Single-Parent Families

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Amy Callaghan]

I absolutely agree with everything the hon. Lady just said, but I would go one step further and also scrap the benefit cap, which would lift 300,000 children out of poverty across the UK.

To come back to my two categories, the second was where the Government are being more of a hindrance than a help to single-parent families. In that category, I will put the Child Maintenance Service, the two-child policy, as outlined by the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier), the benefit cap and the rape clause. The two-child limit disproportionately affects women, as they are much more likely to be single parents than men. Some 47% of the families affected by the two-child limit are single-parent families. As I just outlined, it is estimated that removing the two-child limit and the benefit cap would lift 300,000 children out of poverty. I call on the Government to scrap each of those policies to help single-parent families.

I am keen to hear the Minister’s defence of the Child Maintenance Service, which puts vulnerable parents—mainly women—at risk of further manipulation from an abusive ex-partner. Not being assigned a designated case worker can cause the parent receiving the maintenance to relive trauma, with each conversation rehashing their situation and the breakdown of the previous relationship. CMS is a deeply flawed service that lets down single-parent families time and again. The entire service needs to be reviewed, and I call on the Government to conduct a root-and-branch review of it to make it more suitable and functional for parents. I am keen to hear whether the Minister is considering that point, given the number of times it has been raised with the Department.

The young parent penalty is also worth discussing. The arbitrary setting of two levels of universal credit seriously disadvantages those under 25—especially young parents—and to what end? This issue has been raised with the Department since the introduction of universal credit, most notably when over 100 organisations wrote to a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about it, yet there has still been no movement for young single parents. They have the same financial responsibilities as other parents but receive approximately £66 a month less.

I will move on to where the Government need to change their current stance, which seems to be well-intentioned but is falling short. We in the SNP welcome the inflationary increase to benefits, but it is just not enough for single-parent families, who are disproportionately affected by inflation, given that most of their income is spent on food and energy. It is crucial that any additional money gets into families’ pockets urgently, so the fact that the increase is being implemented only in April is an unnecessary and harmful delay.

That leads me on to tomorrow’s Budget. It is expected that the energy price guarantee will remain at £2,500, which is welcome, but our constituents, and particularly single-parent families, are still struggling to pay their bills. We need bolder action from the Government to keep money in people’s pockets now, rather than have it lining the pockets of energy companies.

The Government could act on one of the SNP’s Budget calls—cutting the energy price guarantee to £2,000 and maintaining the energy bill support scheme until the summer. This would save families £1,400 on energy bills, which would be a much-needed saving for families, and particularly single-parent families.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has reported that, of all the groups of people in poverty, children and others in lone-parent families are the most likely to suffer food insecurity. This means that single-parent families are often among the most vulnerable people in our society. Approximately a fifth of households in my constituency think they will have to use a food bank. This appalling statistic speaks volumes about the Government’s record on social security. Choosing to crack down on benefit fraud—most of which is caused by continual error in the Department, with it paying people too much—instead of getting money into people’s pockets so that they can afford to live is utterly shameful.

Gingerbread has found that single parents experience higher unemployment rates than couple parents, despite having the same desire to work. It found that those single parents who do work often want to work more hours than they are able to and must frequently abandon their career aspirations to take on work that better fits in with childcare arrangements and school hours. This means that many of them are on lower incomes than they would otherwise be. It also means that, at a time when employers are struggling to fill vacancies, they miss out on the potential of single parents, because of the way they structure roles. Although childcare costs are a key barrier in terms of single parents getting into work, those parents are also held back significantly by the shortfall of suitable, flexible, part-time jobs and a lack of tailored employment support from Jobcentre Plus.

The Scottish Government are providing almost £3 billion in this financial year to help households face the increased cost of living, including £1 billion to provide services and financial support that are not available anywhere else in the UK. That includes increasing the Scottish child payment by 150% to £25 per week per child. Has the Minister considered introducing a similar policy? We have also doubled our fuel insecurity fund to £20 million.

The SNP Scottish Government consider social security as an investment in people that is key to our national mission to tackle child poverty, and we are using the limited powers and fixed budgets we have to support children and their families. However, there is only so much that devolved Governments can do to support single-parent families when 85% of welfare expenditure and income-replacement benefits remain reserved here.

In 2021, the Children’s Commissioners for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland wrote to the UK Government to call on them to scrap the two-child limit, which demonstrates that this policy is widely condemned across these four nations. So I ask again: will the Minister consider scrapping the two-child policy alongside the benefit cap?

