In 2011 the Centre for Separated Families was a tiny, failing charity in York, run by a married couple of fathers’ rights fanatics, Karen and Nick Woodall.
Yet Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Loughton paid the couple £487,130 of taxpayers’ money while the charity was under the supervision of an insolvency practitioner because it owed £164,000 to HM Revenue and Customs.
Karen and Nick Woodall set up a series of companies with similar names in order to divert the company payments. The pair stopped paying towards their Company Voluntary Arrangement when they failed to win further government funding, and the Centre for Separated Families was dissolved in December 2016 owing £178,000 to HMRC.
Karen and Nick Woodall were protégés of Samantha Callan at the Centre for Social Justice from 2006 to 2014. Together with old colleague, Christine Skinner from York University, they inspired, steered and profited from Iain Duncan Smith and Maria Miller’s child maintenance reforms.
The early years
The Centre for Separated Families began in 1973 as a small charity in York called One Parent Families. In 1990 a single mother and radical feminist called Karen Richardson joined the charity as a development worker. She had become a radical feminist after leaving home at sixteen and being taken under the wing of older feminists in their twenties. She would later characterise these feminists as predatory extremists who indoctrinated her with toxic ideology.
In 1996 Karen Richardson and Vice Chair of Trustees, Christine Skinner, a PhD student at York University, successfully fundraised £120,000 from the National Lottery Charities Board to buy a large building, 21 Priory Street in the historic Micklegate quarter of York, and equip it as a resource centre for single parents. Karen Richardson was promoted to general manager.
Around 1999 a divorced father of two young children, Nick Woodall, joined One Parent Families as a volunteer, running groups for separated, divorced and lone fathers. Karen Richardson and Nick Woodall fell in love. They both bitterly resented Nick Woodall’s ex-wife:
“Then I met Nick and discovered the other side to family separation, a side in which his life was controlled by the whims of his children’s mother who remarried and became better off financially whilst still taking child support from him, even though he was caring for his children for half of the week.”
The feminist scales fell from Karen’s eyes.
“Those of you who know my background will be aware that I consider myself to be a recovering feminist. I lived my life from early teens to recent years within the construct known as patriarchy, a construct which I was surprised to discover, one rainy night when driving across the pennines, was a figment of my own imagination. The dismantling of this construct, (which took all of about two seconds), was triggered by the nastiness of one Julie Bindel who, speaking on Radio 4, told the world that she wanted the right to marry her lesbian partner, so that she could destroy the institution of marriage. She went on to describe men and boys as inherently violent and spoke of them as dangerous human beings who must be firmly constrained and preferably disadvantaged in order to rectify the advantage conferred on them by birth. I recognised the tone of voice, the indignation, the self righteousness as being that which had driven me for so many years and at the same time I found myself comparing what she was saying with the men in my life and the boys, particularly the boys. That night I felt as if I had suddenly developed 20/20 vision after years of being blind in one eye.”
The couple married in 2006.
In 2007 the Frank Buttle Trust published a large report, “Living with hardship 24/7: The diverse experiences of families in poverty”. The report’s advisory group included Karen Woodall, by now Chief Executive of the Centre for Separated Families, and Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, Christine Skinner’s colleague at York University and co-author with Christine Skinner of the 1999 book “Absent Fathers?”, which argues that most separated and divorced fathers are prevented from playing a meaningful part in their children’s lives by discriminatory structures and attitudes that favour mothers.
But in an interview with the Yorkshire Post in October 2007, the couple boasted that they continued to run two separate homes for the sake of their respective children’s stability:
“This is no ordinary couple.
The pair decided to live separately for the sake of their children from previous relationships. Karen has been living at her house in York with her daughter, Hannah, and Nick in Richmond at the home he shares three days a week with his two children.
They truly believe in putting their children first. They are only now getting a flat together because Hannah is away at university and Nick's children, at 17 and 15, are old enough to understand. But even then he will return to the house he shares with them for three days.
"We know what we have done is quite extreme and it's not for everyone, but we felt that it was important to make our children feel secure and relaxed," says Karen.
"We decided when we started our relationship, rather than drag our children hither and thither, we would do the moving around."“
For two decades, a consuming obsession of Karen and Nick Woodall has been that child benefit is paid to mothers, not fathers, and acts as a kind of “passport” to other welfare benefits and social housing. The couple have long argued that this leaves separated and divorced fathers on low incomes with real difficulties in caring for their children. Nick Woodall had “shared care” of his two children with his former wife: it appears that she had the children for four days a week, and he had them for three days a week. This meant that he was obliged to pay her child support, that she received child benefit, and that his role as a father was invisible and unacknowledged in terms of welfare and housing entitlements. She had remarried and become better off than him, which enraged him and his new bride.
