A NEW political battle over tax breaks for marriage has broken out with a Labour cabinet minister accusing the Conservatives of wanting to penalise children whose parents “have not walked down the aisle”.

James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, has criticised Tory plans to give tax incentives to married couples and those in civil partnerships and pledged to help struggling single parents instead. He claims that Conservative policy would result in children from broken families being “abandoned to poverty”.

His intervention is designed to goad the opposition into detailing plans to offer financial incentives for marriage, a source of division within the Conservative party.

David Cameron, the Tory leader, has called for the state to give more support to marriage but refused to specify how. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is understood to want to go further. Cameron fears a traditional Tory policy of supporting marriage could open the party to claims that it has failed to modernise.

Purnell will announce the next stage of the government’s welfare reforms on Tuesday, when he tours the Dewsbury Moor estate, the former home of Karen Matthews, the mother who was jailed for falsely imprisoning Shannon, her nine-year-old daughter.

Purnell writes in a national newspaper today: “I don’t want to see children abandoned to poverty simply because their parents, for whatever reason, have not walked down the aisle.” He adds: “The Tories . . . called the events in Doncaster a ‘stark snapshot of Britain’s broken society’ . . . It reminded me of when David Cameron said that Karen Matthews was an example of the same thing and that everyone on benefits could potentially turn into someone like her.

“He thereby stigmatised everyone on benefits, but in particular the Dewsbury estate . . . Yet people on that estate spent weeks helping to look for that young girl. Far from being an example of what is wrong in Britain, they showed what good neighbours do.”

In his speech Purnell will claim that some Conservative marriage tax policies will be available to less than a quarter of families.

“With Cameron’s Tories, single parents lose either way – they want to penalise those that are in work through the tax system and at the same time they oppose our measures to help lone parents prepare for work when their children are younger. How is that fair?”

He will add: “We need to see things the way a single mum doing the right thing does. A mum who, like a million other single persons, takes her kids to school before she goes to work while the mum next door . . . who doesn’t work, leaves their kids to run wild.”

The speech will raise speculation that there may be measures to help single mothers in the budget on April 22. The cost of the benefits system is expected to soar as the recession bites with unemployment forecast by some commentators to pass 3m by the end of next year.

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