Roughly 120,000 children in the UK receive no child maintenance, and many more do not receive their full entitlement, so it is abundantly clear that the CMS is not sufficiently protecting these children. I would be keen to hear what the Minister has to say about that policy and what defence for it can he bring to the table. In my eyes and those of the SNP, it is indefensible?

To summarise, the UK Government are failing single-parent families; they could do far more to step up to the plate and help to support them. We need far more action, and far bolder action, from the UK Government to mirror the radical, bold action the Scottish Government are taking to tackle the levels of child and family poverty.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that they should bob up and down if they want to attract my attention to speak in the debate. I call Jim Shannon.

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[David Linden]

Exactly. Quite rightly, my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire should not be sparing the blushes of the Conservatives, who are mandated to turn up to this debate—that is why there are two of them here. The reality is that there cannot be a compassionate social security system when there is this arbitrary cap in place that takes no cognisance of the cost of living. It is not compatible with a compassionate society to turn around and say, “We’ll pay for the first two children, but, by the way, do you see that third one? Out on their ear.” It certainly is not compatible with a compassionate society to turn around to women who have experienced rape and sexual violence and conceived a child as a result and say, “Okay. You have told us that this third child was born as a result of rape. Can you prove that?” That is my question to the two Conservatives who are here. Perhaps that is a problem; that got through the policy process. Was it two white men sitting there thinking, “This policy is absolutely fine”? I can tell the House that the women I speak to at Glasgow East Women’s Aid in my constituency are appalled that, years and years on, we have the abhorrent rape clause.  I know that Ministers find this issue incredibly uncomfortable, and they often tell me, “Don’t refer to it as a rape clause.” They want to refer to it by its official name, which is the non-consensual sex exemption. Let us just think about that for a minute: in 2023, the state asks women in this country to prove that they have been raped, simply so they can get state support. It really should shame the Government.

Some 86% of households trapped by the benefit cap are families, often headed by single mothers—the very people we are debating today—and it is the Government’s job to support families, not to subject them to further hardship. The Minister and the Government can and must do better. They should take heed of the wise words of John Dickie of the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, who calls for the

“cruel and irrational benefit cap…to be scrapped at source by the UK Government as a matter of utmost urgency.”

Those are not my words as a nasty, nationalist MP. They are the words of John Dickie of the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland—somebody who is a respected expert in this field—and the Minister would do well to reflect on that.

The continued refusal of Ministers to fix the extensive and known problems with universal credit is unacceptable, and it is clearly subjecting vulnerable people to wholly unnecessary hardship. Even more damning is the fact that this hardship has been noted outwith these islands. The Government like to fly around the world—it was San Diego yesterday—on Union Jack-clad private jets and talk about the importance of global Britain, but let us look at global Britain. A recent report from the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, of which my hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) is a member, found that the level of support provided under universal credit was a key contributing factor to child poverty. The report, published in November, stated that policies such as the two-child limit and the benefit cap

“restrict the amount of benefits a household can receive, regardless of their specific needs, and thereby continue to exacerbate child poverty.”

In its recent submission to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Human Rights Watch also gives a damning review of the British Government’s restrictive social security policies, such as the two-child limit and the failure to reverse the cut to universal credit, and sets out their negative impact on the right to an adequate standard of living—things such as food and housing for families with children.

I want to refer briefly to the wonderful folks at One Parent Families Scotland, because they have been campaigning for an awfully long time to end the benefits-related discrimination against single parents under the age of 25. People under 25 are entitled to a lower allowance of benefits than those aged 25 or over, but before the introduction of universal credit there was an exemption for single parents in recognition of the costs of caring for a child alone. Now that the exemption has been removed, children are certainly paying the price. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire set out, young single-parent families are now up to £66.13 worse off per month under universal credit compared with the legacy system, which equates to a drop of 20%. Denying young single parents—largely women—the same level of social security penalises children on the basis of their parent’s age and pushes young families into poverty, with an incredibly detrimental impact on their rights and wellbeing. It frustrates me that Scottish Government officials rightly talk about getting things right for every child, yet baked into the social security system is an inherent unfairness.

It is one thing for me to stand here and quote respected committees, international bodies and think-tanks, but I want to highlight some local examples from the east end of Glasgow, which I am incredibly proud to live in and represent. Last week, I was joined in Tollcross by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn). While we were at Tollcross advice centre, Matthew Leach, the financial inclusion officer, told me of several examples—he even provided me with case studies—that highlight the folly of the UK’s current social security system. Time constraints mean that I cannot read them all out, but I will certainly send them to the Minister’s office this afternoon to highlight just how challenging the Government’s policy makes life for single parents in these islands.