The extra cost of running two homes appears to have been met by paying themselves generous salaries, which were stated to be “no more than £50,000” in accounts submitted to Companies House. Throughout the years, the couple displayed a sense of ownership and entitlement to the charity’s income, as if it were their own privately owned company.
They got involved with Sir David Henshaw’s 2006 report into reforming the Child Support Agency, “Recovering child support: routes to responsibility”. It seems likely that they had a route in via their ongoing friendship with Christine Skinner, a child support policy expert at York University and former Vice Chair of Trustees of the Centre for Separated Families.
In 2007 Christine Skinner was one of two academic advisers to the Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into Child Support Reform, chaired by Frank Field. Again, she was likely to have been a key contact for the couple.
In summer 2007 One Parent Families changed its name to Centre for Separated Families and then to The Centre for Separated Families. Meanwhile, another shelf company set up by a local property solicitor and fellow trustee, Philip Lewis Ogden, changed its name to Centre for Separated Families UK and then to The Centre for Separated Families UK. Company documents allowed for funds to be transferred between the two.
The Centre for Separated Families sold 21 Priory Street for half the market price to a buyer who raised the mortgage through Philip Lewis Ogden. At the end of that financial year, the charity was still unable to pay its debts to HMRC. See Centre for Separated Families UK for a full explanation of this.
Both Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families and Penny Mansfield of One Plus One gave presentations about their services at a conference called “What works in Relationship Education? Lessons from academics and service deliverers in the US and Europe”, held over two days on 17-18 September 2008. The conference was “organised by Care for the Family at the request of the Doha Institute for Family Studies and Development”, “held in the Jubilee Room in Westminster”, “chaired by Samantha Callan”, and “sponsored by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sustainable Relationships”, whose chairman, Andrew Selous MP, showed the overseas visitors around the Houses of Parliament on the second day. Andrew Selous is a key member of the British Religious Right within Parliament.
Harry Benson, Deputy Chair of the Centre for Social Justice’s Family Breakdown Working Group, also gave a presentation about relationship education for new mothers.
One Plus one, the Centre for Separated Families and Harry Benson (via Care for the Family) all received funding under the category of “families and relationships” in the Department for Education Voluntary and Community Sector grant announced by Education Minister Tim Loughton on 25 February 2011.
This shows that plans to apportion funding for relationship support had already been laid in 2008, underlining the mendacity of the claim, in Iain Duncan Smith’s Green Paper, that “Central to our approach to reform is an integrated model of relationship and family support services, which helps parents make their own, lasting arrangements”. There was never any intention to put substantial resources into helping separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance: it was simply a ruse to leverage £30 million out of the Department for Education for Samantha Callan’s friends.
In October 2008, following the passage of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act, the Child Support Agency was handed over to a new crown non-departmental body, the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission. From the start of the CSA in 1993, any mother in receipt of Income Support was compelled to apply to the CSA so that child support paid by the father could be recovered by the State. There was no benefit to low income mothers in involving the CSA, as any child support paid by the father was taken directly from her Income Support. Furthermore, there was often a distinct downside: fathers often failed to grasp that it wasn’t mothers’ choice to involve the CSA, and considerable ill feeling could ensue. Many mothers risked Income Support sanctions of up to 40% in order to avoid conflict. The 2008 Act removed this compulsion. And it went further: there was now a desire to encourage parents to make their own private arrangements in order to reduce the administrative burden on the state. To this end, Child Maintenance Options was set up, to encourage separated mothers contacting the CSA to consider whether private agreements were possible. And it was the Centre for Separated Families which trained Child Maintenance Options staff to carry out these discussions. They also trained staff to do some face to face contact.
On 16 October 2008 the Centre for Separated Families hosted a national conference, “Putting Children First” in Dexter House opposite the Tower of London, with headline speakers Karen Woodall herself, Iain Duncan Smith, and the heads of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission and Cafcass. Karen Woodall presented the results of a survey commissioned by the charity from One Poll of one thousand children - Happiness, hopes and wellbeing. One conference participant said it was the best catering she had ever had.
On 27 January 2009 Polly Toynbee wrote a piece in the Guardian: “We must brave the rage and take on the won’t pay fathers”, provoking a furious response from Karen Woodall.
