was just over £43,000.
In some ways it does not make very surprising reading. The costs people are most worried about are heating the home (47 per cent), following by mortgage or rent payments (36 per cent) and then food costs (31 per cent).
Some 27 per cent of families think their income will not be enough to pay the bills in six months time and are cutting back, mainly on Christmas (74 per cent), but also on going out and socialising, clothes and shoes, holidays and days out with the children.
And British families are also in debt to the tune of an average £8,400 after mortgages and student loans. Some one in ten said they expected the main wage earner to be made redundant within the next six months.
Digging down into the detail though and despite all the middle-class worries endlessly rehearsed in the media it is the poorest who are struggling the most and have the least ability to stay the course.
It is not those with mortgages who are most worried about keeping up with payments for instance, but tenants. Parents who rented their main property from either from a private landlord or the Local Authority were asked how easy or difficult they found it to meet rental payments. Tenants said they struggled more than those with a mortgage and tenants were twice as likely to find it a constant struggle or report that they were falling behind, compared with those making mortgage payments.
Although all families are concerned about cash, it is those from lower socio-economic groups who were least likely in the past (25 per cent compared to 36 per cent from higher groups) to have put money aside and who were less likely to do so in the present too – therefore being those least able to cope with a downturn in the economy or losing their jobs.
Are there lessons about this for policy-makers and the government? As Alan Hayes, the director of the Australian Institute for Family Studies reminded us at our conference last week, it was the urban and rural poor who suffered most and for the longest in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The middle classes drew in their horns and there is ample evidence in our survey that this is happening already: parents told us they were embracing thrift, buying second-hand clothes, going on family walks: all in its way a very good thing. Although they may lose status, history tells us the middle classes save and often survive a recession well, with their children focused on education and secure careers.
It is the poorest who risk being left even further behind and suffer most from hardship which leads to more conflict in families. This means that policy makers need to think about these families: those who rely on tax credits and benefits who live in poor overcrowded neighbourhoods with underperforming schools.
We know that low income and mental health problems are associated and that the more debts people have the more likely they are to have a mental disorder. We know that relationship difficulties and the behaviours of despair are linked with poverty and disadvantage.
The Government is acting rightly by saying it will target money on those least able to survive. Recession means that it is even more essential that ending child poverty by 2020 actually happens. These less well-off families need tax breaks but also jobs and benefits that keep them out of poverty, access to good schools, affordable childcare, to free school meals and funding to ensure that their children are not missing out on school trips and after-school clubs which more younger, lower income families reported they were doing in our survey.
We should not be too distracted by the plight of bankers, and remember that in economically hard times it is always the poorest families and most excluded that suffer most and longest and it is these people that the government must continue to support and make sure that they are always included in wider society.