All afternoon we were bombarded with misery about childhood today: kids are
lonely and unhappy, fat and bullied. Half don’t eat breakfast, a third of
under-16s regularly drink, nearly four in ten 15-year-olds have had sex.
About 4,000 or 8,500 children (depending on which spokesman you were
listening to) were admitted to hospital with alcohol-related illness, some
630,000 prescriptions for antidepressants are handed out to children
annually and 11.2 per cent of girls self-harm.
Their dads are missing, their mums are working (or not working, which is
worse), half a million are in failing schools, a fifth are shouldering adult
responsibilities because their parents are disabled, drink or drug-addicted.
Welcome to the Conservative Party conference 2007, and its message of
optimism, hope and change. Once the politicians had finished, a slew of
invited voluntary workers stood up to plead that we offer the children of
chaotic and underprivileged families hope and aspiration rather than
condemnation and pessimism.
And the solution from the Tories? More outside play. That was the conclusion
presented at the end of Monday’s long and miserable session by the man asked
by David Cameron to conduct “an inquiry into childhood”, David Willetts. In
his earlier guise as Shadow Education Secretary, Mr Willetts was coming up
with some challenging stuff about how quickly social segregation is
entrenched in the early years, before kids even get to school, because of
the ruthless ambition of the middle classes. That effort saw him removed
from the education brief to a quieter place. Now, in a decent but hardly
earth-shattering piece of work, he talks about the need for more
playgrounds. The Conservatives’ childhood agenda has shrunk from revolution
to roundabouts.
At least he isn’t doing any harm with that. I wish the same could be said for
Mr Cameron’s other “childhood” policy, rewarding couples with children with
extra tax credits. Mr Cameron appears unable to see what every other
numerate person can: his plan is rubbish.
It is not the case that couples who stay together are penalised and paid less
in working tax credits than lone parents, an error parroted by people who
are too well paid to know. Both families get the same. The Tories have been
using a grossly misleading comparison, first cited by the Labour MP Frank
Field, to back up their case. Mr Field has said that a single mother working
16 hours a week, after tax credits, gains a total income of £487 a week, but
a two-parent family earning the minimum wage has to work 116 hours to gain
the same income.
If you take childcare and housing costs out of it (for some reason Mr Field
put the lone parent in rather expensive private rented accommodation, which
is totally unrealistic), the lone parent in fact has £209.49, but the couple
has £309.18 net income. Look at any honest statistics: single-parent
families are far more likely to be poor than two-parent families.
The only problem addressed by Mr Cameron’s policy is this: if you are a couple
with children living together, but you lie about the fact, then you are up
to £1,700 a year better off from the working tax credit, as one of you can
claim a lone parent top-up. This encourages people to lie about their living
arrangements when they claim the tax credit. So Mr Cameron wants to offer
the extra £1,700 to couples with children who admit to living together.
That’s it. At most it will stop some low-earning couples who live together
but lie about it from lying about it in future.
See? It doesn’t make any sense as a “boost for marriage”. You don’t have to
get married to be eligible. And if you are already married, well, you don’t
need the encouragement then, do you? You’re just being given an extra £30 a
week. Nice, but why? If you want to raise children out of poverty, as the
Tories claim, then putting extra money into working tax credit for couples
is about a third as effective as putting it into more child tax credit for
all children, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Mr Cameron’s policy is unfunded. It will cost an estimated £3 billion a year,
a penny on the basic rate of income tax, no mean amount to play around with.
There isn’t even any evidence that it will be effective: tax breaks for
marriage in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with a steep rise in family
breakdown. So its only value is a symbolic one: to signify that Tories
believe in two-parent families. Yet the recent Unicef report into childhood
found children to be happiest in the Scandinavian countries with among the
highest rates of lone parenthood in the world: it doesn’t have to make kids
unhappy; inequality does.
No wonder lone-parent campaign groups have been alarmed. This would appear to
be a shift back towards the days when senior Tories thought it was OK to
stigmatise and discriminate against single mothers – that’s nearly two
million parents raising more than three million children: one in four of all
kids.
I wonder if Mr Cameron knows who these people are. The median age of a lone
parent is 36 (only 2 per cent are teenagers and less than a quarter are
under 30), half were previously married, a tenth are men. I was thinking
about the three lone-parent families I know locally. One is a widow who had
three children under 5 when her husband died. Another is a divorced man
whose son chose to live with him, not his former wife. A third was left by
her husband when she was pregnant. All of them work. Their childcare
arrangements are fiendishly complex – and expensive. Their average age is
over 40. Why these people should deserve less help than a couple raising
children together is beyond me.