On 25 April 2009 Nick Woodall took part in an episode of Radio 4’s Bringing Up Britain presented by Mariella Frostrup. The topic was parental separation, and the other guests were Elly Farmer, the daughter of Michael (now Lord) Farmer, the fundamentalist evangelical Christian, multi millionaire metals trader and major donor to the Conservative Party, Centre for Social Justice and Conservative Christian Fellowship (who now has a seat in the House of Lords), Christine Tufnell from Care for the Family, and Penny Mansfield from One Plus One - another charity which would receive a big chunk of funding for relationship support in 2011.
On 15 June 2010 John Glen MP, a graduate of the CARE Leadership Programme and newly elected Conservative MP, convened a seminar to discuss how the family law review could help children maintain relationships with both parents following separation. Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families and Samantha Callan of the Centre for Social Justice gave presentations alongside speakers from the Fatherhood Institute and the Fawcett Society.
In November 2010 Minister Maria Miller met with eighteen external organisations, including the Centre for Separated Families, to discuss the Government’s proposed child maintenance reforms.
In January 2011 Minister Maria Miller met with the Centre for Separated Families individually to discuss the proposed child maintenance reforms. It was the first external organisation she officially met with individually, and the only one she met with individually during the month of January. She met with other organisations individually in February and March. In March she also met with the Centre for Separated Families individually for a second time, the only organisation she officially met with more than once individually.
In January 2011 Iain Duncan Smith presented to Parliament his Green Paper, “Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance”.
The paper profiled three organisations, the first of which was the Centre for Separated Families and the second of which was Couple Connection, an initiative of One Plus One.
On 25 February 2011 the Education Minister Tim Loughton awarded the Centre for Separated Families £420,000 under the category of families and relationship support.
In the end, the Department for Education paid a total of £444,000 to the couple for the two years from 2011 to 2013.
On 23 March 2011 Maria Miller took part in a live web chat about the proposed child maintenance reforms on the NetMums website. All the mothers participating were upset and outraged, but Maria Miller blithely ignored them.
On 24 March 2011 Nick Woodall gave evidence to the Public Bill Committee, supporting Iain Duncan Smith’s proposal to close the Child Support Agency and charge parents to use its replacement.
On 16 May 2011 Nick Woodall of the Centre for Separated Families gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into the Government’s proposed child maintenance reforms, strongly supporting the reforms. The charity’s written evidence supporting the reforms was included in the Committee’s official report.
Nick Woodall told the Committee that “family based arrangements” were more flexible, longer lasting and better for children, and that the Child Support Agency and single parents’ organisations (alluding to Gingerbread, in particular, whose researcher, Janet Allbeson, was giving evidence alongside him) entrenched conflict. He promoted Isle of Wight Separated Families which “a private businesswoman” (his own wife, using money filched from the Centre for Separated Families) had set up at “no additional expense to anybody".
On 15 June 2011 Maria Miller gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, praising the Centre for Separated Families three times, more than any other organisation (she mentioned Relate and One Plus One twice each).
“When I am talking about family support, I am not really talking about what lawyers would call mediation; I am talking about relationship support, like the sort of support that Relate might offer to individuals, or therapeutic justice, which is something that I know the Centre for Separated Families feel is an important part of how we manage people through family breakdowns to successful outcomes for their children.”
“I am very fortunate that many of the organisations that, day in, day out, support separated families have looked at our recommendations and are very excited about what we are talking about. They are already working together and have, I understand, formed an informal consortium for how this sort of support might be delivered in the future. I see the Government as being a facilitator. I do not see us as providing services that are already provided much more expertly by other organisations, some of which I have mentioned. It is to provide them with a way of coming together.”
“If you are familiar with the Options service, which we already provide as part of the child support offering from the statutory system, we already have as a Government some expertise in how to talk to families and help them to facilitate their own agreements. Now around 100,000 families come to family-based arrangements through the support of Options, but it really only deals with the finance bit. All the evidence would suggest that you need to put child maintenance into that broader perspective if you are really going to be successful for the future, and that is what organisations like Relate, the Centre for Separated Families, One Plus One and a whole host of other organisations can bring to the table.”
On 17 June 2011 Maria Miller answered a written parliamentary question by Conservative MP, Sir Oliver Heald:
“A central part of the vision set out in the Green Paper ""Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance"" is to make it easier for parents to access the support already available to deal with the effects of separation in a way that recognises their ongoing responsibilities as parents.
