Lone Parents (Benefits) (Hansard, 23 April 1999)

§ Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North)

Inequality has grown faster in Britain than in any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country, with the exception of New Zealand. That is not just a question of income and wealth, nor should it rely on definitions of occupational class. Poverty is defined as a socially constructed set of markers for disadvantage—for example, social tenancy, reliance on means-tested social security benefits and so on.

Lone parents stand out clearly as a group in poverty and hardship. Although only 15 per cent. of other families with children are social tenants, 66 per cent. of lone parents are in that category. Although 10 per cent. of other families are on benefits, the figure for lone parents is more than 50 per cent. Similar figures are recorded for means-tested benefits.

Even among the minority of lone parents who have jobs, more than 50 per cent. claim some type of benefit and achieve council tax relief, and three out of 10 receive lowly maintenance payments. It is estimated that 1.7 million lone parents have responsibilities for 2.9 million children and they are a main force in the driving up of the published poverty figures. It is estimated that, soon, 25 per cent. of all British families with dependent children will have one parent and that there will be more than 3 million such children.

More than any other large group of people of working age, perhaps with the exception of the disabled, lone parents face great circumstantial barriers to work. It is estimated that one lone parent in six has never had a proper job. The stress associated with their lives—I shall not go into the shambles of the Child Support Agency in that context—is reflected in one in three of them having been subjected to domestic violence. After a relationship breaks down, there is also a stressful limbo period in which benefits are sorted out and assessed, and lone parents struggle to provide reassurance and comfort to their small children.

It is estimated that lone parent incomes are 50 per cent. of those of two-parent families. Lone parents have rent arrears and repayment problems in excess of those of all other groups. They are often in damp, poor-quality housing with no central heating, which suffers from vermin and unattended repairs. One in 10 report health problems, which restrict their ability to enter the work market.

All that is well documented, researched and understood, but another feature has emanated from some prominent and brilliant research by Dorsett and Marsh of the Policy Studies Institute —80 per cent. of lone parents smoke. In comparison, only 20 per cent. of better-off young women in a similar age group smoke. I contend that no tobacco company could ever have achieved such a figure by pushing for the elimination of tobacco tax or even by inducing the public to believe that no health hazards are associated with smoking.

More than 1 million young women living on their own smoke, and excessively. It damages their health and initiates the cancer process. A report was published

1213 yesterday that described how poor people develop more cancers and are more likely to die of the disease than the rich, who benefit from better conditions of life. Smoking also damages the hearts and lungs of those young women. The, researchers' contention is that smoking is linked with poverty, pessimism and poor health, and the poor health of children. All of those are major features in the lives of lone parents. The researchers often use smoking as a barometer of the social situation of lone parents.

Lone parents also find it hard to quit smoking. Continual hardship blocks them into a pattern of smoking excessively. Smoking behaviour is a result of a complex interplay of contemporary and historical circumstances, but the 80 per cent. figure is still astonishing. The spiral that those people are in means that it is hard for them to get a job and improve their lives.

Three issues demand departmental interaction at Government level, both inter-Department and inter-Department. The first issue is the challenge for health promotion, the second is the consideration of a welfare-to-health project and the third is the welfare-to-work programme. All three are necessary to solve the deep social problem, if lone parents are to control their lives.

Lone parents who smoke pay nearly £300 million a year back to the Treasury, which is 17 per cent. of their share of income support. A fraction of that money spent on a major effort to mobilise lone parents against tobacco would help to remove them from the spiral that traps them in poverty. Nicotine patches should be freely available to them, because the research shows that many young women smokers would like to quit, and that would assist them. Only a significant enrichment of their lives will produce results. No approach to improving lone parents' health behaviour will mean anything unless it is embedded in a broader appreciation of their circumstances and an understanding of how those circumstances can change.

Income has only a small effect on determining smoking habits. Income is a measure of the spending resources available to a lone mother and its value is dependent on the prices of the goods bought. For the smoker, an increase in the price of cigarettes represents a fall in the real value of their income. The effect of income in determining smoking is small, implying that the effect of an increase in the price of cigarettes will also be small. Ciggy money is often set aside in the same way as that for food and fuel, so taxing cigarettes will not solve the problems I have described.

I welcome the new deal initiatives—including the child care benefits and the recently announced work benefits—to get lone parents into work and enable them to keep work. However, the hypothesis that the researchers put forward is that welfare to health could be an initiator to lift lone parents from the spiral of despair. It could be set up quickly and would not disrupt the original intention of the welfare-to-work programmes. Given the trends in workplaces against smoking, lone parents could become more likely to find a job if they give up.

The right to smoke is not an issue. The link between smoking and poverty is clearly established. Rather than choosing not to smoke, lone parents are constrained by their circumstances, which prevent them from 1214 relinquishing the habit. In politics, we have to start from where people are, and in this case they are in hardship and despair. To start the journey to reliable employment and child care, we must get lone parents to kick the smoking habit and reclaim its cost relative to income.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Angela Eagle)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) on securing the debate. His comments on smoking are primarily a matter for my right hon. Friend the Minister for Public Health, because it has a tie-in with the Department of Health. Smoking is disproportionately high among all people living in poverty, including lone parents.

