One Parent Families briefing for Welfare Reform Bill 2nd Reading, Monday 24 July 2006

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One Parent Families briefing for Welfare Reform Bill 2nd Reading

July 2006. Key points:

The Welfare Reform Bill was printed and presented on 4 July and makes provision for a new benefit - the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) - to replace incapacity benefit from 2008. The Bill will also facilitate the national rollout of a Local Housing Allowance for private tenants along with a pilot scheme under which Housing Benefit sanctions will apply to people evicted for anti-social behaviour.
While we are pleased at the Government's 'aspiration' of helping 300,000 lone parents into work, OPF are not convinced that the measures announced in the Bill and the Green Paper A New Deal for Welfare: empowering people to work, are sufficiently effective to reach the 70 per cent employment rate for lone parents. Some of the measures outlined in the Green Paper, which are to be delivered through secondary legislation are welcome, and will help to deliver the lone parent employment and child poverty targets. However we believe that this measures are not enough. Important measures missing from the Bill include:

The national roll out of New Deal Plus for Lone Parents (currently operating in five areas)

Further outreach work to encourage more lone parents to join the New Deal for Lone Parents and access routes into work.

Measures prior to work to increase the rate at which lone parents keep jobs rather than enter them.

Measures aimed at further promoting the right to request flexible working.
Nine out of ten lone parents say they want to work, although not all do so immediately. While we are pleased with the Government's efforts to help more lone parents into employment to date, we are not convinced that paid work is always the right choice for lone parents, and we would reject any approach that seeks to pressurise them into work.
56.6 per cent of lone parents are now in paid work (compared with 45.3 per cent in 1997). If the Government is to meet its target of having 70 per cent of lone parents in employment by 2010, lone parent employment in the next five years will need to rise three times as fast as it did in the last five.

Download the full briefing below.

One Parent Families briefing Welfare Reform Bill July 06 (PDF 41KB)

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