During the Green Paper consultation, we have been talking to experts in the voluntary and community sector (VCS) who understand families' needs, including among others the Centre for Separated Families, Relate, and Gingerbread, and they tell us that local support itself could be delivered in a more integrated fashion. We will continue to work with the sector to understand how best to facilitate more joined-up services.”
On 12 July 2011 Iain Duncan Smith presented to Parliament the Government’s response to the consultation on the green paper, Strengthening families, promoting parental responsibility: the future of child maintenance”.
Although Maria Miller had told the Work and Pensions Committee that the consultation had elicited over seven hundred responses, the Government’s response quoted the Centre for Separated Families four times - more than any other organisation. My analysis can be downloaded here.
On 14 July 2011 the London Gazette published a petition by HM Revenue & Customs to wind up the Centre for Separated Families.
It would later be established that the charity owed £164,000 to the tax man by this point.
On 23 August 2011 the Centre for Separated Families entered a Company Voluntary Arrangement, supervised by an insolvency practitioner, which would allow it to continue trading subject to pay £3,100 per month to repay its debts.
On 25 January 2012 Iain Duncan Smith and Maria Miller issued a government press release, announcing “£20 million to help separating families” and quoting Karen Woodall:
“A steering group of voluntary and community sector experts as well as academics have advised on how best this money should be used to coordinate existing organisations on the ground.
Karen Woodall, Director of the Centre for Separated Families, who are part of the steering group said:
‘We are absolutely delighted that the government is making this money available to help parents make their own family-based child maintenance arrangements. Support services, such as those proposed, will offer parents the kind of help they so desperately need around not just maintenance but other post separation issues, too.
We know that parents who make their own private arrangements are not only happier with them, but that those arrangements tend to last longer, work better and are more flexible in responding to children’s changing needs.’
The group will continue to help define what is needed, which could include:
A web service that will be able to provide on-line material and peer to peer forums as well as signposting parents to specialist websites and local support services in their area;
Helpline support for separating parents who need information and contact details for specialist and local support services that could help them;
Coordinated local services to offer help and support.”
Interestingly, the press release had the title “Putting Children First”, which is the name of Karen and Nick Woodall’s handbook of advice for separated parents, which they continue to sell on their legacy website, to which the government-run Child Maintenance Options and Sorting Out Separation websites continue to signpost parents.
“Our reforms also reflect the fact that over 50 per cent of parents using the CSA told us that, with the right support, they were likely to be able to make a collaborative agreement.* Groups working with parents also tell us this. Karen Woodall, director of the Centre for Separated Families, said that,
‘the campaign around the proposed changes to the child maintenance system has been largely based on outdated stereotypes around parental behaviour. By offering support to both parents and to the wider family, we believe that the changes will bring about much better outcomes for children’.
However, it is surely not the state's role to intervene and arbitrate in personal relationships between two adults. Instead we wish to support parents to make an informed decision. That was always the intention of the gateway we provide for under Clause 134. It has become apparent that Clause 134 as drafted, referring to reasonable steps, has been interpreted more stringently than we intended. We do not wish to require parents to take multiple steps determined by us before being able to make an application. That would risk establishing a new quasi-judicial function. It would require us to decide whether a parent had taken reasonable steps and is an impediment to making a collaborative agreement. This would be akin to the complex and intrusive bureaucracy that dogged the early days of the CSA. That is the antithesis of our approach and why we have brought forward Amendments 62BL and 62BM. I hope this clarifies our intentions.
The amendments make clear that our role is to inform the parent approaching us and invite them to consider whether they can make a collaborative arrangement outside the state scheme. This will normally take place when the parent telephones to discuss their options. Where parents wish to pursue it, we will direct them towards wider sources of support. To further make sure support is available for parents, we have announced today £20 million of additional funding. This will be spent working with voluntary and community groups on streamlining existing support and looking at what additional help is needed. This amounts to doubling government spending on relationship support in 2012-13. I hope that, on that basis, noble Lords will be prepared to support Amendments 62BL and 62BM.
Organisations as diverse as the Centre for Separated Families, Families Need Fathers and Relate have all welcomed this announcement.”
*This was a central lie, repeated dozens of times. Click here for more information.
On 2 March 2012 Karen Woodall blogged:
“Today we deliver our child focused training and practice to Children’s Centres across England as well as through our Family Separation Clinic, a specialist service for families where separation has created high conflict between parents.”
Yet the last accounts ever submitted for the Centre for Separated Families only went up to 31 March 2011, and the Family Separation Clinic was not incorporated at Companies House until 5 June 2014.
