Training | 2008.11.25
Libby Brooks: A bureaucratic kicking won't help lone parents into work
\'In a recession, nobody will be interested in employing single parents." Julia, a lone mother of two children aged nine and 12, is pragmatic about her options. "Most of us will have been out of work for some time, and need hours to fit with school. That already puts us at the back of the queue. But in an economic downturn, I think it\'s going to be virtually impossible to get a job."
Julia\'s assessment of her prospects is abysmal, but fair. What is not fair is that, as of Monday, single parents with a child of an age with her eldest will be forced to find work of at least 16 hours per week, or risk a 40% benefit slash. The difficulties of securing a part-time job that dovetails with adequate childcare, even for the best-placed parents, has been well rehearsed. So this move is especially devastating, coming at a time when the government has just reneged on its commitment to flexible working while unemployment escalates.
As a former business analyst, Julia assumed that - once she had eased her children through the trauma of divorce - re-entering the workplace would be reasonably straightforward. She was wrong. After a long succession of confidence-sapping rejections and childcare-incompatible offers, she remains unemployed.
"I tried for office skills jobs - through agencies, the internet, the jobcentre and directly to banks - but none were viable. Most after-school clubs finish at 6pm and if you are working and expected to do overtime you can\'t get home for that. When you have older children, you can\'t keep an eye on what they\'re getting up to or be there if they\'re lonely. And you just can\'t get the holidays you need to be with them when they\'re not at school."
Julia\'s problems with inflexible working will be familiar to all parents, but are hugely exacerbated when functioning solo. And the chances of any immediate improvement are slim. Last month, new business secretary Peter Mandelson\'s imperative to ease the burden on businesses during recession found an early casualty in Labour\'s commitment to a more family friendly employment ethos.
Despite this, the process of transferring lone parents with progressively younger children off income support, which they can currently claim until their youngest child is 16, and on to jobseeker\'s allowance - which requires them to take work or face sanctions - looks set to continue. In less than two years\' time, the age of the youngest child to shift this already vulnerable group on to far more treacherous territory will be just seven, affecting more than 300,000 families.
The new regulations do allow lone parents who cannot find "suitable, affordable or appropriate" childcare to turn down a job on these grounds. But how this will be applied in practice remains untested. And the regulations do not take into account the particular needs of parents with disabled children, or those experiencing problems at school, nor parents who have only recently separated. It is blind absurdity to compel a parent to work purely on the basis of their child\'s age. While the government\'s rhetoric around childcare is all about parental choice, these measures remove that choice, leaving the ultimate decision to the discretion of a Jobcentre Plus advisor who is manifestly not best placed to assess the needs of an individual family.
It is a further irony that this policy will severely limit lone parents\' capacity to ready themselves for the employment market. Thirty per cent of single parents on benefits lack any formal qualifications. Yet a transfer to jobseeker\'s allowance means that many will be denied the opportunity to participate in education and training, since the benefit isn\'t available to those studying full-time.
Labour only started to take an interest in childcare when it surmised that one way to tackle this country\'s appalling level of child poverty was to get mothers into the workplace. But, despite the success of Sure Start, provision for older children - those who will be affected by the new regulations - remains poor. A recent report for the charity 4Children found that there was only one place for every 200 children aged 11-14.
While Labour is right to conclude that helping single parents back to work is the best way to ameliorate their disadvantage, it\'s plain these regulations alone will not achieve that end. The independent social security advisory committee recently reported its reservations about the proposals, noting "the underlying tensions between policies to promote greater personal responsibility for their children, and greater engagement in securing their health and wellbeing, and policies that may have the effect of forcing lone parents to give priority to paid employment."
So welfare-to-work has its limits: more than half of children living in poverty already have a parent in employment. And these proposals also subscribe to a middle-class agenda which assumes that all mothers - and the vast majority of single parents are women - are desperate to return to meaningful, well-paid jobs which fulfil their sense of self beyond the home. While the majority of single parents in this country are in employment, the ones who remain on benefits are by definition those who need much more than a bureaucratic kick up the arse to get them behind the till at Tesco. Credit crunch or not, it makes no sense to remove support for the people who choose to concentrate on the hard work of parenting in difficult circumstances.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/child-benefits-single-parents
