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Mr. Bernard Jenkin: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Campbell: I shall not give way at this point. The hon. Gentleman can intervene later if he wishes.
Most lone parents do not want a handout; they would like a job. Since I was elected to the House, I have had a number of conversations with lone parents in my constituency, many of whom are desperate to get back into work, but feel that the system conspires against them. Many lone parents in my constituency are well qualified. I remember one in particular who had a degree in molecular biology and some years' experience of working in a
professional environment. Her problem was not finding work--plenty of organisations wanted to employ her--but the fact that she could not find work that paid her enough to pay her child minder and be better off than she was on benefit. Yet the state was paying out four times more to her in benefits than it would have paid to subsidise her child minding expenses, to enable her to work.
That is a crazy way to organise the benefits system. It does not benefit women and their children, and it certainly benefits neither the state nor the taxpayer. At the same time as we are paying lone mothers to stay on benefit, my constituency is experiencing job skills shortages. Many lone parents are highly skilled. Not to use those skills is a disgrace, given that we are experiencing job skills shortages.
My hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) has been doing sterling work in that respect. She has emphasised the disproportionate number of parents who depend on benefit in the United Kingdom. When we look at other countries, we realise that in Denmark, 38 per cent. of single mothers depend on benefit; in France, the figure is 37 per cent.; in Belgium, it is 38 per cent.; in Norway, it is 43 per cent.; and in Sweden it is 33 per cent. In the United Kingdom, however, the figure is a staggering 70 per cent. No wonder our benefits bill is so enormous. Benefit is paid out not just to people who want it, but to people who would prefer to have a job.
The Daycare Trust has just published an interesting leaflet in A4 format, which is convenient for Members of Parliament who do not have a vast amount of reading time. It has found that there are 800,000 latchkey children--children who go home after school to an empty house because their parents work and no affordable child care is available. Only two children in 100 have out-of-school child care places. My hon. Friend the Member for Peckham has emphasised the importance of out-of-school child care places and the crucial part that they play in helping lone parents and other parents to get back into useful employment.
When I was first elected nearly five years ago, I was so concerned about the problem that I called together several organisations in my constituency, some in the public sector, some in the voluntary sector and some in the private sector, to see whether there was anything that we could do as a local initiative.
We quickly decided that the lack of cheap nursery places was not the only problem, and that there were other factors that we might be able to deal with more easily. One critical factor for lone parents who wish to return to work is the lack of co-ordinated information. They need information on child care. That is available from social services or, in Cambridgeshire, from the under-eights advisers. They need information on jobs, and possibly on training. Again, that is available from different organisations. Parents also need to find out whether they would be better off in work than on benefit. That involves a visit to yet another organisation, the Benefits Agency.
Let us try to imagine what that is like for a lone parent with two children, who probably does not have her own transport and has to drag the children across a city such as Cambridge to the jobcentre, the Benefits Agency, social services, the further education college and wherever else she needs to go. It is obvious that the logistics and mechanics of that can become impossible.
We decided to provide a co-ordinated information service, and that service, which is called Childcare Links, was launched on Monday by my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham. It is doing precisely the job that the Benefits Agency should have started doing years ago.
Childcare Links provides an Internet service, freely available on all Internet access points across the county. There are now 11 of those in libraries, offices and schools, and of course the service is available on home computers, too. It provides a series of interactive web pages that guide users through the different areas that must be co-ordinated by someone looking for a job.
Those pages include information on what qualifications are needed, what training may be applied for, and how to find suitable child care to fit in with any training or job that may be chosen. We have collected all the information on registered child care in Cambridgeshire, and parents will be able to search for nurseries, child minders, out-of-school clubs and much more.
In addition, the service provides signposts to other helpful agencies, such as the under-eights advisers, the benefits advice centre, the citizens advice bureau and careers guidance. We have also made available details of play, sports and leisure activities for children, so that parents can make full use of the wide range of activities on offer in Cambridgeshire.
In setting up the system, we had help from many organisations, including Cambridgeshire county council, Cambridge city council, and Greater Peterborough training and enterprise council, as well as Cambridgeshire TEC. A huge number of voluntary sector organisations also contributed. We had advice and help from the citizens advice bureau in Cambridge, Cambridge jobsearch, Cambridgeshire careers guidance, Cambridge women's resources centre, Cambridge university and many others. We also had huge support from several private organisations, most notably Andersen Consulting, which provided a superb piece of software. It is stunning, and user-friendly for people who may not be accustomed to accessing such technology.
I am pleased to report that, although the service was launched only on Monday, there are already 500 hits a day--that is, at least 500 accesses to the service every day. We have had some success already. Last week we managed to help a working mother whose children are at school in Saffron Walden, where half-term was last week. She wanted to find some child care in Cambridge, where she was working, and assumed that that would be difficult, because most of the half-term child care there would be arranged for this week, which is half-term in Cambridgeshire. I am pleased to say that she received help from the system, and quickly located a child care organisation that could help her.
Another example concerns an employee relocating from Sweden. If the service had not been available, he would almost certainly have had to wait until he arrived, to find the child care that he wanted, but by using the Internet service, he made arrangements from Sweden before he arrived, and his children are now happily settled in nursery schools in the Cambridge area.
The service is aimed primarily at lone parents. I was therefore somewhat surprised when I heard that the Benefits Agency's Parent Plus scheme would be piloted
in Cambridge. I have been told that under that scheme, an organiser has just been appointed to search for information on child care in Cambridgeshire and make it available. Given that our service is already up and working, and has made information about all registered child care available on the Internet, and through citizens advice bureaux, council offices and libraries throughout the county, I find that extraordinary.
What we are doing has been described as a first-stop shop or as "simple government". I should like to think of it as a re-engineering exercise. Instead of thinking about the ways in which public and private sector organisations supply information to members of the public, we are turning the system on its head. We are thinking about the needs of a specific group of customers, and are using modern technology to supply what they need in the most simple and user-friendly manner.
That not only makes information more accessible and easier to use, but gives people more power over their own lives. It enables, it motivates and it means that things that previously seemed impossible are suddenly within one's grasp. I hope that the service will take off, and that we shall be able to expand it nationwide. We need a Government with the energy and vision to help that happen--qualities sadly lacking in the present Government. Let us hope that we shall soon have a Labour Government, who will do all they can to promote it.
I shall briefly pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Ms Lynne), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, about pensioners who, although entitled to income support, do not receive it. About 1 million pensioners fall into that category. In many cases, the sums that people do not claim are quite large, and the average sum unclaimed is £14 a week.
Some such pensioners already claim council tax benefit, and the form used to claim it is almost identical to that used for claiming income support. Birmingham city council has an innovative scheme that makes good use of the information on that form. The computer system that assesses people for council tax benefit also assesses them for income support.
When pensioners make a claim for council tax benefit in Birmingham, the computer assesses the claims and sends them supplementary information on a piece of paper, telling them not only whether they are eligible for income support but, if appropriate, the weekly sum to which they would be entitled if they claimed it. The form then suggests that pensioners tick a box indicating whether they would like to claim. If the box is ticked, the information is sent on to the Benefits Agency, and the claim is made as simply as that.
Of course, that system would not benefit people who, although entitled to council tax benefit and income support, do not claim either. But if it were introduced throughout the country, it would enable us to catch many pensioners who do not claim the income support to which they are entitled.
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