On 27 June 2012 Karen Woodall and Sir Paul Coleridge made presentations on parental alienation at a seminar convened by Andrew Selous, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Iain Duncan Smith.
On 6 July 2012 the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission awarded the Centre for Separated Families a contract to produce a “self diagnostic tool” for the Sorting Out Separation website, for which they were paid £19,630. This was less than a month before the Commission was abolished and the CSA brought back under the direct ministerial control of Maria Miller on 1 August 2012.
On 29 October 2012 Iain Duncan Smith awarded the Centre for Separated Families a contract to produce a training programme for a series of train-the-trainer events for the Sorting Out Separation telephone helpline.
On 29 November 2012 DWP Minister Steve Webb issued a press release, “Sorting Out Separation” web app launched”:
“The Government is today launching an easy-to-use web app, called “Sorting out Separation”, featuring an innovative and interactive tool, which offers parents personalised advice and shows where they can access further support.
Around five million parents have gone through separation and the new figures show over four million children now live in separated families - equal to a third of children in Britain.
However, a YouGov poll out today commissioned by the DWP reveals that more than half of parents (52%) find it hard to access help and support they need when they separate.
Sorting out Separation is a one-stop-shop for any parent going through a separation. It covers everything from how to avoid a separation to coping with the emotional impact of breaking up, accessing legal or housing support and arranging child maintenance. The web app will be hosted by a range of leading family websites, starting with the likes of Relate, National Family Mediation, Mumsnet, Dad.info, Gransnet and Wikivorce.”
The “innovative and interactive tool” was designed by Karen and Nick Woodall.
On 18 January 2013 Karen Woodall blogged:
“Not sure I am being what you call ‘snooty’ in this article so much as realistic given that I work with shared care families most days of my life and am the director of CSF which, at the last assessment spent 68% of its working time on supporting families sharing care who are in difficulties because of transition issues or other related problems.”
According to the reports submitted to Companies House by Saswati Watts, the supervisor of the Centre for Separated Families’ Company Voluntary Arrangement, January 2013 was the last month that the company ever made a payment towards their CVA.
The Centre for Separated Families was paid a total of £444,000 by the Department for Education by 29 April 2013. Yet Karen and Nick Woodall paid only £55,304 towards their Company Voluntary Arrangement.
In June 2013 the Centre for Social Justice published its report, “Fractured families: why stability matters”. Samantha Callan told website Conservative Home “honesty is what this report is all about”.
Karen Woodall blogged: “I regret that I ever wasted a moment of my time on the Steering Groups for the DWP and DfE.”
Karen Woodall blogged:
“I have been demonstrating the difference that equality and respect based work with separated families makes since1998. Alongside colleagues, I have written about it, delivered it, evaluated it and even shown the Minister for Child Maintenance herself the way it works. We have embedded the difference in the Child Maintenance Options service (not that you would find it there these days) and we have recently trained over four thousand early years workers to do it. We have worked with families themselves, with Local Authorities and even trained an Australian Relationship Centre to use our programmes. We have worked with practitioners up and down the land, what more could one do to demonstrate that there is a different way that delivers a different outcome, that is based upon respect for the difference between men and women and underpinned by an equalities based approach?”
“In the midst of a heat-wave, as the pressure mounts and disaffected dads decide that they will no longer simply disappear into the shadows, I am thinking about the debacle that is the Coalition efforts to reform support to separated families and the futility and the financial waste that has gone alongside it. Like others, I am considering the ways in which the sticky fingers of the state and its institutions bring not resolution but ruin to the efforts of families to find ways of co-parenting after family separation.
From where I am looking the view is quite dismal.
We have the Child Support Agency, which used to spend 40p on every pound collection on the collection process itself. To ensure that the collection of child maintenance is not as costly to the state, we now have some services which are offered to poor people, some services that tell dads how deficient they are and a call centre which tells people how much he should be paying or how much she should be receiving. If that fails to ensure transfer of resources, payment is levied from parents themselves to cover the cost of transfer of funds and if that fails, enforcement with menaces is the order of the day…
…In the field of family separation there are many many people who have the awareness and skills to bring together exactly what I have just described. We have legal people, we have therapists, we have social workers, we have parenting co-ordinators, we have mediators, we have conciliators, child psychiatrists, psychologists, goodness me we even have Judges [Sir Paul Coleridge] who understand that what is currently being done is not what families need…”
“Those who are likely to make use of this kind of service are those who want to do it for themselves and are naturally suspicious or unused to the state being involved in their lives anyway and that the state is working with those who will do all possible with anything possible to maintain control. But, could we not try out something which offers a road map to something different? Using people who are used to working with the percentage of those who go to court (remember virtually 100% of our work is with court based cases, most of which are in the tiniest percentage of highest conflict and we get good results in 82% of the work we do with alienated children). And I know you have the skills Stu and you know people who have the skills and people who know people who have the skills. And we have a working framework for court management and we don’t need huge amounts of funding because we are delivering it anyway, its just a matter of linking people up and building local hubs…”
The telephone training contract estimated that payment would be between £25,000 and £50,000. In the end, only £23,500 was paid, because the couple fell out with DWP officials over their extremist theories on domestic violence, which contravened official Government guidance on domestic violence.