As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has said, life is hard enough for everyone right now—the cost of living crisis means that everyone is having to do more with less—but we know from today’s testimony alone that life is particularly hard right now for single parents, and the fact that the British Government are making life harder only adds insult to injury.

In conclusion, Westminster must do better. If it will not, an independent Scottish Government stand ready to step in and fulfil their obligations to families, whatever shape, size or format they come in.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

I call the shadow Minister, Alison McGovern.

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[Alison McGovern]

Of course, the hon. Lady is right. The knock-on effect for British businesses is really quite big, because they are missing out on all the talent that exists in single-parent families.

The United Kingdom has a good story on single-parent employment, which has been on a generally upward trend since the mid-1990s, having previously been falling since 1979. In 1997, 45% of single parents worked; by 2010, that had risen by 12 percentage points to 57%. I am not sure what happened between 1997 and 2010, but I think it was probably quite good.

That was obviously a bit of a joke about the Labour Government and how they were brilliant on lone-parent employment, particularly in relation to jobcentres, which I will come to. The numbers have continued to grow, which is good; again, I hope that represents a cross-party consensus. Worryingly, however, single-parent employment has fallen since 2019. We need to focus on it again and work out how to turn that around.

Single parents are also likely to be underemployed. As was mentioned by the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell), many single parents could do more and offer more to our economy if childcare were available. We know that single parents are more likely to be women, and the kind of work that women are more likely to do militates against their having better pay. We need to work on employment segregation. The jobs that women do mean they end up being paid less, which has a massive knock-on effect on single parents. If we could change that so that women’s time and talent were valued properly, as they should be in our economy, we would give single parents and, crucially, their children a much better chance.

Childcare has been mentioned because it is the glaringly obvious cause of many of the challenges that single parents face in our economy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies points out that there are at least eight different programmes to help with the cost of childcare and many families are eligible for more than one form of support simultaneously. That complexity makes it hard to understand what someone is eligible for. However, despite the plethora of schemes, the supply of childcare is not really any good, because there are failures in the way that the schemes run.

We need to have a root-and-branch look at childcare. We are all hopeful that we might hear something in the Budget. There are things, such as reforming the way it works through universal credit, that we could have done already. Labour wants to invest in breakfast clubs, which could be funded by savings that we have identified from changing tax arrangements for non-doms. That would help single parents to do a job that starts at 9 am and give them a lot more flexibility.

In addition to the extremely important issue of childcare, our success as a nation in helping single parents to have a choice of jobs and success in employment was driven by Jobcentre Plus services. In recent years, I have worried that the focus on supporting single parents has declined. I hope that is not the case, but we need to make improvements. Gingerbread found recently that just a third of single parents agreed that contact with Jobcentre Plus was personalised and relevant to their specific situation. That is not great. Lone parents face specific barriers, and they need specialised support. Gingerbread found a lack of continuity in relationships with work coaches, and that people were being pushed to apply for unsuitable jobs. That is problematic. We know that Jobcentre Plus works best when it provides tailored and specific support.

Of course, we also need workplaces to change, with more part-time and flexible working. Will the Minister say how he sees the DWP making that happen? Do the Department’s own flexible working policies support single parents? What does the Department advise work coaches to suggest to employers on flexible or part-time work to support single parents? There is a huge amount of skill and life experience available to businesses, if only they can ensure that the employment they are offering is fully inclusive. There is no better time to address this. We have businesses crying out for staff. Why not look for talent in single-parent families?

We await tomorrow’s Budget, and I live in hope that we will see expansive, brilliant childcare reform that will really help—I am slightly sceptical after 13 years in this place, although perhaps my Pollyanna-ish tendencies should be tempered with a bit more scepticism—but whatever happens tomorrow, we also need action far beyond childcare, including reform to the support that Jobcentre Plus offers; improved public transport, because fewer single parents are likely to have their own car; and big changes on flexible working, so that everybody is fully included. In this time of staff shortages, making employment more inclusive and ensuring that it involves more people would be a big win, which could help our labour market to be sustainable into the future. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say as a precursor to tomorrow’s excitement.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Pollyanna-ish is the word of the day. I call the Minister.

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[Amy Callaghan]

I think the Minister might want to correct the record on support for independence—we are in a much better place than we were just a couple of weeks ago—and get back to the subject of single-parent families.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Order. The debate is on single-parent families, not independence or the candidates for leader of the Scottish National party.

[Guy Opperman]

I utterly endorse that very strong steer. I have no intention of correcting any record because I stand by the statistics.

