At last, the coalition shows its softer side. In the interests of making sure their policies are “fair” for the nation’s poorest children, it has asked Frank Field, Labour MP to conduct a review of poverty and the effect on children’s life chances.
To be fair, it was a sorry situation the coalition inherited. The gender pay gap widens to a huge 41 per cent when looking at the part-time workforce dominated by mothers. The salary needed to cover the average cost of childcare and housing without state support sits at about £26,000 a year, with the median average full-time salary sitting at well below that.
Discrimination against mothers in the workplace is so widespread that women having their children young may find they never get to experience a career on the same terms as everyone else. Mothers are concentrated in low-paid, part-time positions that allow them to balance paid work with the unpaid 24/7 job that is parenting.
Most women in Britain, married or not, working or not couldn’t afford to breed without the support of either a partner or the state. The very act of “breeding” ensures they are highly unlikely to be able to provide for themselves and their children alone, and there are no guarantees that the person they “breed” with will always be a willing, able, or safe provider.
Twenty-one per cent of working single parents are in poverty, and the rapidly rising cost to the state of subisidising this inequality has contributed to our booming tax credits and housing benefit bill. The receipt of housing benefit and tax credits when I worked full-time as a social worker meant that, after paying rent, childcare, utilities, student loan and travel to work, I was able to spend about £100 per month on food and the clothes that my daughter had the temerity to grow out of.
There are organisations that would have shared their extensive research with Mr Field. He could have looked at the overwhelming evidence that mothers act as “shock absorbers” of poverty within families, and the effect this has on their mental and physical health, as well as their ability to parent. He could have taken a passing glance at the plentiful evidence of widespread discrimination in the workplace experienced by mothers of young children – preventing many from entering the workplace at all. He could have looked at the exorbitant cost of childcare in the UK. On Friday, Unicef declared that urgent action was needed to tackle the income poverty caused by low wages of households with children in the UK.
So I read Mr Field’s report cover to cover – after all, something needs to be done. All the things I thought were crucial to understanding children’s poverty are apparently irrelevant. What children need is secure and loving parenting, and parents who are poor clearly cannot be trusted to do this, so money paid to them should be diverted into “early years intervention care” so that clever graduate professionals can raise children’s aspirations.
Mind the gap
Frank Field’s report is the centrepiece of a strategy to tackle child poverty, which has so far seen huge cuts to the housing benefit, and tax credits that allow the parents of young children to work and stay in their communities.
Single parents are to be forced on to JSA when their children are five, with their housing benefit being cut a further 10 per cent if they fail to fly in the face of widespread discrimination and secure employment, and mothers of babies as young as one will face financial sanctions for not “keeping in touch with the labour market”. Conditions of the replacement to the current tax credit system are likely to look at whether working mothers requiring state support are doing enough paid work, and dictate their working patterns accordingly.
Our “feminist” equalities minister Lynne Featherstone MP announced this week that companies will not be required to address the gender pay gap in their organisations, and the legal aid that would allow individual mothers of young children to challenge employers when they experience discrimination has been dropped.
Rapidly rising female unemployment is to be addressed by slashing hundreds and thousands of jobs in our public sector done predominantly by women. Still, now that the clause in our Equality Bill which demands that legislation be assessed on its impact on equality has been dropped, it isn’t like anyone can point this out.
After nudging women out of the workplace and into poverty – nudging equality out of our legislation, nudging away women’s ability to seek legal help to challenge this, and slashing the meagre state funding that bridges some of that inequality – early years professionals need to teach these feckless women (and let’s face it, it is mainly women we are talking about) to centre their lives around Surestart, so they can be taught to be “better”. Create poverty and blame women for the effects.
Now I don’t want to be disingenuous. I knew that part of Frank Field’s remit had been to eliminate a “couples penalty” from our tax and benefit system. A penalty calculated by omitting the cost of childcare, or the earnings potential of women with children.The anti-abortion charity Christian Research Action and Education (Care) has long been grateful for the support of Iain Duncan Smith and Frank Field in campaigning about it.
Frank Field’s belief then was that if you took money away from single mothers, they would be more inclined to find themselves a man – thus improving their outlook. I thought the coalition had quietly dropped this obscene aim, but it would appear it has been achieved completely – without anyone bothering to announce it.
Christopher Hitchens is apparently incorrect: the cure for poverty isn’t empowering women, it’s marriage or Surestart.
Content from our partners
Related