But I’m sure they will be delighted when I tell them that it’s OK because Mr
Willetts is going to build more playgrounds.
Solving the appalling mess created by Mr Brown's hamfisted tax credit system will not be easy , but personally I would have much more faith in Mr Field than the author of this piece to be able to identify the roots of the problem.
This is the man who was asked to think the unthinkable and was sacked (presumably at Mr Brown's behest) when he did, right at the start of the New labour disaster.
cuffleyburgers, Lucca,
Mr Quick, Sir, I think you confuse a cynical socialist for a
feminist.
Alison Miles, if you want to do something usefull and really
intellectual , why don't you expose the changes in social
housing and what the effective privatisation has cost US
ALL.
The fact that Cammeron can't see the skeleton in Labours
cupboad, in my view makes him either lazy or not fit to run
our country
M walker , worcs, worcs
Added to my last comment. Lone parents who do not live in one room and are not asylum seekers, in fact DO have to privately rent as there is no other option aside from living with parents. If you live in London, I'm afraid on average a 2 bedroom flat will cost anything from £750 a month upwards. So this is not unrealistic at all but a fact. I suppose those of us lucky enough not to be in a position where you find yourself on your own with a child will have absolutely no experience of this at all and so shouldn't comment on it unless they have thoroughly researched the subject. Also, lone parents from London get exactly the same amount of tax credit as people who live in areas where house prices are a hell of a lot lower than here.
Sally Eason, croydon, england
Angela, Guildford. Excellently put. How refreshing not to have the downtrodden single mother approach that is paraded in front of us by the left wing BBC everytime someone at least tries to tackle the problem.
Still easy to have a go at someone who tries to do something constructive than simply maintains the current status quo that will see the ASBO culture take over our streets in a few years.
Salty, Reading,
D Case of Newquay; evidently you have prophetic powers in the matter of the next election. What are you going to do when Brown walks it back to number 10?
B J Carroll; yes it would be nice to have two parents---as my grandfather was blown to pieces on the Somme, my father did not have this privilege and my grandmother endured real hardship as a consequence. Those friends of mine who ended up as single parents did not embrace this situation lightly either.
Paul Francis of Brisbane. You must know that there are suburbs of ,say, Adelaide, S.A. almost entirely peopled with single parents. And I don't presume that single parenthood is unknown on the Goal Coast, either.
Dectora , London, UK
Our system subjects people on low or lowish incomes to three separate tax regimes - income tax, national insurance and tax credits, all with different rules, all with penalties for non-compliance, all backed up by the full coercive power of the state.
This is silly, expensive, inhuman and inaccurate. It is bound to create anomalies, non-compliance and unfairness. It means that we have to grovel for some of our money that shouldn't have been taken from us in the first place. It is a job-creation scheme for tax parasites.
It should be replaced with a single tax system, where we give money to people who haven't got much and take it from those who've got quite a lot.
Frank Upton, Solihull,
The problems we have today come from no police on the streets. Where i live we use to have a great town untill our local station was down graded to just an office and left the streets to the youths of today. You can be the best parent in the world, single or married, but when you have no one policing the streets even the best of kids can go off the rail.There behaviour then changes and has a knock on effect in the home and school and it has nothing to do with tax breaks. You can police your home but you can't police the streets. Bring back local courts to deal with local minour offences, use the money from the fines imposed to go back into the community and that takes the pressure of the high courts, use the money to pay for the police to go back on the beat and keep the community safer it worked when i was a child and you always saw police on the street. The only time you see police is after the crime there not there to prevent it,
Alan Mc Ateer, Kilsyth, Glasgow, Scotland
What a cynical socialist you are (but aren't they all?)
Don't you think that single parents lie about their status then?
Or do you believe that Nu Labour keeps a full and factual check on all of them with a Stalinistic police force? On second thoughts, you're probably right, given that we have a Stalinistic government running the whole mess.
Tony Quick, Slough, UK
I don't think that Frank Field deserves to be rubbished. The worst thing that was done to the man was the rubbishing of his Report on Pensions. He was looking to the future at the time, and now that future is upon us.
We all should recognise that the future yet to come depends on reversing the trend for our average age to increase. We need people *working* to pay for *everything* through taxes.
So any government must look at the options for doing what it can to stabalise the family relationship as the time-proven vehicle for raising our young.
Has anybody got any suggestions?
The Tories are at least proposing *something*.
Incidentally, DC appeared to me sincere. In this "modern" world if someone says something to me, my first instinct is *not* to believe that he is saying the opposite. I *really* believe that most of your correspondents here are saying what they believe. I may be disappointed, but am I wrong?