On spending, there is also the energy price guarantee, which will be extended until the end of March 2024; a typical household bill will be around £3,000 per year as a result of that support. For those needing extra support, we will be providing an additional £1 billion to help with the cost of household essentials this year, bringing total support to £2.5 billion since October 2021. There is also an extension of the household support fund backed by £842 million for 2023-24, and devolved Administrations receive funding that totals £158 million through the Barnett formula.

Much was said about childcare, and I want to address it in a bit of detail. While there is, of course, intense speculation about what may or may not happen tomorrow, it is relevant to make the point that, since 2010, we have taken a system of almost non-existent childcare in this country to a substantial, comprehensive and broad-ranging offer. For example, in 2010 there was no 85% universal credit childcare, and parents could not receive the paid-for 15 or 30 hours of childcare. Universal credit claimants can claim back up to 85% of their registered childcare costs each month, irrespective of their hours worked. That is available to all parents who satisfy the childcare cost and the work condition to qualify for help. This is obviously a substantial increase from what existed before and it applies to any parent up to the maximum amount of £646 per month for one child and £1,108.04 per month for two or more children.

Separate from the universal credit childcare element, the Government also provide free childcare for many families. There are the 15 hours free childcare a week we brought forward for three to four-year-olds in England. In 2017, that doubled to 30 hours for working parents of three to four-year-olds. There are similar schemes available in the devolved nations. Since 2013, we have also provided 15 hours of free early education entitlement to disadvantaged two-year-olds. The obvious aim is to improve long-term educational outcomes, and narrow the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.

Parents are eligible if they are in receipt of certain income benefits, and have a household income of less than £15,400.

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[Guy Opperman]

Well, the simple point is that I strongly urge the hon. Lady to raise that with the individual Minister. I cannot comment on a particular case, as she knows, but, without any shadow of a doubt, the Department is clear that our role is to support parents who choose to use its services, encouraging them to make a family-based arrangement to start with, or supporting them with the statutory scheme if they cannot.

The Child Maintenance Service is genuinely delivering a transformation programme and aiming to improve outcomes for children by enabling parents to set up, and then manage, their child maintenance arrangements in ways that suit their own individual circumstances. Significant improvements have been made to the online offerings, whether around applying for child maintenance or the development of a new service to help in arranging child maintenance. All of that makes for a more accessible service.

Let me give a few examples. In the quarter ending September 2022, 872,000 children were covered by Child Maintenance Service arrangements—an increase of 25,700. Our current estimate is that, as a result of regular child maintenance payments, 140,000 fewer children are growing up in poverty. Clearly, these matters are always difficult, always contentious, and always a difficulty between individual parents. We accept entirely that the principle is that child maintenance is designed to encourage parents to work together and make their own family-based child maintenance arrangements wherever possible, which is usually better for the children, but it can play a role in helping to lift children out of poverty and can help to enhance the outcomes of individual children.

I will turn back to some of the other points that I wished to make. Clearly, as a result of some of the decisions made in September, the child benefit itself—which is payable to anyone responsible for bringing up a child up to age 16, or under 20 if they are in approved education or training—will increase by 10.1% from April 2023 for the eldest or only child, and there will also be an increase for every other child. Alongside the financial assistance that child benefit provides, claimants also receive national insurance credits to protect their future entitlement to pension entitlements. Those can be transferred to grandparents providing childcare.

I will touch on a couple of quick points that were raised on other matters. There were multiple references to the Chancellor. On flexible working, the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), is obviously bringing forward legislation on that point.

There have been great changes there, and I can assure colleagues that the Department for Work and Pensions, as with other Departments, operates a very flexible working arrangement. It is not necessarily based in Whitehall, I can assure them. For example, I have two ladies who job share one of the most senior roles in Government in the Department for Work and Pensions. Between them, they cover one directorship in one of the most impressive job share and flexible-working examples I can imagine. Frankly, that is becoming the norm on a greater and greater basis.

I will conclude by stating that I accept and endorse the approach of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire on how we are driving these matters forwards. I accept that more can be done on the Child Maintenance Service, and I encourage her to take up my offer of a meeting, on behalf of my parliamentary colleague. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to set out certain matters in detail, including the amount of support that is available to single-parent families. Clearly, I will report back to the Chancellor the last-minute additions to the Budget that many have put forwards.

We are committed to meeting the needs of individuals and single-parent families in the United Kingdom, and we continue to provide the Scottish and Northern Irish Governments with generous funding and support where these matters are devolved.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Thank you, Minister, for the revelation about Jane Bond. I hope that Thames House was not listening.