Michael Gove has suggested that parents who fail to ensure their children attend school regularly could have their child benefit payments stopped. Gove has argued such penalties would help restore “an ethic of responsibility”. He had previously attempted to introduce the measure while education secretary during the coalition government in 2010 but was blocked by then Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. He later pushed David Cameron to put it in the Conservative manifesto for the 2015 election. On Tuesday, at an event in central London from the thinktank Onward to debate the future of the Conservative party, he told the audience: “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 antisocial 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.
“I think what we need to do is to think radically about restoring an ethic of responsibility.” Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, said: “If Michael Gove thinks that the solution to encourage children back to school is to impoverish them, then he is living in a different century.” The levelling-up secretary is understood to want the proposal included in an action plan on reducing antisocial behaviour that he is preparing for Rishi Sunak, which is expected to be published next month, the Times reported. Under the coalition’s plans, parents would have faced penalties of £60 for persistent truanting, which would double to £120 if they refused to pay and would have been collected through child benefit. Last month, Gove said antisocial behaviour should not be seen as an “inevitable or a minor crime” but as a gateway to more serious offences. He claimed reducing truanting would be central to stopping teenagers drifting into offences such as vandalism or graffiti and urged police to stop “virtue signalling” and clamp down on such offences. In his speech at the Onward event, Gove also criticised social progressives whom he refused to describe as “woke”, saying: “I dislike the use of the word both because it can at times seem to trivialise and render as simply eccentric and amusing what is actually an increasingly powerful and destructive force in our society. “And also because I believe in being awake to genuine injustice is a distinctive part of the conservative tradition.”