Lone Parent Employment

: That is what I am telling him, anyway. There are three huge challenges for the Department for Work and Pensions. One of those issues—pensions and retirement—we are not talking about today, but the other two big issues are getting as many people as possible back into the labour market, which is in their interests and in those of the taxpayer, and child poverty. This debate touches on both those vital issues. The Minister was gentle with her Conservative counterpart—unusually gentle given the nature of these debates—about the developments in both those areas in the 1980s and 1990s. I do not go over those developments purely to make the hon. Member for Daventry uncomfortable, but it is worth drawing attention to the enormous social changes that took place in those decades, because they had enormous economic and social consequences. For example, there was an explosion in lone parenthood in the United Kingdom, which was not seen across most of the rest of the developed world. For a while, we were the lone parent capital of most of Europe. Associated with the explosion in lone parenthood was an almost unprecedented increase in child poverty from something like 14 children in every 100 at the end of the 1970s to a peak of 34 in every 100 at the mid-point of the 1990s. I suspect that that phenomenal social change has had enormous implications for crime rates, education standards, benefit costs and other consequences that fall on the taxpayer. One of the Government's great achievements so far is their attempt to tackle child poverty, albeit with only moderate results so far—moderate in terms of relative poverty, but more impressive in terms of absolute poverty. The Government have also had some success in getting people back into the labour market. As the Minister indicated, the lone parent employment rate has increased by about 10 per cent. in the past decade or so. That is quite a large increase considering the nature of these things, but I remain sceptical about whether the 70 per cent. target will be easy to deliver. The Government should take those issues seriously for three reasons, the first of which is that worklessness has a huge impact on the country as a whole. About one in four individuals of working age are not currently in employment, and groups such as lone parents are over-represented among workless households. That means that people in those households often have low incomes and lose contact with many of the social opportunities that people have through work. It also means that they will probably retire on poor incomes. The benefit cost alone of lone parenthood is vast—about £4.6 billion a year, which I believe is more than we spend on jobseeker's allowance. That is a significant change from the situation 20 years ago. At the same time, 27 or 28 per cent. of children are still in relative poverty. The impact of that on opportunities for those children, as well as the situation in which they live, must be phenomenal. Therefore, any sensible Government—now or in the future—should do everything possible to increase employment rates for lone parents and the population as a whole, and attempt to tackle and reduce child poverty. Whether it will be possible to reduce child poverty to zero is another matter, as is the question of whether the Government are sensible to set a target of zero for child poverty without setting any equivalent levels for poverty among other individuals. A legitimate issue for debate, on which we can only touch today, is the fact that the Government have decided to pour a lot of money into areas of the benefit system covering what are seen as worthy and deserving causes, such as children and pensioners, when many people rely on benefits that have been fixed in relation to prices rather than wages for the best part of 20 years. For example, the jobseeker's allowance rate is now about 12 per cent. of average earnings, compared with 21 per cent. in the late 1970s. If that price indexation continues, people such as single parents who rely on the underlying benefits rather than the child-related benefits might find themselves in deep poverty in future.