The Government are committed to helping lone parents to give up smoking. Last December's White Paper, "Smoking Kills", for the first time put services to help people to quit smoking at the heart of the NHS's work. The Government announced that they would make £60 million of extra cash available over the next three years to develop new services.

As with the benefits system, the poorest smokers are our main priority. This year, £10 million will go to the 26 health action zones to start work to help people in deprived areas to quit smoking. The package includes a week's free nicotine replacement therapy for smokers who are on benefit, including lone parents on income support. The Government have already taken steps to help in the areas to which my hon. Friend referred.

I should like to take this opportunity to outline the range of other action that the Government are taking to lift lone parents out of their current hardship, which my hon. Friend has identified. We want to get to the root cause rather than just to tackle the symptoms. When the Government came into office, more than 1 million lone parents were on income support and bringing up about 2 million children. I am pleased to say that those numbers are now coming down, but there are still far too many workless lone parent families, who often remain workless for far too long.

A life on income support can never provide the benefits of inclusion in the world of work. It is undoubtedly hard, and it is not just materially hard: families' health can be affected; children's educational prospects can be damaged; and their future economic prospects as adults may be less bright. It is time to put an end to living in a divided country, with too many families trapped in a cycle of poverty and worklessness: a country in which lone parent families in particular are consigned to a life of hardship. That must be changed. The previous Government criticised lone parents as scroungers, and took little action. They were given no practical help to break out of the cycle of poverty. The Government are changing that.

The route out of persistent hardship is to get into work. Lone parents know that a job offers them the opportunity to improve their family's life. That is why, not unsurprisingly, nine out of 10 lone parents want to be in work. We are trying to remove the many barriers to work that they face. We are using welfare spending as an investment to lift lone parents and their families out of poverty.

Our current £190 million investment in the new deal for lone parents, which my hon. Friend mentioned, provides individually tailored, practical help to people who have 1215 been offered no help before. To date, more than 40,000 lone parents have joined the new deal and, now it is available nationally, thousands more are taking part each month. We are getting real help to tens of thousands of lone parents making the difficult journey from a life stuck on benefit to a new life in work with further opportunities. As a result of our programme, more than 7,000 have already found jobs.

We are changing the culture associated with lone parents and work. It is a real change for lone parents to be shown that work can be a viable option for them. We are building on that in the single work-focused gateway pilots, which will be established from June onwards. Lone parents claiming income support will be required to attend an interview to learn about how they can be helped to independence through work. It is about informing every lone parent's choice. It is not enough to make sure that welfare offers support and advice to them: we must ensure that work really lifts lone parents out of hardship.

The working families tax credit, which will be introduced in October, will help to do just that, because it will provide more generous help to support families in work than the current family credit, and it will help 400,000 more families than the current system. Importantly for lone parents, the support that it provides for child care is more generous than that on offer previously. The WFTC is a £5 billion-a-year investment in making sure that families can get away—and keep away—from those workless households and the cycle of poverty to which my hon. Friend referred. It will provide vital help for hundreds of thousands of lone parent families.

Child maintenance can also play a key role in ensuring that work really pays for lone parents. I hope that my hon. Friend will recognise and welcome the fact that, under the WFTC, all maintenance payments will be disregarded. Reform of the child support system, a subject that my hon. Friend rather skirted round, will create a simpler, more efficient system, and will get more non-resident parents to pay to support their children.

In our wide-ranging and innovative reforms, we have not neglected the need for other changes to help lone parents. In the Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that, from this October, when lone parents on income support obtained jobs they would continue to receive that benefit for the first two weeks during which were in work. Having to meet new costs such as the costs of travel and child care, as well as having to wait for up to a month to receive 1216 wages, can present what appears to be an unbridgeable gap to people contemplating a return to work. Organisations representing lone parents are delighted with the change, which they say will make a real difference. Again, we are investing welfare money in ending the problems that worklessness causes them and their children.

When we consider what Government can do to help families in hardship, we do not confine ourselves to social security and the new deals. We believe that all Departments should work together. The national minimum wage, the national child care strategy and the promotion of family-friendly employment practices will help us to achieve our aim, and we are working across Government to deal with the consequences of past economic failures that are already afflicting our communities. We are investing £40 billion in the modernisation of health and education, £800 million in the new deal for communities—with which we intend to address the multiple social problems in our poorest areas—and £540 million in the sure start programme, which is intended to help young children who are at particular risk of social exclusion.

Let there be no doubt that the Government are committed to combating poverty and social exclusion. Earlier this month, in his Beveridge lecture, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister placed us at the start of an historic mission to end child poverty over this generation. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security will be publishing annual reports on how we are tackling the causes of poverty across the board, which will constitute an annual audit, and will keep an eye on the task that is before us.

We can achieve our aims only by increasing opportunity and reducing the inequality that is caused by prolonged worklessness, and improving the position of lone parents and their children must be at the heart of that. We have already made bold reforms, and have invested in an active system of welfare in its widest sense. We will continue to take action across Government to combat poverty.

Many lone parents and their children have already begun to benefit from the Government support that they deserve, and many more will do so during the coming years of this Government.