The National Family and Parenting Institute (now the Family
and Parenting Institute) was set up in 1999, following the
Green Paper from the previous year, Supporting families
Home Office, 1998). Since 1999, substantial changes have
taken place in family policy. This paper discusses the
developments of the past decade across the diverse and
interlinked strands of family policy.

Many challenges still remain, such as: integrating adult
and children's services to meet families' needs;
ensuring families have access to both good universal
services and specialist ones; achieving child poverty targets;
and creating real choice for parents in how they balance paid
work and family responsibilities. The changes of the past 10
years have taken place against a background of national
economic prosperity. The current recession is imposing new
challenges on both families and public services, and even if
the recovery is quick, the context for the next decade will be
one of high public debt. This paper provides an overview of
family policy as we move into that new era, in the hope that
some lessons from the past can inform progress in the
future.