Arch Wernham, Perth, Scotland
What a shame Dave couldn't come up with more radical policies than having a pop at single parents.
He could revolutionise the UK and reduce tax at the same time by -
legalising and taxing prostitutuion
legalising and taxing drugs
not renew our nuclear deterent
reduce immigration
simplify the tax structure - flat rate, big personal allowance
and get rid of working tax credits.
The country needs to stop plodding the same path that doesn't work and get some common sense policies that are affordable and work in the real world.
ian, durham, durham
Top-up for single parents working 16 hours was possibly
one of the first things new labour did in 1997 as I can
remember talking to to some arogant young mother at
the time, pleased as punch that it was that easy to play
the system, So i have to take that back...............................
What New labour has done is to means tests the poor
then and gives it to the Landlord class.
If an insurance company operated the way our benefit
system did.............. no one would pay the premium.
The real benefit cheats are the one sitting in westminster
the last 30 years and we now have a benefit system thats
that has no principles what so ever.
M walker , worcs, worcs
As a single man, thats paid tax for 30 years and now means
tested off the register, its nice to see all the hand outs that
I've paid for........ and kept women voting labour.
Couples living apart or just working 16 hours and no more;
My god, Camerons just worked out that some people play the
system.........................................................
But this was been going on BEFORE 1997...............................
it was conservative legislation.
M walker , worcs, worcs
Thank God someone in the Media has highlighted this issue, well done Alice. As the child of a single parent I disagree with the whole issue of giving married couples more money than single parents. The Tories forget the fiancial burden of looking after a house by yourself, despite benefits. At least under Labour single parents got some help. I'm not a Brown fan but i'm not falling for 'Call me Dave' Cameron. Tell the smug married to shut up.
Sarah , Belfast,
"At most it will stop some low-earning couples who live together but lie about it from lying about it in future." What about single parents who find a new partner they'd like to move in with? At the moment, they lose a lot of money if they do so, so the current policies encourage staying single (or lying). I am in this situation myself. My partner has three kids from a previous marriage, and is therefore working part-time, but she cannot now get any tax credits because she's living with me.
Thomas Widmann, Glasgow, Scotland
Anyone who thinks that a couple on the brink of divorce will stay together for the sake of £30 per week is deluding themselves. I don't believe that the vast majority of separating parents take the decision lightly and won't desist on the basis of tax planning.
Equally I think it unlikely that people are voting with their feet by not marrying because the tax allowances need amending. Our society has become flexible and slightly rootless (as required by the changes first introduced by the Thatcher reforms to the economy ) - we are living with the consequences. The breakdown of the social contract may have been good for business - it has not neccesarily been good for everyone else, especially not for the nation's children.
There are far more fundamental issues that need to be addressed, in particular the strains on family life imposed by two working parents, and attempting to combat a fundamental imbalance of that sort by making minor tax concessions is unlikely to succeed.
Pauline Bird, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey
Having read the above article I am now thouroughly depressed and it is the fault of that fool Cameron who has never ever had to endure the misery of so many children.
I had a priviledged childood marred by a conserted effort on the part of Germany to kill me and so many others.
All of this misery is to a greater extent because of a Welfare state that pays so money more allowences than they can earn money; Hello yobo culture; and yobo children.
I do not know the answer but it will take another 50 or 100 years to bring about a change, but then in the meantime, Anglo Saxon stock will be out numbered by immegrants.
In 10 years some inner cities will have a majority of ethnic minorities, so what will the standard of life become?, certainly not the White Anglo Saxon Protestant country we have been foe so very long.
How has this come about? Why politicians have destroyed this country, politicians of both major parties.
Charles Horne, Chichester,
Alice, I don't think you have considered the couples who really wouldn't lie about being married - Cameron's policy is a benefit for them. James, Coventry
James, Coventry, West Midlands
Are you sure "a third of under-16s regularly drink"?
That is approximately 3.85m children - sounds unlikely to me.....
Matt, London, UK
The real point of course is that all post-War parties have tried and failed in using the tax and benefits system to change social behaviour. The solution would be for Government to retreat from this tax/spend position and instigate a flat rate personal income tax which has huge benefits for individuals. Families will or won't stay together but there's no need for the stae to bribe people to do it.
Peter Bench, London,
Good article Alice, this week has proved what a SHAM Cameron and his pals are, elect them to goven the country ? No way .
Rudd, Worcester
tony rudd, worcester,
Ok, so some single parents are good some married parents are bad but the state can play the percentage, parents can't.
