New analysis of the plight of millions of British children should shame ministers into action
It is dismaying, though not really surprising, that lone parents and their children are very nearly twice as likely to be living in relative poverty (with less than 60% of the national median income) than families with two parents. Over the past decade or so, the work on reducing child poverty led by Gordon Brown when he was chancellor has been comprehensively undone. Conservative benefit cuts and changes aimed at reducing public spending, and incentivising work by making welfare more conditional, have disproportionately harmed many already vulnerable groups. That around 1.5 million children and their lone parents, 90% of whom are mothers, face such severe hardship should shame the ministers responsible.
It is almost a century since the suffragist (and later MP) Eleanor Rathbone published her pioneering analysis of motherhood and poverty in her 1924 book The Disinherited Family. The child allowances she advocated became a cornerstone of welfare policy after the second world war, in recognition of the fact that primary carers (then, as now, mostly mothers) need support in order to care. Yet, while the benefit remains, many of the assumptions that underpinned it have been stripped away. The message communicated by such policies as the two-child limit and benefit cap has been that having children is a kind of luxury – not a vital task that parents perform on behalf of society as a whole.
