TV show just confirmed my belief - families need Dads

This has been a very strange week.

For those of you who don’t know, I agreed to take part in a Channel 4 documentary which has been showing on Monday nights called Tower Block of Commons.

In the programme, I spend time with three households on one of the worst housing estates in Britain.

Unfortunately for me, when staying in the first house, one of the occupants went through my purse and my toiletries bag and posted the details of every receipt and medication on the internet. And that was just the least of it! From just over 100 hrs of filming the public view about ten minutes a week and don’t get to see anything like the real story.

I met mums who had lost their sons through stabbings; commonplace on the estate I stayed on.

Young men whose lives were passing them by, due to a severe drug habit, and many of the dysfunctional unhappy families you would expect to encounter when there are no dads, and mums with children who have a variety of fathers they don’t know.

It was important to get under the skin of the estate because those of us in Mid Bedfordshire pick up the bill for the broken society politicians, having allowed the breakdown to occur in the first place, are expected to repair. One of the conclusions I came to as a result of my stay was that kids need dads and families need fathers.

When you meet mums with teenage boys over whom they have no control and you witness how street gangs operate, you realise that it is an inescapable truth.

A society which operates on the basis of a benefits culture, supported by crime and addiction, is a society within which no one is happy and everyone complains, even if they aren’t sure why it is they are so unhappy.

Without structure and boundaries, I observed the fact that societies and families descend into freefall. In the last programme I brought two communities together.

In the tower block I stayed in, the residents were resentful of the Mosque which had opened within the midst of the estate.

The people in the Mosque were resentful of the residents who complained in the tower block, but no one spoke to each other.

I put on a BBQ in the middle and invited everyone to come. For a little while I worried that it would be a complete flop, but then people started to arrive. By the end of the evening the Iman and the residents were sitting down, breaking bread and making arrangements to visit each other’s homes for coffee.

For the first time in four years the barrier of resentment had been broken.

I felt good after last night’s programme because I felt I had achieved something, but that was tempered by the knowledge that there was so much I couldn’t do, so much I couldn’t change in just eight days.

Those of us in Mid Bedfordshire should be grateful every day that we are blessed that our part of the UK is so green and spacious and safe.

Many people on the estate I visited can boast none of those things and their lives are so much the worse for it.