Comparing policy approaches to supporting lone mothers

Jane Millar

It has been just over twenty years since the Finer report on lone — parent families in the UK was published (Finer 1974). The report was the first attempt to consider in detail the policy implications of changing family structure and remains the most detailed and comprehensive account of the circumstances of lone parents. However, it had only a very limited impact on policy. Few of the recommendations were put into practice and the approach adopted by Finer—that the growth in lone parenthood reflected a welcome liberalization of the institution of marriage and that the most pressing issue was the poverty experienced by lone mothers and their children— seems very far indeed from the official view today. In fact, for most of the twenty years following the Finer report, policy towards lone parents has changed very little. The most tangible change has been the targeting of some additional help towards these families within existing benefit provisions: one-parent benefit as a small supplement to child benefit, less stringent means tests for family income supplement (later family credit) and housing benefit, more recently the lone-parent premium in the income support scheme (Millar 1994a).

But following this long period when policy has been relatively static, the early 1990s have seen some significant changes, which, if successful, will create a very different structure of support for lone — parent families in the future. Central to the thinking that provided the framework for these policy changes was the argument that lone parenthood was imposing an unacceptably high cost on society as a whole, both directly and indirectly. The direct costs include the rising social security bill for lone parents, which tripled in real terms during the 1980s, as the proportion of lone mothers receiving supplementary benefit or income support rose from about half to over three-quarters, while the proportion of lone parents employed fell to below four in ten, and the proportion receiving maintenance

from their former partners fell from about one half to just under a quarter. Lone-parent families also made up an increasing proportion of homeless families and families living in the otherwise dwindling public housing sector.

The indirect costs are not so readily quantifiable but they supposedly arise from the status of lone parenthood itself. As analysed in more detail in other chapters here (particularly Burghes, Chapter 9, Phoenix, Chapter 10, and Roseneil and Mann, Chapter 11), lone parents, especially single mothers, are seen by some as the epitome of the failure of the family: irresponsible mothers whose motives—and capability—for motherhood are questionable and who ‘choose’ a life of benefit-dependency. These women are ‘wedded to welfare’ for both their incomes and their homes. Their ‘selfish’ choices mean that their children grow up damaged by the lack of a father and this has a negative impact throughout society as a whole (Dennis and Erdos 1992; Morgan 1995). These fathers too have come in for an increasing share of condemnation, for refusing to accept their responsibilities to their children and happily leaving the taxpayer to meet the costs of their personal choices: costs that include rising rates of juvenile delinquency and crime, drug abuse and second-generation unemployment and lone parenthood. Here is the dependency culture indeed.

Thus the key policy objective has become to reduce the costs of lone parents both in the short term (by reducing dependency on income support) and in the longer term (by making separation more costly and hence perhaps marriage more attractive). The key legislation was, of course, the 1991 Child Support Act. The provisions of the Act were twofold: first to get more separated fathers to pay higher amounts of child support, and second to get more lone mothers into employment. Thus the aim of the legislation was to change the balance of financial support of lone mothers—to reduce the role of the state in providing that support, to increase the role of fathers through higher child maintenance payments, and to encourage greater self-support through employment.

The relationship between these three potential sources of income — earnings, benefits, maintenance—is central to analysing the nature of the support offered by the welfare state to lone mothers. It thus provides a framework to compare the policies of different countries. Just as the number of lone-mother families has been rising in the UK for the past two decades and more, so other countries have also seen an increase in the number of such families. The UK and Denmark have the highest rates of lone parenthood among the European Union countries, at 15-17 per cent in the late 1980s when the EU average was estimated at about 10 per cent (Roll 1992). Even countries like Ireland—where there was no civil divorce before 1996—have seen increases in marital separation and unmarried motherhood and so rising proportions of lone mothers (Millar et al. 1992; McCashin 1993). Lone mothers make up a significant proportion of all families in the Scandinavian countries and in the English-speaking countries (OECD 1990, 1993). Table 5.1 summarizes these figures.

Widowhood has generally declined as a factor leading to lone motherhood. The most common route into lone parenthood is marital breakdown (divorce and separation), although unmarried motherhood accounts for a rising proportion of the total in some countries, the UK and the USA included. Thus the issue of how to support lone mothers, and especially the ‘new’ group of non­widowed lone mothers, is an issue for policy in many countries. What role should the state play? What role should the separated parent play? And what role should the lone mother herself play? This chapter seeks to review the policy responses in different countries to these three questions. The objectives are first to describe the nature of the support available to lone mothers in different ‘welfare state regimes’, and second to examine the ways in which assumptions about gender roles affect welfare provisions.