Lone Parent Employment

: I am delighted to have the opportunity to debate, in this elite group, an important issue—lone parent employment. It is a central element of our welfare reform proposals, but in my view it has not been properly debated so far, or attracted as much attention as our proposals on incapacity benefit. I hope that this afternoon we can help to stimulate a discussion on the issues in the Green Paper as they affect lone parents. There are many reasons for our developing the provision of effective support to lone parents in moving into work, but I shall pick out those that I consider the most important. The first is our ambition to eradicate child poverty. When we came into government in 1997 the UK suffered higher levels of child poverty than nearly all other industrialised nations. During the 20 years preceding 1997 the proportion of children in relatively low-income households had more than doubled, and the division, disadvantage, despair and lack of equal opportunity that that meant was intolerable to us as a Government, because the twin ambitions of economic prosperity and social inclusion are the underpinning objectives of all our public policies. That is why we have set ourselves the challenging goal of halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it by 2020.