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Children and Families

My Lords, I want us to think again about the structure of the welfare state and social security as it affects women and their families. We need to go back 100 years, to Lloyd George’s introduction of national insurance. He refused to accept that sickness, unemployment, old age and so on were a lack of moral fibre to be dealt with by charity. He would have preferred universal provision and a decent poor law but the stigma of that was unacceptable. So he went for contributory national insurance for the head of the household—for the working man. That kept out the rough and the idle, and women. His principles were continued by Beveridge, who worked for Lloyd George. As long as the man held on to his 40-year job and his wife held on to him, they were okay. National insurance, revamped poor law, filled in the gaps for the uninsurable, the lone parent, the widow. The bones of that system—contributory national insurance for men underpinned by means-tested benefits for women—still scaffold our welfare state, wrongly in my view. Why is it wrong? Because it has continuously discriminated against women. Let us think about it. Benefits assume that you are either in full-time work or out of it. That is fine for men but impossible for most women, who can manage only part-time work. What about pensions—save for 40 years, save early, save enough, do not touch it? That is fine for men, because pensions depend on full-time work, but impossible for most women. Economics and demographics have rendered this model of Lloyd George and Beveridge pretty much obsolete. Yet we still expect women to get their benefit and pension cover either from husbands, even though half of women in their 50s or 60s are not married, or, if they are without a husband, to behave like men even though most will have children, grandchildren or elderly parents to care for. All Governments have recognised the problem and sought to tweak the system. Since 1997, the Government’s record has been admirable. They have made it possible for mothers, particularly lone parents, to work. The minimum wage, the tenth anniversary of which was yesterday, has benefited a million people, mostly women. Tax credits, childcare provision and the right to request flexible working have made work possible and work pay. As we all know, the only way to address child poverty is to bring up the child in a working family. As for pensions, five years ago 90 per cent of men, but generally only 20 per cent of women, could retire with a full basic state pension. As a result of the great work of James Purnell, the number of years required for a basic state pension is down to 30. Those caring for older people and, to my delight, those caring for grandchildren for more than 20 hours a week will receive a national insurance credit. This is a real recognition of family values and the dependence of one family generation on another. Above all—thanks to your Lordships—the Government have allowed people, mainly women, to fill in their pension gap through the buy-back of missing national insurance years. One hopes that within the next decade or so both women and men will have similar coverage, perhaps of 85 or 90 per cent, in their pensions. We have travelled a long way. And yet, why keep the state pension contributory if fairly soon almost all will be covered but in unnecessarily complicated ways? Why not go for a universal state pension based, say, on 20 years’ residence? This would be simple, popular, inexpensive and save 3,000 jobs administering a redundant system. Why continue to police a contributory system to keep people out when, on the other hand, we then use credits to bring them back in again? As for working-age benefits, income support—a woman’s benefit which recognises unwaged work—is being replaced by jobseeker’s allowance, which is a man-seeking-full-time-work benefit. Given that three-quarters of unemployed men voluntarily return to work within six months, JSA’s tough conditionality has been designed for the 22-year-old who is reluctant to get up in the morning. That is fine: a 22 year-old can be expected to work under JSA rules and to travel an hour and a half to seek work. But a job that starts at 9 am and is an hour and a half away is not fine for a lone parent with two children whose school opens at 8.45 am. The JSA has financial sanctions for the 22 year-old; but apply those to the lone parent and you also sanction the child. You can pressure the 22 year-old into full-time work, but often all that the lone parent can manage is a patchwork of mini-jobs of, say, 12 hours a week. As her benefit is deducted pound for pound it may not be worth working, so either she will not work or she will not declare it. And yet those mini-jobs may be the best preparation for her to go into full-time work when her children are older. We make her fit the benefit regime of the 22 year-old instead of devising a benefit regime that fits the realities of her life, which requires a tapered approach to benefit rather than the male model of being in work or out of it. The time has come to restructure social security by holding up the gender filter and building it around the lives and needs of women as well as those of men. I believe that we would all win from it.