Welfare Reform Bill
4:00 pm
Fiona Weir: We have a wide range of concerns about the Bill, a number of which come from our perspective as a single parent charity that not only inputs into policy debates affecting single parents, but is very much a provider of employability training. A huge amount of what we do is about trying to get single parents back to work. Our concerns are focused on a number of main areas, one of which is how to get the right balance between the parenting responsibilities that parents have, and their need to get into a job and to obtain help to get their family out of poverty.
A second area of concern runs through parts of the Bill. While we agree with the thinking around getting children out of poverty, and while we very much welcome the Government’s commitment to that, it is very important to ensure that work really is a route out of poverty. Several aspects of the proposals give us concern that single parent families will not find a route out of poverty, but will instead join the ranks of the working poor, or will face problems such as cycling in and out of benefits or low-paid jobs, with detrimental impacts on their families. We are also—partly from our own experience of what works, and partly from our respect for much of what has been achieved in the past decade to get lone parents into jobs and to improve the employment rate significantly, which has happened through a mixture of incentives and the removal of barriers—very concerned about the shift from incentives towards an approach that is very much based around compulsion. We have particular concerns about the impact of sanctions, in terms of both the hardships that they would cause to families that are already vulnerable and at severe risk of poverty, and the kind of discretionary powers that are to be given to advisers. We think that they could be detrimental to building the kind of relationship that is needed if you are going to encourage people back into work. We also think that they could create a real risk of unjust and inconsistent approaches. Those are our main concerns, in top-line terms.