“Continuing on the domestic abuse front, a Facebook message from Karen Woodall (Centre for Separated Families) stated "here's one for all of you interested in domestic violence.... Nick is training today for the DWP, he is not allowed to talk about violence against men or violence in separating couples in any way other than that which is ratified by the Coalition Government Policy on VAWAG by order of the HOME OFFICE - he also has two observers sitting in on the training to make sure he does not transgress this order (that's because they are nervous about my blog and my refusal to do as they ordered me to). This is what your taxes pay for people...the state is most definitely controlling you and if you separate it will be Women's Aid and Refuge who rule your world.”
2 August 2013, Rights of Man website, How the feminist narrative template discriminates against men and boys
I wrote to the Department for Work and Pensions about this, but received no reply.
In total, £487,130 was paid by the Government to the Centre for Separated Families after 31 March 2011, none of which was declared to Companies House or HM Revenue & Customs or the Supervisor of their Company Voluntary Arrangement. The payments appear to have been siphoned off into another company with a similar name, Separated Families (Europe) Ltd, and possibly into Isle of Wight Separated Families, Jersey Centre for Separated Families and Family Separation Clinic. An overview of the couple’s companies can be found here.
Although these contracts and grant were delivered several years ago, it is not too late to investigate the fraud committed by Karen and Nick Woodall. They are obliged to retain their records until the end of the sixth financial year following the end of the contracts. Terms are laid out on page 7 of the “self diagnostic tool” contract and page 8 of the telephony training contract.
The last payment by the Department for Education was on 29 April 2013. DWP Minister Steve Webb confirmed that the “self diagnostic tool” contract was completed on 5 July 2013. The telephone helpline training contract was terminated prematurely at some point in summer 2013. Therefore the end of that financial year was 31 March 2014. This means that the Woodalls are obliged to retain the documents until 31 March 2020.
Autumn finds us working on the development of our network of family separation centres, the most recent addition of which is the Jersey Centre for Separated Families. This network, which works outside of the prevailing lone parent model of support, demonstrates what can be done when local expertise is combined with a holistic approach to supporting separated families…
…The old saying ‘if you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got’ is one that exemplifies the UK government’s approach to supporting family separation. The most recent example of this being demonstrated by the Coalition Government’s Help and Support for Separated Families (HSSF) initiative which, ironically, had as its intention (at the outset at least) a move towards supporting parents to collaborate after separation. Sadly, as with most if not all of the government funded services which are available to support parents after separation, HSSF has fallen foul of the dominant and all encompassing lone parent model of analysis and delivery. Which means that it predominantly serves the needs of mothers, who are considered to have problems, at the same time as seeing fathers as people who are problems. As a result, we can confidently expect that the latest £14 million, which was supposedly made available to test innovative new approaches to supporting collaboration between parents, will simply deliver the same outcomes as all of the other rounds of wasted funding in this arena…
…As Autumn settles in and the leaves begin to fall, we are planting seeds for a different way of working. Seeds which have been taken from the fruit of our whole family approach with families over the past fifteen years and which have proved to us and to the parents and practitioners we work with that outside of the lone parent paradigm, where fathers as well as mothers are equally valued for the different things they offer to our children, different outcomes are possible. Off shore on Islands around the UK, soon in Northern Ireland, the Midlands and in London, whole family approaches will be embedded within the community, bypassing the state and the illusion that it peddles, connecting with families in ways that offer astonishing levels of change. As we roll this ball up hill again, more hands have come to join us and the model of collaboration between men and women serving the needs of mothers and fathers in local communities is becoming real. A world far beyond the lone parent paradigm, where lies, stereotypes and misinformation are no longer needed because we are working with reality, not what the women’s rights movement tell us about families. In a world of sadness and loss, where challenge and change are daily experiences, mutual co-operation in local communities brings relief, respect and rejuvenation to mothers and fathers who are hurting and struggling to cope. And those of us who work with families, find that we can sleep again at night.”