If on average it will cost the state less to support a child of a married couple than an unmarried couple or a single parent then it is to the benifit of the state to support married couples.
John Mohan, Letchworth GC , England
The solution is to remove the government from the equation as much as possible. Imagine life with practically zero income tax, no capital gains tax, no vat, no customs & excise duties, lower corporate taxation, lower NI, no inheritance tax: think how much cheaper life would be. From that cheaper life you choose to fund your own choices; you earn, you save & you pay. The govt maintains law, order, defence and promotes the development of infrastructure as well as some minimal public housing, education & health programs & that's about it. You'd soon find that people would make more responsible decisions about getting together for life, raising children, and splitting.
Let's try looking at this from the other end of the telescope for a change by building up from no Govt, stop looking to the govt for solutions. I think Britons & the govts they elect have long forgotten how good we are at managing ourselves despite this being our more natural state.
charlie poulton, islington & hong kong, England and China
All this stuff about marriage incentives is absolute nonsense. Divorcing my cheating wife cost me £60,000.
I can't wait to see the tax incentive that's going to encourage me to risk £60,000 - and my home - again!
Jon Page, Winchester, UK
It doesn't matter what political party one might favour, they all seem to have lost the plot!
Ever since the political forces decided it was better to send both parents off to work instead of supporting one to stay at home to look after their children, it has been down hill.
Maybe we should bring back the married persons tax allowance and encourage one of the parents to stay at home to look after their children.
If the tax threshold was increased to £10,000 per annum maybe we wouldn't need to have both parents working!
We also now have the biggest problem of all. DONT GET MARRIED!
or you will be worse off!
If you 'live' with someone you can legally have 2 primary homes and pay absolutely no tax when buying and selling either one of them. Not a wonder house prices are so inflated!! If you get married you are only allowed the one!
How fair is that!!
Roddy Baldwin, Petworth, UK
£3 billion a year. The money wasted on NOMS could have paid for that then. And please tell me, Alice, as the father of four children who was financially penalised firsth by Thatcher and then by ZaNu Labour, when at last I started to earn some money, WHY helping families with children is such a bad idea? Given that childrens' tax allowances are a thing of the past, given that Child Benefit was then in effetc frozen for years, and given that larger familes get hit hardest by indirect taxes.
Jeremy Poynton, Fromeville , 51st State
Im I wrong or isnt the main reason to stay together Love?
I myself wouldnt like to be a child with 2 parents that only stay together for a few extra pounds.
john, glasgow, uk
Yes, but luckily children don't have the vote.
Furriskey, sINGAPORE,
You are sounding like a Brownite running scared and as the next set of polls will show you, there is every reason to be running scared.
David Cameron will be the next PM, take my word for it, these things I know.
D Case, Newquay,
Surely you prove the opposite of what you saet out. If you lie about being together you are £1,700 worse off than if you don't - but actually you are better off if you are a couple. Seems something of an oxymoron to me and suggests that it is your case that is rubbish.
sam, london,
The free money dished out to single mothers is a big source of the problem. The justification is to help the children, the snag is that the policy means we now have far more of such families.
The actual mathematics of tax allowances and the odd £20 a week don't matter too much. As long as single parenting is a finacially viable option, we will have many single parents.
(Young widows are a complete red herring. There are only a few of them and they can be generously supported by the taxpayer with no moral hazard.)
Malcolm McLean, Bradford, UK
The piece was long on using the word rubbish and short on suggesting alternatives. I am not a Tory, nor a pessimist, but I share what I think is the concern of most of our people when they shudder as another statistic is unearthed showing us as among the worst in the world for binge drinking, teenage pregnancies, family breakdown and divorce, obesity etc etc.
Alice quotes a sample of three single parents who need help. While it is a small sample you have to ask who has been responsible for helping these three people over the past ten years? Could it be the same man who double and treble counts on soldiers leaving Iraq?
Incidentally, when you are in rubbishing mode you have to ask what is wrong with building more playgrounds?
Anthony Hollis, Frimley Green, Surrey
What's so bad about underage drinking and sex anyway? Some of the best days of my life were spent that way. It was certainly a lot more fun than being the mortage work and children fettered adult that I've grown into.
Redcliffe, London,
'Looney left' is quite right - Cameron is making sounds and moves in the right direction. Quite unlike Labour, who have their fingers tightly in their ears and are ploughing determinedly on along a road that for ten years hasn't led anywhere. My vote will most certainly go to Mr Cameron's fresh approaches, and right now he doesn't need to prove to me that they're fool proof. Just different will do.
