It is dismaying, though not really surprising, that lone parents and their children are very nearly twice as likely to be living in relative poverty (with less than 60% of the national median income) than families with two parents. Over the past decade or so, the work on reducing child poverty led by Gordon Brown when he was chancellor has been comprehensively undone. Conservative benefit cuts and changes aimed at reducing public spending, and incentivising work by making welfare more conditional, have disproportionately harmed many already vulnerable groups. That around 1.5 million children and their lone parents, 90% of whom are mothers, face such severe hardship should shame the ministers responsible.
It is almost a century since the suffragist (and later MP) Eleanor Rathbone published her pioneering analysis of motherhood and poverty in her 1924 book The Disinherited Family. The child allowances she advocated became a cornerstone of welfare policy after the second world war, in recognition of the fact that primary carers (then, as now, mostly mothers) need support in order to care. Yet, while the benefit remains, many of the assumptions that underpinned it have been stripped away. The message communicated by such policies as the two-child limit and benefit cap has been that having children is a kind of luxury – not a vital task that parents perform on behalf of society as a whole.
Analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation confirms that lone parents have seen the sharpest falls in living standards: they are more likely to go hungry, skip meals and be in debt; and less likely to be able to afford to heat their homes. Mr Brown, the former PM, shares desperate stories from the Scottish constituency he represented of “poverty at its demeaning and degrading worst”. Evidence about the damaging impact of Covid, particularly on the under-fives, mounts up along with warnings of energy and other price rises.
The package of support announced recently by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and worth £650 to 8.3m households, along with a promise to raise benefits in line with inflation, shows that the government is not impervious to the strain that people are under. But what has been promised falls short of what is needed. The benefit cap was a punitive measure and should be abolished; as a first step, it must be increased when benefits rise. Child benefit too should go up; it is widely recognised to be among the most effective ways of targeting funds at children. Ministers must also answer for the hopeless performance of the Child Maintenance Service, which a committee of MPs said last month was no better than the failed system it replaced. It is hypocritical to preach self-sufficiency while allowing non-resident parents (mostly fathers) to ignore their responsibilities.
But besides such specific measures, broader recognition is needed of the ways in which care and needs continue to be overlooked and penalised by a government that remains committed to shrinking, rather than growing, the UK’s social infrastructure – or letting private equity owners buy it up. We all have a stake in the future. That future includes the 3.1 million children who live with just one parent. Nearly a hundred years after Rathbone made the case for family allowances, she would surely be appalled to hear that children are still going without hot food and sleeping on floors with not enough blankets.
