Lone Parent Employment

: The proposals in the Green Paper suggest that we should lower the age in relation to which we start requiring lone parents to come in for work-focused interviews. From October last year, we introduced quarterly work-focused interviews for lone parents whose youngest child was 14. The Green Paper proposals take the age down to 11 and suggest a discussion on whether that is the appropriate age, and we await a response. I say to the hon. Member for Yeovil that much of the success of the programme in enticing, encouraging and supporting lone parents back into the labour market has been achieved because we have got the balance right between conditionality and support. Much of the reason for having to do that has to do with the social attitudes about which my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley talked so eloquently. The hon. Member for Yeovil raised a range of issues relating to whether we have sufficient budget resources to ensure that we can continue our programme. He will know the priority that the Government attach to ensuring that as many people as possible have an opportunity to work, for both economic and social purposes. He will know how important it is to all of us in government that we do all we can to eradicate child poverty. As we discover what works, we will ensure that the appropriate support infrastructure is in place to enable us to progress in the direction in which we want to go. Through the careful use of our resources, the Department for Work and Pensions has ensured that we can roll out the pathways to work, for example, for all new claimants by 2008. I hoped that the hon. Gentleman would welcome that as another element of the welfare reform Green Paper. My hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley talked largely, and extremely eloquently, about attitudes to women and work. She brought us to the reality of what the issue means to the lives of people outside this Chamber in the community and constituency that she represents. Nothing that she said was not important. All parents—particularly mothers and lone parents—struggle to find the right balance between their responsibility to support their families through work by bringing money into the house and their responsibility to support their families by caring for their children. I have yet to come across a mother who works who does not feel guilty about getting the balance wrong. Perhaps my hon. Friend and I, having been through it all, are the only ones here who can properly understand how difficult it is to get the balance right. I am proud of what the Government have put in place to support women to move into work and I am proud of what we have done through the Sure Start programme. I urge my hon. Friend to look in detail at the extended schools programme, which for me is Sure Start writ large for children throughout their childhood and teenage years. It brings together not only quality child care and invigorating activities in school, but all the other services that families need on a school site, whether they be primary health care services, employment support services or Jobcentre Plus advisers. We hope to introduce a range of services. Indeed, a debate is taking place in the House this afternoon on the Children and Adoption Bill, which contains a proposal to bring contact centres for separated parents on to the school site. There is a range of support, which builds on what we have learnt through Sure Start, for children and teenagers through the extended schools programme. I also accept entirely that if we are to be successful in encouraging more lone parents to return to work, we must not only continue to transform social attitudes, but have reliable packages of support. That is why our commitments in the extended schools policy and a clause in one of the education Bills going through Parliament, which places a duty on local authorities to provide a sufficient package of child care support for all children of school age, are so important to our policy of increasing the number of lone parents in work. I completely concur with my hon. Friend's view on working lone parents being role models for their children, particularly on some of our more difficult estates, where it is often unusual to find many people in work and where there tends to be a concentration of lone parents. I also concur with what she said about trying to encourage personal advisers to support lone parents in transforming their attitudes to work and building confidence. People very quickly lose confidence when they move out of the labour market. All of us who have had time out of the labour market, whether through having children or for other reasons, know that one can quickly start to feel that one has little to contribute. Building and retaining confidence and self-esteem are important. My hon. Friend also talked about teenage pregnancy and what we need to do to ensure that that group of lone parents decreases. We have a terrible record of teenage pregnancy in this country, with one of the highest rates. The teenage pregnancy strategy, for which I had some responsibility in my previous ministerial role, was difficult to get right so as to tackle all the issues that cause too many young people to become parents at too young an age. I was therefore particularly pleased to see the most recent figures, which I think were released in the past week or two by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families. They show a 15.2 per cent. drop in conception among under-16s since 1998 and that the teenage pregnancy rate has declined overall by more than 11 per cent. We now have conception rates lower than at any time since the mid-'80s. It is important to raise the aspirations of those young girls, who are often the children of lone parents and teenage mothers, so that they feel that there are other ways to gain recognition, status and esteem within society through education, training and other means. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley for her contribution. Finally, the hon. Member for Daventry, speaking for the Opposition, said that our proposals are pie in the sky for two reasons: because we do not have the resources to implement them and because of the possibility of the employment rate not growing.