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Social Security (Lone Parents and Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2008

I had been praising the policy and deploring the language. Perhaps I could now explore conditionality, which is the core of this. I am sure that my noble friend will be able to give us the reassurances that we need to feel entirely comfortable about this policy. On the conditionality of JSA, my noble friend was very sensitive about the different situation faced by lone parents juggling childcare compared with the average people on JSA who tend to be younger, single people, three-quarters of whom are on JSA for less than six months and who will move very quickly into the labour market. That will not be the case for many lone parents who have had many years away from the labour market, particularly as they face limitations which the younger, single people on JSA will not face. The first is the suitability of a job. Jobs between the hours of 9.30 am and 2.30 pm are like gold dust. In my experience, they seldom exist, unless you are lucky enough to have a very supportive employer. Increasingly, lone parents take jobs which, in previous years, we used to call ““unsocial hours”” jobs. They are in catering or cleaning, retailing on a Saturday, or working Friday evening in the newsagents, the chip shop or the launderette. Suitable formal childcare is not available with such jobs. So there is a problem about the availability of suitable jobs with the backing of childcare. Secondly, lone parents, particularly in rural areas, may have a very real problem with juggling transport. Most lone parents are not able to afford a private car and public transport will be weak. A lone parent has to juggle taking a child to school or to the childminder or wherever, along with getting herself to work. All that will bite into the time available for part-time work, and hence the wage, which will affect both the conditionality of JSA interviews and the ability to hold down a job under pressure. There is also the problem of reclaiming JSA if a job folds for whatever reason. Conventionally, you do not easily reacquire JSA if you have voluntarily left a job. That is understandable in most circumstances, but not here. If your child is sick and cannot go to school and the childminder will not look after him as he may infect other children, as the child’s carer—the European Court has already established what that would mean—you cannot work. That is understandably inconvenient for the employer and, therefore, the job may fold, as a result of which there may be a question about reaccessing a JSA claim as it could be perceived that you have voluntarily left the job because you were not able to fulfil the perfectly reasonable requirements of the employer. There will be conflicts here in which both sides are right, and that will require sensitive negotiation. The problems of reclaiming JSA will be at least as hard for many lone parents as they would be if they were going from JSA into the labour market. Alongside that will be the ability to reclaim housing benefit, which often takes weeks and weeks. I suspect that something like the linking rules that currently apply to disabled people will need to be applied to lone parents who have no income and are reliant on JSA—if they have been able to reclaim it—as part of the New Deal framework. That would be necessary to smooth the transition and avoid finding not just the lone parent but, even more importantly in my view, the child exposed to serious poverty. Lone parents’ advisers who are handling the New Deal have a wonderful track record in acting as sheepdogs for their sheep, taking the lone parent to job interviews and helping them to buy clothes and so on. Will the task of encouraging lone parents to go not only on to JSA but into the labour market be entrusted to those self-same lone parent New Deal advisers? If not, what additional training will be given to what are often young single men who are well intentioned, I do not doubt, but have no experience whatever of trying to juggle difficult issues where there is absolutely no financial margin with which to play? I would be much more comfortable with the regulations if we had already securely banked the right to ask for flexible working for parents with children over the age of six. The Government are intending to introduce that but it appears to have been deferred at the moment. I would also feel much more comfortable if I knew that we could support the childcare of choice of most lone parents, which is that provided by grandparents. Twenty-six per cent of all childcare provided for women in work comes from grandparents. That is even more important in rural areas and for lone parents who work unsocial hours. Whatever the JSA regulations say, lone parents will often feel guilty about going into the labour market unless they have childcare they trust, and the childcare they trust is the sort that they themselves give the child, which is very often that provided by their own mother. They know that that childcare means that the child will be taken to the doctor if he is feeling poorly or be hugged if necessary, and it will be available if the mother is running late because the trains are late or the bus is not running, or whatever. I am delighted that from 2010 we shall be giving carers of older people a national insurance credit if they care for 20 hours a week. I understand the argument that going for a childcare tax credit for grandparents in their fifties to pay for the childcare that would otherwise go to a childminder may produce a dead-weight loss. However, if a grandparent enables a lone parent to work, that lone parent, who would have been entitled to HRP, will not be claiming it but will be paying their own NI credits instead. Therefore, in a sense, it amounts to a transfer of the NI credit. I hope that my noble friend can take that away and look at it, because that would be one way of making the system easier. A lone parent would feel more guilt-free about entering the labour market and sustaining a job—which, after all, is the point of JSA—if she had childcare which she trusted, was stable and would strengthen family bonds. That can be provided by a grandparent. If we decide that we cannot afford to pay for it, we can at least ensure that that grandparent in their fifties is not penalised by losing access to their pension. We should remember the problem that we had with tax credits. From the latest statistics that I saw, the core problem was that 50 per cent of lone parents experienced more than 10 changes of circumstance in any one year. As a result, the computer system toppled—it simply could not keep up with the continuously changing circumstances. For lone parents, the job contours may have changed or they may have a new partner in their life. But the primary cause of the changes of circumstances which toppled over the tax credit computer system was changes in childcare. I have no confidence that we have fully addressed that problem. We may provide after-hours care, but if the child is tired, the child wants to go home and does not necessarily want to stay at school until 6 o’clock when the mother can come. That applies to weekends, if the mother has to work in Debenhams, for example, on a Saturday, and to holidays. Unless we can ensure that there is childcare that is stable and reliable which the mother trusts, the lone parent will be in a revolving door situation between JSA and work, JSA and work. Every time the childcare collapses, which, from the tax credits records appears to be once a month on average, that lone parent will be out of the labour market. At that point, the employer will understandably get increasingly pressured, particularly in small firms, and lone parents will find themselves back on JSA again. I am not confident that we have fully taken on board the ramifications of what that means. Having said that, I remain supportive of the policy. The most important thing we can do to address child poverty is to encourage the lone parent, as soon as is possible, back into the labour market, without having her fray under the pressure we put on her. I hope that my noble friend can give me the assurances I seek on suitability of jobs, issues of transport and, above all, supporting the childcare the lone parent most needs to have available to her, which is probably that provided by her own mother.