“If you message me at clinic@separatedfamilies.org.uk I will put you in touch with Nick who is bringing the Network of Family Separation Centres to life, I am sure he would be really interested in working with you to develop one in Sheffield. K”
“Something that matters to us more than anything else, and in the months to come, throughout 2014 and beyond, we will be bringing to life our Network of Family Separation Centres, which will be linked up to our Family Separation Centre Hub and which will provide, for the very first time in this country, a joined up, whole family focused support service, through which all of our information, support and advice can be accessed… Because when family separation, is put back in the hands of families themselves and the state sponsored rights based services are bypassed, children will get the help that they need and their connection to the parents that they love so dearly, will not be systematically eroded. And that’s when humanity will once again set in.”
“Last week we held our first training day for professionals working with alienated children and their families at Facebook Headquarters in London. We were delighted to have the support of Facebook for this event because we know that social media already plays and will play an increasingly significant role in keeping children in close relationship with their parents after separation.”
On 18 December 2013 the Centre for Separated Families was removed from the Charity Commission website, which says it “ceased to exist” from that date.
13 February 2014
Why I won’t be rising on Valentine’s Day
“The day that is celebrated by lovers everywhere is upon us again. For too many men, however, instead of hearts and flowers, this day will be scarred by the images of Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising movement, an initiative which to my mind, exemplifies the very worst of the poisonous rhetoric of the women’s rights lobby. Rather than celebrating the love between men and women on this special day, this movement attempts to whip up the gender war and steal away the joy. It’s nasty, it’s not telling us the truth and it’s probably arriving somewhere near you on February 14th. I won’t be rising on Valentines Day, unless its to make my husband breakfast in bed (listen out for the sharp intake of breath from the billion rising advocates on reading that one!) You see I love my husband. I love him because he is a man. I love him because he is, like me, full of strengths and weaknesses and I love him because he survived the worst that the eighties could throw at him in terms of feminist dismissal of who he is a person, of his position in the world and of the assertion that he is basically, at heart, a rapist. This horrible assertion, which demonised, demolished and devastated too many young men in that decade, was the result of second wave feminism gone, in my view, completely out of control. I could say more. I won’t. I was one of those feminists, I am not now.”
On 8 June 2014 she wrote:
“I lived a long time in such circumstances, navigating with Nick, the cold tight grip of the psychological other – the times we carved out of that, which were truly magical, are what we got as the children’s second best family, the crumbs of what the other parent felt she could allow us.”
On 24 June 2016 the Gazette reported a creditors’ meeting to agree the winding up of the Centre for Separated Families.
Karen and Nick Woodall trained Child Maintenance Options call handlers from 2008 to 2013. They designed the “self diagnostic tool” for the Sorting Out Separation website. Karen Woodall wrote the training programme for the advisers on the Sorting Out Separation helplines. The couple trained over four thousand early years workers in Sure Start children’s centres and private day nurseries how to support separating and separated couples to co-parent their children.
The advice was promised to be “expert and impartial”. However, the quotes below show clearly that Karen Woodall was extremely hostile to the Child Support Agency and to the preposterous notion that fathers should be required to pay child maintenance.
Karen Woodall wrote on her blog: “Plus Maria Miller who is the Minister with responsibility for reforming child maintenance, she is, the single most focused politician on getting collaborative parenting supported (apart from Iain Duncan Smith) to my mind. She could do with support, all of the reforms to child maintenance are met with a barrage of opposition from Gingerbread et al, most recently when the Lords opposed the proposals to charge single parents for using the statutory maintenance scheme (what used to be the CSA). Fortunately the government just went ahead and implemented it anyway but it takes real vision and focus to keep on facing what has hitherto been an impenetrable wall of opposition and she has kept on going. I actually think that not many people realise the significance of the reforms that have been to child maintenance, they are to my mind, the biggest signal of all that there has been a shift, the repeal of Section 6 in 2008, which meant that there was not an automatic use of the CSA for people on benefits and the move towards supporting private agreements, changed the landscape completely. The most recent changes have been swift, big and brave and the future for making child maintenance agreements looks different with the big stick having been put away (taken out of the hands of Gingerbread et al) and a much more realistic and family based approach being taken which is respectful of fathers rather than treating them like walking wallets.”
https://karenwoodall.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/shared-parenting-preparing-for-the-road-ahead/
On 21 May 2013, in a discussion below the line on her blog, at a time when she was growing increasingly furious with civil servants’ reluctance to adopt her extremist domestic violence policy, she wrote:
“And your story Yvie is EXACTLY what David Henshaw identified as being the failure of the CSA. That horrendous, state intervention into family life, that destroys any ability of the family to continue to work together and the spiteful, faceless bureaucracy that purports to be about children’s well being but in reality is simply state sponsored robbery, is what we believed would be ended by the Child Support Redesign Team. Its why we agreed to do the work in the first place, we thought Henshaw had got it right. How wrong could we be.”
