House of Commons Hansard Debates for 2 Jul 1997 (pt 29)

6.49 pm

Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington): There was much to welcome in the Budget. Any remaining Conservative supporters who heard the pathetic attempts of the Conservative party in Parliament to criticise it with bogus allegations of leaks would be forced to weep. It is a sign of how low the party has sunk that it is unable to mount a sustained, serious attack on the Budget.

I want to discuss reform of the welfare state, which is probably the most important Budget theme for people who live in inner-city constituencies such as mine. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer made much in his excellent speech of his aspiration to build a welfare state for the 21st century. No one who has had dealings with the welfare state, whether as a claimant or through trying to help claimants, could deny that it is creaking and in urgent need of overhaul. It is degrading, inefficient and laden with bureaucracy. We can all think of ways in which it could be reformed and of improvements in the way in which we deliver benefits. To cite one, the Benefits Agency has had a series of targets imposed on it by Government. A benefit take-up target is long overdue. How can it call itself effective if it does not ensure as near 100 per cent. take-up as possible? Some benefits have a very low take-up rate.

I want to focus on the programmes that have been heralded today. First, there are my right hon. Friend's plans for lone parents. Much of the political debate about what politicians and society should do about lone parents is based on a body of prejudice and misinformation. The prejudiced and biased way in which the media have presented the debate down the years has meant that an unnecessarily and misleadingly mechanistic model of why young women become lone parents has seeped into the political consciousness. It has almost become the accepted wisdom that women become lone parents of their own free will, to get extra benefits and a new council flat. My constituency may have the largest proportion of single parents in the country, and anyone who thinks that women become single parents to get council flats should see some of the ones that they occupy in Hackney.

The argument that women become single parents to get extra benefits--if it is not made by Conservative Members, it is often put by the tabloid press--asks us to accept that when young men and women get together on Saturday night and Sunday morning, the key factor in their decision whether to have sex is the thought that if the woman gets pregnant, she will get an extra £6.50 a week income support. Stated in those bald terms, the proposition is absurd. I make that point because if we fall prey to a mechanistic model of why women in the inner-city areas of Hackney, Manchester, Glasgow and the north-east become single parents, there is a danger that we shall fall prey to the reverse analysis that if we take away benefit, women will either not have children or will rush out to work.

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I warn the House that I shall make this point over and over again in this Parliament. The reasons why poor young women in the inner city become single parents over and over again, often by different men, are complex and are not subject to mechanistic remedies, whether through the benefits system or through the welfare system. They have children because they are careless. Members of Parliament are not people to lecture others about being careless about sex. Single mothers have children because they believe that this time, the man will stay. A single mother may do it because she feels that if she has the child and dresses it up in the best that Mothercare can sell, she may, for the first time in her life, be someone. That may seen silly to hon. Members on the green leather Benches of this august Chamber, but unless we as legislators try genuinely to understand social conditions in the inner city and what drives young women to have, and keep having, children, we shall never address the problem.

My right hon. Friend the Chancellor's proposals include a package of help for lone parents. We are offering them special interviews, access to the Internet for more information about jobs, fast-track help with family credit and the Child Support Agency, 50,000 training places, after-school clubs funded by lottery money and more money for the CSA.

I object to none of those things in themselves, but let us be clear. It would be unfortunate if the Government got carried away by the assumption that young single-parent mothers do not go out to work because they do not know how much better off they would be if they did. A young single-parent mother has only to turn on the television or experience her child coming back from school and asking for trainers that cost the equivalent of a week's benefit to know how much better off she would be if she worked. While I do not decry or oppose giving single mothers interviews or having them sit in front of the computers so that they can find jobs on the Internet, the fundamental cause of their not going out to work is not lack of understanding of how much better off they and their children would be if they worked, but issues such as child care.

Let us consider some of the other remedies advanced by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. The information presented with the Budget talks about giving single-parent mothers who go to special interviews fast-track help with family credit and the Child Support Agency. If it is possible to speed up such access for some single-parent mothers, we should in justice and fairness, speed it up for everyone. It is not fair to offer swift and efficient service to some people, who will go through the rigmarole of interviews sitting in front of a computer and plugging into the Internet, while offering a slow process to others.

We also talk about making 50,000 training places available for child care workers. I am not opposed to that, but again I put it to the Government that the problem with child care, and I speak with some feeling having brought up a child on my own for the past five years and nine months, is not a lack of trained child care workers, but the lack of availability of child care facilities, whether in the workplace or in the community. Training people for jobs in nurseries that have not been built or whose fees my constituents could not afford to pay will not meet the needs of my constituents. We also talk about giving extra money to the Child Support Agency. That is fine and will help some mothers, but it specifically will not help mothers on benefit.

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There is nothing in the package that I disagree with, but until the economy or Treasury thinking reaches a point where we are prepared to put real money into a genuine national strategy to produce affordable child care, we shall still have the problem of lone mothers being out of work, not because they are lazy or want to watch daytime television rather than working, but partly because the jobs are not there and partly because of problems with child care.

My hon. Friends have talked about after-school clubs; they are all well and good, but, as I know, they do not help in the holidays. The poorest single mothers will enter the work force and find jobs in shops and service industries that involve working nights and split shifts; it is precisely those single mothers who need elaborate child care arrangements. I do not see how after-school clubs will, in themselves, meet the child care needs of women who are increasingly working in retail, cleaning and service industries in which they are required to work nights, or strange shifts involving two days one week and one day another week. No normal nursery can meet those requirements.