A system which fails to reward work is not going to address poverty and is not going to encourage lone parents to seek work, writes Frances Byrne
Today, on the UN International Day of Families, OPEN's new national centre for Lone Parent Groups in Dublin is to be opened by Minister Séamus Brennan. According to the 2002 Census there are 153,000 lone-parent families in Ireland bringing up 164,000 children. Is life any different for families where there is only one parent?
Every family has its own unique experiences, but one-parent families have one thing in common: a high risk of living in poverty. Over the past 10 years, lone-parent families have fallen further and further behind income trends for the rest of the population, with for example, the highest rate of consistent poverty among all social welfare recipients.
In fact, lone parents and their children are three and half times more likely to live in poverty than anyone else in the Republic of Ireland. Access to housing, affordable childcare and the opportunity to work remain burning issues.
Over the past few weeks there has been a consultation process around the recently-published Government discussion paper: Proposals for Supporting Lone Parents. The document sets out a radical reform agenda for State supports to lone parents with an emphasis on getting more lone parents into jobs. This is against a background where, contrary to popular myth, approximately 60 per cent of lone parents on social welfare are already working outside the home. How have lone parents on social welfare received the Government's somewhat mixed bag of proposals? Most lone parents in OPEN's member groups are eager to get a decent job which would allow them to give their child the same opportunities as other children. OPEN has long campaigned for reforms that would help more lone parents get back to work and out of poverty.
It remains to be seen whether these proposals tackle the disproportionate levels of poverty suffered by lone parents and their children - over 30 per cent of lone parents and their children live on incomes so low that they cannot afford basic necessities - or whether they will consign lone parents to the growing numbers of working poor?
The central proposal of the discussion paper is to abolish the One-Parent Family Payment, which currently can be claimed until the youngest child is 18, without being obliged to seek work. It will be replaced with a new Parental Allowance.
This payment will not be restricted to lone parents - every family without an income from work would be eligible, including cohabiting and married couples.
For lone parents, this allows them to move into a new relationship, without a financial penalty, if their partner is also on social welfare or in a low paid job. But there is a sting in the tail - while the paper offers various age-related milestones for when the Parental Allowance will end, it clearly favours the withdrawal of the new payment when the youngest child reaches the age of eight years. After that, lone parents, and the partners of unemployed people, will be obliged to find work.
Poorer families will be denied the option of having a stay-at-home parent. However, the proposals would allow unemployed people look for part-time work (19 hours a week) rather than the full-time requirement that currently exists for those on unemployment payments.
OPEN's 85-member groups have been involved in a series of internal consultations around Ireland since the proposals were launched on March 20th last. Arising from them, our concerns centre not so much on what the document says, as on what it has left out. Specifically, OPEN's concerns relate to three areas: childcare; education, training & work provision; and welfare to work.
All parents know the difficulties of finding appropriate childcare. These problems are even more acute for people parenting alone. In the document, Government recognises these issues and it seems to accept that it will have to put systems in place to ensure that lone parents can get access to quality, affordable, accessible childcare. But beyond that, it is short on detail.
The key to getting a decent job, that offers the chance of promotion, a career and financial independence, is education and training. This is of particular concern to lone parents - 47 per cent of whom have no formal education qualifications.
The skills-based training provided by Fás that provides an excellent route to a meaningful, well-paid employment is often only provided on a full-time basis, starting at 8.30am. Are parents expected to abandon their children at the school gates at 8am? Again, while the proposals recognise that quality training options will have to be made more flexible and accessible to lone parents trying to combine work and family life, there is no detail within the Government paper as to how or when this will happen.
In the workplace, there is broad agreement among social partners and beyond, that much remains to be done to provide flexible options that meet both employee and employer needs - but the proposals are again conspicuously lacking in detail. As sole parent and sole breadwinner, lone parents require such flexibility in greater numbers than other parents might.
Finally, and crucially for proposals aimed at tackling poverty, there is the question of the financial implications of the reforms. And again, it is what is not in the document that is of most concern.
During OPEN's consultations, one of the first questions to come from lone parents was - what will happen when the Parental Allowance finishes? How will that affect my family's income? The Government document provides no details on this, so OPEN crunched our own numbers, and discovered that in certain cases parents would be worse off under the new system.
A new system which fails to reward work, and in fact financially penalises families just because a child turns eight, or indeed any age, is not going to address poverty and is not going to encourage any parent to seek work.
OPEN gave a cautious welcome to these proposals when they were first published. We hoped that finally Government was going to make a serious effort to support lone parents in their efforts to secure a better life for their families. On closer inspection, literally reading between the lines, we cannot treat with credibility proposals that would penalise lone parents for doing exactly what everyone wants them to do - working for a living, making a contribution to our society.
We believe these ideas can be salvaged, and are willing to engage with Mr Brennan's department to design options that will work for low-income parents.
However, what lone parents in OPEN's groups want to know is - how serious is the Minister when he says he wants to tackle poverty?
- Frances Byrne is the Chief Executive of OPEN, the One Parent Exchange and Network representing 85 member groups.
www.oneparent.ie.