The proposed Government scheme to make lone parents seek work has received a cautious welcome, but is it practical, asks Kathy Sheridan
The concept is hardly novel and the details are sketchy, but the reaction to yesterday's story in this newspaper of a Government plan to make it "obligatory" for lone parents to seek employment or training, is notable in one respect: the absence of outrage.
An estimated 80,000 lone parents are reliant on the one-parent family payment and politicians and commentators have learned the hard way to tread softly in this notoriously sensitive area. But lone parents too are acutely aware of the public's perception of them: Vicky Pollards all (from the BBC's Little Britain); teenage delinquents, mothers of several; apt to react poorly to well-meaning advice with splutters of indignant outrage on "this fing wot you know nuffin about" while swapping her baby for a Westlife CD.
So when a passionate campaigner such as Frances Byrne of the single-parent group Open gives the new Government plan "a wary welcome", it may be inferred that behind the scenes, the departmental groundwork has been careful, respectful and constructive.
The latest proposal suggests that a single parent would be obliged to take up education, training or employment once their youngest child has reached seven or eight years of age. Then, over a four-year period, the parental allowance would be tapered off to act as an incentive to seek a job. After this, the parent still on welfare would move on to unemployment benefit, which obliges recipients to seek work or education.
The "carrot", the crucial element of the proposal - the one that is so far earning a "wary" welcome from campaigning groups - is the "holistic" approach being promoted by the Department of Social and Family Affairs. As Byrne points out, lone parents are not all the same; one size does not fit all. So the plan is to allocate a trained welfare support worker to each individual, and this work would begin at around the time the youngest child starts school, giving the parent a three-year lead-in.
THE BENEFITS OF thoughtful reform are obvious. In this State, the child of a lone parent is four times more likely to live in poverty. In Northern Ireland - which, at 27 per cent, has the highest percentage of lone-parent families with dependent children in the UK - a recent study concluded that such households were more than twice as likely to be poor. Only 43.5 per cent of lone parents in the North are working, compared with 56.5 per cent in Britain.
These dismal figures come on the heels of 10 years of New Labour's welfare-to-work concept, the New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP), which famously lost its teeth in 1997 when 47 Labour MPs voted against benefit cuts for lone parents.
At present, lone parents in the UK are required to seek work only when their youngest child reaches 16, and are obliged to attend work-focused interviews four times a year to avoid losing part of their benefits, but they do not have to take up job opportunities.
A University of Bath report in 2003 gave the NDLP scheme a generally positive marking. It found that participating lone parents had about double the chance of gaining employment as those who had not. But it also questioned the limited range of training options open to participants, and the sometimes offensive restriction to low-level qualifications. That criticism, interestingly, is loudly echoed in the Republic, where Fás stands accused of blatant sexism by lone-parent groups for refusing to accommodate lone parents with flexible times for higher-skilled training courses, thus effectively excluding many female lone parents from the kind of jobs to which male "breadwinners" customarily aspire. The Bath report also found that the many parents who chose not to participate did so mainly because they attached a strong importance to being a full-time parent; had concerns about the idea of "strangers" looking after their children; and had concerns about the financial impact of the transition from benefits to work.
But signs of impatience are emerging. In the past month, a constant trickle of British media reports has been preparing the ground for a tougher approach, including a requirement of lone parents to "actively seek" a job when their child has reached seven, but this allied to the promise of "a flexible system of pre-work preparation and in-work support". This week, the carrot was sweetened with intimations of "cash rewards" for those who complete training.
Marking the 10th anniversary of the New Deal on Wednesday, Gordon Brown noted that "in the old days the problem may have been unemployment, but in the next decade, it will be employability . . . Lack of skills. And that means that our whole approach to welfare must move on."
In this State, where it is estimated that around 60 per cent of those in receipt of benefit are already in some kind of work, the principle of supported welfare to work is broadly accepted. But the terror of exchanging one financial trap for another is real. Research conducted by Open shows that a lone parent with one child can drop 42 per cent of their welfare income by moving to a 40-hour minimum-wage job. "It's going to be meaningless if people only earn an extra €20 to €30 from work," says Byrne.
THE PITFALLS ARE obvious to Nuala McGinnity, a 27-year-old lone parent to 10-year-old Ryan, living in Monaghan town. "There's a great fear of the unknown. And will the jobs be there? The biggest problem for me now is getting any job," she says. She has been working since Ryan was nine months old in a series of part-time, minimum-pay jobs - washing dishes, as a chambermaid, picking up glasses in a nightclub, working in McDonald's. "I had done the dirty jobs and wanted to do something better. I always wanted something better for myself and for my son."
She did the Fás courses, enjoyed working in a community employment scheme for four years, picking up work experience on the way. After a year of applying for jobs, at a rate of six a week (getting only three or four replies out of 20), she finally landed a job with the HSE last September. When she had given up her part-time job with Catholic marriage care service Accord, and finally found suitable after-school care for Ryan, she got a letter saying that a three-month recruitment embargo had been imposed. Four months on, she has heard nothing. "The Government really needs to sort out jobs for this new scheme to work. Fás and the other agencies, like the VEC, really need to be behind it." And what about childcare, that other great elephant in the nursery? "We don't have the notion of part-time childcare places at part-time prices," says Byrne. "That's one of the biggest challenges."
"Is it the fact that there are no childcare places or the price of them? I think it's both," says McGinnity. "What do they think happens to a child like Ryan when school ends at 3pm? And why does that €1,000 allowance - meant to help towards childcare - end when the child is six? What do they think happens after that? That he disappears into a hole?"
Byrne believes that "the ducks need to be in a row and we accept that there are attempts to do that. But we would be very concerned that this would be another Irish solution to an Irish problem."
And by the way, only 3 per cent of lone parents are teenagers.