If it is the financial burden of welfare spending which is the main concern, universal rather than means-tested benefits may be the main target for savings. If the wider ‘dependency culture’ is the focus, we are likely to be more wary of means-tested benefits, since they reduce the incentive to seek work and practise thrift. Nor will we be concerned with Social Security and tax only. Some means-tested financial benefits may also make recipients eligible for linked in-kind benefits such as free prescriptions, free school meals and cold-weather payments. If the recipient were to lose the original benefit, therefore, he would automatically be compelled to lose others, often a considerable financial sacrifice.
Moreover, a welfare recipient is likely to find himself and his family experiencing the most run-down local authority housing and the worst local authority schools in a disorderly and crime-ridden environment. The terrible paradox of the dependency culture is, therefore, that it offers people very considerable financial incentives to lead lives of idleness, squalor and despair. And we should especially honour those brave people who make the effort. But it is up to government to help them by removing, or at the very least scaling down, the temptations.
Some piecemeal measures to erode the dependency culture have already been taken. The 1988 introduction of Family Credit, paid to working families on low incomes, was an important step in dealing with the worst effects of the ‘unemployment trap’ (where people are better off out of work) and the ‘poverty trap’ (in which people lose benefit as their income increases). Alongside the Youth Training and Restart programmes, already mentioned, this has helped alleviate some of the problems of welfare dependency. It has dissuaded people who are fit and of working age from dropping out of the workforce. Whether it would be worth developing further initiatives such as Workfare is an open question. In principle, those who are ready to make heavy demands on society should be equally ready to fulfil some obligations to it. But US experience suggests that Workfare can be both expensive and frustrated in practice by bureaucratic obstruction. In these circumstances, probably the most important task is simply to curb public spending in general and welfare spending in particular, while reducing regulation and taxes, so as to make it more worthwhile to work and earn.
SHORING UP THE FAMILY
Our fourth objective, strengthening the family, must begin with the treatment of single parenthood in general and the never-married mother in particular. It is important not simply to concentrate on the financial cost of single parenthood. Even more worrying is the effect on all concerned, above all the child, but also the mother and (absent) father too. It is possible to give a good upbringing to one or more children alone, but the dice is loaded heavily against. A girl who has become pregnant and left the parental home — either deliberately in order to get a council flat or because of silliness which went wrong — is suddenly confronted with the demanding, draining task of looking after a baby. And, particularly if the baby is a young boy growing up without a father, the problems are likely if anything to get worse. Of course, some find the inner resources to cope; some are lucky enough to find the right professional or voluntary help. But human nature being what it is, even the instinctive love of a mother for her child is likely to be swamped by depression and difficulties. Nor, incidentally, is it just mother and child who suffer. It is the serious commitment of marriage, particularly marriage and children, which is the making of many young men. Perhaps for the first time in their lives they have to raise their sights and consider their responsibilities to others and the longer-term prospects which will allow those responsibilities to be fulfilled. Without such demands, they often find that the only way they can express their masculinity is through the life of the street, through crime and through getting other young women pregnant. This pattern of behaviour is most clear in the American ‘underclass’; but traces of it can be seen in other classes and other countries.
Although, as I have suggested, the moral and cultural climate is of overarching if unquantifiable importance, the benefit and local authority housing allocation systems themselves have created the conditions for increasing single parenthood.[101] The argument is sometimes advanced that, given all of the difficulties likely to ensue in subsequent years, no one would make the rational calculation to become pregnant simply in order to receive housing and benefits. But this is in fact an over-simplification of any one person’s rational calculation. There may, for example, be many prior or contributory reasons for taking the decision — misunderstandings with parents, paradoxically a desire for ‘independence’ and, of course, all of the instincts since the apple was eaten in Eden. The provision of cheap (even free) housing and of social benefits removes disincentives and penalties which might otherwise have deterred. The fact that this short-term calculation leads for the most part to long-term unhappiness does not mean that calculation is absent or irrelevant. It merely means that the calculator has a short time-horizon.
How best can we deal with this? We must first distinguish between the widow and the divorced wife with children on the one hand, and the never-married single parent on the other. Whatever benefits are available to single parents must be paid to the widow or ex-wife in whatever family circumstances she finds herself, as now. The never-married single parent would, however, receive the same benefits under certain conditions: very broadly, if she remains living with her parents or, alternatively, in some sort of supervised accommodation provided by a voluntary or charitable body with other single parents under firm but friendly guidance. In such an environment, young mothers could be helped to become effective parents, young children could be cared for under proper conditions for part of the day if the mother went out to work, and undesirable outside influences could be kept at bay. Together with quicker and better procedures for adoption, this approach would safeguard the interests of the child, discourage reckless single parenthood and still meet society’s obligations to women and their children who, for whatever reason, are in need and distress.
Of course, strengthening the traditional family involves more than altering the position of never-married mothers. The very large increase in the rate of divorce is also a clear threat to the family. Some divorced women have savings, a substantial marital home and a reasonable income and are consequently well able to provide financially for children. But large numbers receive little or no maintenance and have had to rely on the state. The new Child Support Agency’s attempt to enforce decent levels of provision for an abandoned family, although the Agency’s approach clearly has shortcomings (now being remedied), is a response to the scale of the problem.
In the circumstances of divorce, as in the case of never-married mothers, the children are disadvantaged. But the main disadvantage to such children is the trauma of family break-up itself and the emotional turmoil involved in subsequent conflicts of loyalty between two separated parents. I have always accepted that in some circumstances the best option for all concerned is to end a bad marriage, particularly one where there is serious violence. But all too often the comfortable notion of a ‘clean break’ for the sake of the children conceals a large amount of adult selfishness. Recent research confirms that divorce itself is bad for children, leading to lower educational achievement, and worse employment and emotional prospects; nor do these consequences just apply to the children of poor parents.[102]
101
In January 1994 the Government announced a limited but welcome tightening of the rules on local authority housing allocation to help tackle the problem of queue-jumping by single parents.
102
This research is summarized in a Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet,