David Cameron plans to lead Labour rebels into inserting an amendment into the government’s welfare reform plans, basically removing all threat of sanction from lone mothers of children of pre-school age. This, I think, is the upshot of his press conference today. “The state prodding, pushing, cajoling mothers of children so young is simply wrong,” he said. “We need to help families, and that especially is true for single parents. It won’t do any good for our economy, or our society.” He said he suspected James Purnell was engaged in “some macho positioning exercise” which he said was “pretty sick”.
CoffeeHousers will be unsurprised to hear that I disagree with Cameron on this. I’m all up for welfare reform, the more radical the better – and placing demands on lone mothers of pre-school children is hardly a King Herod approach to newborns. It places us alongside normal countries. Belgium, Denmark, Finland Japan and Sweden don’t have any minimum age before they start to impose a work test (aside from normal maternity leave cover). In the US, it’s three months. In France, Germany and Norway and Switzerland it’s three years. The Freud Report on welfare identified only five countries on the planet which don’t make work requirements of the parents of pre-school mothers: Australia, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland and Britain.
It’s worth adding that no one is forcing these single mums to go flip burgers. They’d be required, in return for their taxpayers’ money, to ‘stay in touch with the labour market’ as Purnell puts it. This means doing training, sometimes literacy classes, all with childcare provided. The most important point is to remove the option of child rearing on welfare as a lifestyle choice, Karen Matthews-style. There are 363,000 lone parents with one kid under five – just under half lone parent caseload. This is a major driver of poverty in Britain, and it just can’t be ignored. The most chilling statistic in the welfare debate is that those who stay on benefits for five years (including lone parents) are more likely to die than work again.
Remember, most welfare-dependent lone parents have more than one child. An astonishing 95,000 have four or more. So what’s more compassionate: writing them a cheque and leaving them to isolation and poverty, or using the taxpayers’ money to try to demand that they undertake behaviour likely to lead them out of poverty? Most countries take the latter option. So should Britain.
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