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Welfare Reform Bill

No. Given the right support and help with child care, the majority of single mothers will go back to work. However, we are talking about a residual group of women who, in practice, go back at the very bottom of the work pyramid, to do jobs that none of us would want to leave our three-year-old children to do. The second point is that the Government's proposal is based on fantasy figures about the availability of nursery care and child care for children aged three. Ministers have said that nursery places are available for three quarters of children, but that is not my experience in Hackney. My experience is that people regularly come to me with children aged five and above who cannot get places for them in nursery. I would be happier with the Government's proposal if the Government came to me with solid research to show that nursery provision is available for 75, 80 or 90 per cent. of children, but that is not my experience in the east end of London. We therefore have a proposal based on fantasy figures about the availability of child care. However, even if child care were available to 100 per cent. of such children, speaking as a single mother—albeit a well-paid one—I put it to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench that although some children skip off happily to nursery at the age of three and never look back, some do not like nursery, while others are sick every minute and have to stay at home for a week or two at a time. It is very hard for someone with a child who is poorly every other week or who has something wrong with them to sustain permanent employment. Only the mother is best placed to judge whether she can leave her three-year-old and go out to work. As I have said, some children are happy in nursery at the age of two or three, but some need more support because of health issues or whatever. The mother should be able to judge that, not some official in a jobcentre. Even if 100 per cent. nursery care were available, which it is not, I believe that Ministers are peddling fantasy figures. Only a mother can tell whether it is best for her child to be left while she goes out to do work-related activity or to work. The residual group of mothers that we are talking about needs support and education as mothers; they do not need to be shoehorned into jobs at the bottom of the work pyramid. Ministers have tried to explain to me that those women will have to work only if it fits in with school or nursery hours. Again, they are not talking about the real world. Are they taking into account travel time to and from work and the time it takes to pick up children from nursery? When my son was five, I had to leave Westminster an hour and a quarter before picking him up from nursery. Are Ministers adding on these women's travelling time? Are they taking into account the time that it takes to travel to pick up another child from school after picking up a younger child from nursery? This is not real world stuff. Of course work is a route out of poverty, and of course we should encourage and support single mothers who want to go back to work. In the middle of a recession that has by no means played itself out, however, it is unconscionable to talk about imposing financial sanctions on women with children as young as three. We know that those women are on the breadline because they are on benefits. It is a fact that, nowadays, the proceedings of the House of Commons are not properly reported, if they are reported at all. Colleagues on the Treasury Bench will be grateful for that, because if ordinary Labour members and supporters could hear Labour Ministers talking about imposing financial sanctions on women with three-year-old children to get them into notional jobs in the middle of a very real recession, they would be shocked and unhappy. Ministers have not made their case, and I will be voting to support Lords amendment 2.