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Lone parents and employment conditionality: key points
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This information can be downloaded as a PDF at the bottom of this page.
February 2007: The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, John Hutton, recently floated the idea of increasing the conditions that lone parents must fulfil in order to claim Income Support, including requiring lone parents whose youngest child is aged 11 or over to be available for work (in effect moving them from the Income Support to the Jobseeker's Allowance regime).
We support the Government's ambition to help more lone parents into work: that is what most lone parents want for themselves. But the best way of achieving this is to provide lone parents with the help and support they need, a strategy which in recent years has resulted in a dramatic increase in lone parent employment. The threat of sanctions and penalties, which may discourage lone parents from coming forward to seek help into employment, is not the answer and could be a counterproductive waste of stretched resources.
One Parent Families would strongly oppose any extensions in conditionality for lone parents. We believe that such an approach ignores the fact that most of the target group (those with older children) are already in work and those who are not often have very good reasons, including caring for a child with a disability or lack of adequate and affordable childcare.
Which lone parents are working now? - The Government has a target to increase lone parent employment to 70 per cent by 2010. Using the voluntary approach of the New Deal for Lone Parents, alongside increases in in-work support through tax credits and in childcare, progress has been extremely rapid. The lone parent employment rate has risen by 10 per cent since 1997 to 56.5 per cent today.
- The majority(66 per cent) of the group being targeted, lone parents with children aged over 11, are already in work.
- Of those lone parents whose youngest child is aged over 11 and are claiming Income Support, one quarter are caring for a disabled child and half themselves have a health condition or disability.
- Nine out of ten lone parents want to work. But in a survey of 1000 lone parents undertaken by One Parent Families this month, 71 per cent of non-working lone parents cited a lack of childcare or flexible working as a reason for not being in paid employment.
What do international comparisons tell us?
Much has been made of Britain's relatively low level of employment for lone parents compared to other European countries, with the Secretary of State drawing comparisons with Sweden and Denmark. However, lone parents in these countries not only have different characteristics but also face a remarkably different set of constraints: - The education gap between single and coupled mothers in the UK is particularly high in European terms. Two fifths of lone mothers have no academic qualifications compared to just one quarter of mothers in couple families. UK lone mothers are also younger and likely to have more children than their European counterparts.
- Sweden spends proportionately four times as much on training than the UK.
- At present parents in the UK contribute 75 per cent of the costs of childcare compared to average parental contributions across the EU of between 25 and 30 per cent.
- Lone parents in work in the UK are more likely to be in poverty than in most other European countries.
Would increasing conditionality for lone parents help reach the poverty target? - Employment can be a good route out of poverty, but even if all lone parents with a secondary school aged child moved into work the Government would meet neither its child poverty nor its employment target for lone parents. Targeting the 150,000 lone parents in this group is poor value for money in child poverty terms.
- We have no evidence that increasing conditionality in the benefit system would necessarily lead to an increase in lone parent employment. A review of lone parent employment across 20 European countries found that the key factor in explaining differences in employment rates was not the presence or absence of work tests but of publicly funded childcare.
- The Government has already introduced elements of conditionality into the system for lone parents, and in the Green Paper for welfare reform increased these so that lone parents with secondary school aged children must now attend four Work Focused Interviews a year. Evidence of the effectiveness of these measures is extremely sparse, with one evaluation finding that they increased lone parent employment by around one percentage point. In contrast, the voluntary New Deal for Lone Parents doubles the chances of lone parents moving into work.
- Lone parents already leave work at twice the rate of other comparable groups. Pushing those who face substantial barriers into employment is likely to increase the incidence of this 'low pay no pay' cycle. A more productive approach would attempt to address the problem of job retention for lone parents; research has shown that if this was increased to that of comparable groups the 70 per cent employment target could be met with no further increases in the rate of entry into work.
The Department for Work and Pensions faces cuts in its spending by 5 per cent per annum over the course of the spending review. International research shows that implementing conditionality is costly and time consuming. In the absence of evidence to suggest that it would have a substantial impact on rates of child poverty, we believe that it would be fundamentally wrong to focus resources in this area.
For more information please contact Kate Bell on katebell@oneparentfamilies.org.uk.
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