The headlines earlier this summer were strangely reminiscent of the ‘90s, although whether these were the 1890s or the 1990s was not entirely clear. ‘Britain’s broken society’, lamented one newspaper while another declared, perhaps with some relief, ‘marriage back in fashion’. Much of the more alarmist comment was prompted by the publication of the Conservative party’s Breakthrough Britain report, which identified family breakdown and the rise in lone parenthood as the major cause of poverty in Britain today.
Breakthrough Britain proposed a range of measures intended to bolster marriage, most notably the return of tax breaks for married couples in the form of a transferable allowance. Other proposals included a re-weighting of tax credits to favour couples and measures to push lone parents back to work when their children reach primary school age.
What is wrong with this? Children in one-parent families in the UK do indeed face twice the risk of poverty as those living with two parents. But to suggest that lone parenthood inevitably leads to poverty is to ignore evidence from Europe showing that lone parenthood and poor child outcomes need not be linked. Unicef’s report on child wellbeing, published in the spring, found that Sweden, Finland and Denmark, which occupy three of the four top places in the material wellbeing ranks, are four of the six countries with the highest number of children brought up by a lone parent. Furthermore, studies have found it difficult to isolate the independent effect of lone parenthood on child outcomes. But they do show that poverty and family conflict are bad for children – problems that marriage alone seems unlikely to address.
But why not reward marriage if it is a social good? While one argument would be that it is not the state’s place to intervene in personal relationships, a more practical objection is that efforts to promote marriage have a poor success rate. The married couple’s tax allowance, which existed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, coincided with the highest rise in divorce rates seen in this country. And the US, where promoting marriage has long been a goal of public policy, has the highest rate of lone parenthood in the OECD. If the goal is to tackle poverty, there are more effective ways of investing the £3.8bn needed to meet the 2010 target of halving poverty for children – and ways that do not discriminate on the basis of family type.
It is also important to remember that over half of lone parents have been married and therefore have a good knowledge of the benefits of marriage. Breakthrough Britain paints a picture of young mothers choosing to parent alone, ‘an environment where young women routinely express the attitude that “everyone else is a single parent anyway so what’s the big deal if I become one”’. In fact, the average age of lone parents is 36 and only 2% are teenagers.
Labour has up until now been better at recognising the diversity of families, focusing policy on the wellbeing of children. Tax credits, investment in childcare and the New Deal for Lone Parents have all helped reduce the rates of poverty in one-parent families, and helped many more combine caring for their children with paid employment.
However, there was a surprising echo of Breakthrough Britain in the government’s green paper on welfare reform. It proposed ending the automatic entitlement to income support for lone parents once their youngest child reaches seven and moving them to the Jobseeker’s Allowance regime with its requirement to actively seek work.
Piling on the pressure will not help lone parents find jobs they can combine with caring for their children; more employment support and more flexible jobs would. A wedding or the workhouse may have been the only choices for lone mothers in the 1890s. In the 21st century, surely we can find better ways of recognising the diversity of families – and supporting all children within them.