Helen, Northants,
So if you take childcare and housing costs out "the lone parent in fact has £209.49, but the couple has £309.18 net income" - it is not clear whether you understand that it costs significantly more to house, feed and clothe two people than one.
These proposals would not make lone parents worse off so why should they begrudge others?
M Walls, London,
Alice, you seem extremely confused. The working Tax credit rise is different to the marriage allowance. Regarding the Tax credit rise your argument appears to be that this is a bad policy because all these couples are lying, where is your proof of that and if they are getting the benefit anyway what is the problem. Lets suppose they are not lying then two parents are better than one for bringing up children lots of studies show it, that is the point.
For some reason you then go on about a penny on income tax. Nobody was suggesting that is how it is paid for. It will be paid for over the course of a parliament by returning people on incapacity benefit to work.
Steph, Brighton,
There is no merit in having a tax system that encourages people to lie. It is about time that such dross as this article is recognised and seen for what it is - an attack on a decent proposal that seeks to stop this and to encourage marriage and a stable environment for children to grow up in. When I married there were all sorts of encouragements, like marriage tax allowances and MIRAS. Now it is the other way round and it has got to stop.
Diddly Do, Liverpool,
I would tend to go with Frank Field, ie that the current discrimination against two parent families is unjust and deeply damaging to society.
No doubt Alice would also be a fervent backer of religious claims for polygamy to gain heavy state tax breaks - the key idea of the politically correct liberal agenda is to destroy the traditional social ethos based on the nuclear family as the ideal. It's a basically negative motivation.
Tim, Oxford, UK
Cameron's initiative is not about affecting single parents is about doing keeping families together, why can't you Alice see that? Or maybe yourself are a single parent looking to tax discounts to encourage you to remind single, or maybe even have more children from different parents to keep milking tax discounts.
Why don't include in your calculations next time what it costs in terms of housing to have single parent families, the cost of a divorce, and also mention please how many parents become homeless after it.
Mr. Reader, Reading, Berkshire
Can this woman not see that the best start in life for any child is to have a mother AND a father? Cameron for all his faults is trying to restore the family unit. You know, mother , father, aunts, uncles and all the stability that goes with it for children. Far better don't you think for a boy to have parents rather than to either not know who his father is or to be one of several or several dozen children whose father is an absentee layabout, increasingly of the ethnic variety. And as for the criticism about children being encouraged to play. One of the great joys of my childhood was the playing of games. We were encouraged in this regard by teachers. Of course a rapacious Labour Council had not in the 50's and 60's sold off our school playing fields to the developers. If Cameron can bring back sport into schools it will be another feather in his cap. I agree with the correspondent from Chesterfield. This article is utter dross.
B,.J. Carroll, Hong Kong, China
Do I understand correctly when you state that the Tory leadership accepts and relies upon data supplied by a Labour MP without checking out for themselves?
If so, then it seems reasonable to conjecture that they also trust the present government and it's parliamentary group.
I guess the election playgrounds will not have as many swings as the current opposition would like to see.
Keith Robotham, Dalsland, Sweden
I am surprised that the intelligent Alice Miles should so wilfully ignore a broad picture to mount a defence of good single parents whom nobody is attacking. I am a single, divorced, parent and have brought up a child with no input, financial or otherwise, from her father. Life was economically very difficult at times, but somehow or other I neglected to become a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or sink into welfare dependency. Possibly helped by my interest in encouraging it, my child did well at school, went on to achieve an academic degree and is now gainfully employed. So you could call her, along with thousands like her, brought up by single parents like myself, fortunate.
However, the fact remains that children from stable two-parent families are statistically far more likely to have that fortunate childhood and grow into responsible adults. I see no threat at all to my own status in a Conservative commitment to encourage such households, any more than I would be so puerile as to mock David Willetts' commitment to build more playgrounds, which is but a small part of an overall strategy to give children more, and proven beneficial, physical exercise.
Angela, Guildford, UK
Typical looney-left rantings. I thoght that The Times would have more sense that to publish this utter dross.
David, Chesterfield, UK
OK, so what is your solution? Willetts didn't put his point across very well. Maybe he meant to do something about the single mothers on council estates. Not the decent ones, but the ones who resent their children because they remind them of the male partner who abandoned them. The ones who gave birth as an alternative to working, knowing there would be no father around to provide support. Who then treat their children as a nuisance, and drag them up to repeat the cycle. I saw a few of those when I lived in Britain. I am not sure what the answer is. I know it has something to do with raising the expectations and work ethic of the underclass.
Paul Francis, Brisbane, Australia