That’s very interesting about the different meanings of family networks. I think in many parts of UK society especially with the costs of housing in the SE, for many people, their families have completely different (ie none) expectations of extended family obligations or relationships, even from aunts and uncles, or even between siblings once they leave hiome. because they virtually never actually see them, let alone grow up living around them. Unless there’s a grandparent figure who wants to get their children and grandchildren together very regularly and the far flung children and grandchildren are up for doing that, which takes a certain level
of income and time privilege and pre-existing good relationships to make happen. many families are very atomised in how they are able to or expect to live unless they’re very rich or very poor.
So I guess that means that many (not all) key people relevant to decision-making around these issues who are working in the legal system, or in policy making in the civil service, or especially in the elected political hierarchy, or are working in many record keeping public services like the NHS, will have absolutely no experience or understanding of how differently other families live, which will affect how they think they should manage these kinds of situations re access to information or family bias issues. There will be intense resistance to changing these mindsets for fear of stereotyping so universal policies will need to be adopted. It’s a tricky one to change and will be important to discuss with many sectors of society and get right and be vigilant about. That takes trust and goodwilll and new public money which seems likely to be in short supply so it needs to have support from elevated politicians who can decide to allocate money to it.
Feels like a job for one of the UK’s national Law commissions to review the law around this, for starters, but that’s where these wider thinking projects may be flawed. Would need to be highly collaborative to be able to reflect reality and be nuanced.
Dont get me wrong all public bodies should be trained in doing this kind of listening work to communities (but those would be the exceptions and clearly very many aren’t). I’d say currently most organisations consider themselves consultative by carrying out their minimum statutory consultation requirements on a pre existing policy proposal on which and they only really expect to hear back from other organisations in the traditional comfortable way. As opposed to what would be much more effective, forming the policy ideas in the first place, by working closely with affected community members or grassroots groups. Much more challenging and costly and much harder politically to work closely with the many groups of people that if implemented, that work would affect, in that necessary way.