“Its not very long since I was at that same coal face with those chaps [Families Need Fathers], digging desperately, hoping that this time the change we were seeking would come. Faced with reality over the past year or so and seeing the light switched on blindingly when Tim Loughton and Maria Miller disappeared from the family separation landscape in 2012, I stopped digging and started thinking what could I do next that might keep me going until we had chance to do something a second time around. That’s what I mean about scanning the landscape, plotting the terrain, knowing who is moving which pawn to which bishop and why.”
“To render the old obsolete one has to build the new instead of attacking the old and so that is also what we are doing with our family separation centres and our family separation hub and network. This is of course a step by step process, we are not working with the millions that government makes available but everything we are doing is outside of the prevailing paradigm and so when families come to use for help, they get the best of what we can give, without the prejudice and the discrimination and without the smoke and mirror effect. We do what we say we do and if we get something wrong, as we have this week, we put it right.
Somehow I never felt right in that world of government and big charity, it always felt dirty somehow, not real, not honest. I think there are probably some people who do some good things, but being welcomed at the table requires one to give up much of what one believes to be true and learn parliamentary doublespeak.”
11 May 2014 in discussion with Jerry Karlin, Chair of Families Need Fathers
“Onto HSSF*. I don’t know why you are not aware that we (nick and I) whilst at CSF worked with the DWP between 2008 and 2013 on reform to child maintenance services. In 2008 we designed and delivered the training that brougt the CM OPtions service to life, working withe CM Reform team intensively as part of the strategy to bring David Henshaw’s 2006 reforms into being. We continued to work with the child maintenance commission across the years subsequent to that, we trained all of the staff at Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission (as it was then) and even won awards for the training we designed and delivered. We continued to work with the Minister for responsibility for Child Maintenance in 2010 and were a core part of the reforms that brought HSSF into being. I chaired groups working on reform and we designed the HSSF web app and the training for the telephony service. We disagreed with the CM Options team however on the watering down of elements of the web app, specifically because all of the elements of it which make collaborative practice with parents truly effective, were stripped out, largely to please the women’s lobby who demanded that the DV triage system was removed. This is the reason why we left the sector and decided to go our own route and build the change we know is needed.”
*HSSF = Help and Support for Separated Families
On 22 June 2014 she wrote:
“Here’s our answer to the child maintenance AND shared care issue – at the point of separation BOTH parents should be considered single parents and BOTH parents should be considered paying parents. Both should be assessed for child support and the configuration of funds should be based around an agreed amount of time spent in BOTH parental homes…
THE number one argument from women’s rights groups in opposition to the Child Maintenance System changing to allow parents to make their own arrangements ‘HE will bully HER to accept less than SHE is ENTITLED to. And there’s me thinking child maintenance is for children… and there’s you thinking that women bully men!”
Karen Woodall wrote on her blog:
“I worked with government for 13 years, I have trained over 10,000 people in whole family work, opposing the single parent model by training front line early years workers to understand and work with a whole family approach. I have devised and delivered training to government services, I wrote the training for the Child Maintenance options service and delivered it, I recently wrote the training for the HSSF telephony service, though I didn’t deliver it because I disagreed with their approach in the end.”
On 14 July 2014 Karen Woodall blogged:
“I no longer work in the charitable sector and I no longer work with government, I chose instead, with Nick, to walk away and work directly again with the families that need our help. In our world, where family violence is wrong and must be stopped, healing and teaching and changing behaviours is what helps families to end the transgenerational patterns of coercive control and non feminist/non political analysis is what makes the difference in our work. Ironically it was exactly this understanding of the field that I work in that caused a lawyer this week to accuse me of ‘spouting off’ with ‘clear political bias.’ In a field which is riddled with political bias, in which forty years of women’s political activism has effectively silenced, strangled and shunted fathers (and some mothers who are regarded simply as the unintended consequences of feminist policy) to the margins of their children’s lives, I consider it to be one of my greatest achievements to be able to speak the truth of what I see as well as continue to help families change and grow and heal.”
