02 February 2007
An extensive review of the welfare system will consider reducing the period for which lone parents receive child benefits – but ministers have vowed not to reduce payment levels, the Department for Work and Pensions has said.
Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton this week floated the idea of reducing the cut-off point for child benefit payments to encourage more single parents back into work.
The idea forms part of Hutton's long-term plan to overhaul and simplify the benefits system.
David Freud, chief executive of the Portland Trust think-tank, who has been asked by Hutton to review the UK's welfare system to tackle poverty and raise employment rates, will assess the possible policy change, DWP sources confirmed. One added that ministers 'have no plans' to reduce payments made to parents.
Amid reports that ministers want the cut-off age to be reduced from 16 to 11, a departmental spokesman told Public Finance: 'There has been no decision on that. The broad issue of reducing the cut-off age forms part of the current review – whether we reduce it to 12 or 13, for example - but it is merely one possibility being considered.'
Hutton told the Institute for Public Policy Research on January 30 that if the UK is to eradicate child poverty 'we need to challenge existing assumptions' about who should be in work and at what point.
He said that the UK has the lowest employment rate of single parents in Europe and stressed the pitfalls of continuing with a welfare system that embeds benefit dependency, and therefore low incomes and potential poverty, among many of the UK's 1.7 million single parent families.
'It is the opportunity to work that provides the only long-term, sustainable anti-poverty strategy,' Hutton said. '[Yet] in the UK, when the youngest child reaches 16, there is evidence that as many as a third of lone parents move seamlessly on to incapacity benefit or make a further claim for income support within the next 12 months.'
The answer, he suggested, is to encourage parents to return to work sooner, particularly as the government has planned more child care places nationally.
But Chris Pond, chief executive of pressure group One Parent Families, said there were good reasons why many lone parents stayed at home and warned ministers that 'a big stick approach would be badly targeted'.
'One quarter care for a disabled child and others simply try to provide stability in the aftermath of a family break-up. Lone parents want help in getting over the hurdles they face when they are ready to work, not further impoverishment,' Pond argued.
PFfeb2007
