By Guest
Church Action on Poverty runs a project called Thrive in Stockton-on-Tees. Thrive carries out action research into the factors that keep people in poverty, and does community organising work to help people in poverty make a difference.
Tanya, a lone parent with childcare qualifications, is one of the people who’s been involved in Thrive’s work over the last year. Her story illustrates very clearly some of the challenges that face people who are out of work but looking for a job. CAP’s Liam Purcell chatted with Tanya by phone, and she was eager to tell people about her experiences.
Tanya used to be self-employed as a child-minder, but found that the work simply didn’t pay. For minding five children – including several with learning difficulties – and dealing with difficult parents, she got just £3.25 an hour. She could only earn £33 a week and had to top up her earnings with Income Support. She found it hugely frustrating.
She tells of how one year, the fee she had to pay to be a registered child-minder jumped suddenly from £15 to £100 – a huge blow for someone struggling on limited finances. Tanya complained to her MP and got them to introduce the increase in a stepped way – but many people on low incomes would not have the time or confidence to challenge a ruling like this.
Since finishing that work, Tanya has never stopped looking for work. She has amassed a huge collection of certificates from job training courses she’s attended – she says she’s “never stopped going to college”. But all of that effort seems to be wasted. She still feels like she’s “on the bottom rung of the ladder”.
There are simply no suitable jobs out there. Many of the positions that are available are for less than 16 hours a week, which means that they’re no good for someone depending on tax credits. Others are full-time, without the flexibility needed by a lone parent. Or they’re too far away for someone depending on public transport – Tanya had to turn down one job because it required working Sundays, and there were simply no buses to get her there. Other employers will only accept online applications – and , like many people on low incomes, Tanya doesn’t have regular access to the internet. As a result, she’s been out of work for over a year, except for a six-week stint over Christmas.
Tanya complains that many of the local organisations she’s gone to for support don’t understand her situation. They even claim that she is “limiting herself” by insisting she be able to get to work easily by public transport. She also tells of how stressful she found it to attend interviews at the JobCentrePlus – it was a very uncomfortable and demeaning experience. She has been much more impressed recently by the JobCentrePlus’s lone parent adviser, who works in the community and has helped enormously with paperwork, job applications and training. There is clearly a need for services that are more accessible and friendly, rather than institutional and initimidating.
Tanya is managing at the moment on Income Support. She carefully pays all her bills on time, shops around for the lowest prices, and plans as much as six months ahead. However, she is dreading the change that will come soon when her child turns 10, and she will be forced to receive JobSeeker’s Allowance rather than Income Support. She wants to know how she is supposed to cope – she has been desperately seeking work but simply can’t find any jobs that will leave her better off than she is now.
I asked Tanya what single policy would do the most to help people in her situation – people who really want to work, but are simply unable to find a suitable job. She says that the benefits system needs to be “totally changed”. At the moment, she feels that it is penalising people like herself who want to find work and move on – and that it works in favour of those who really don’t want to work. It should do more to help those who genuinely want to work. She’s also aware that many people in her situation feel that immigration is putting a strain on services. While she knows herself that the stories about immigrants getting privileged access to housing aren’t true, she says that they cause bad feeling and bring people down.
She’s also very angry about the way lone parents are portrayed in the media. Other single parents she knows feel the same way. She says they “can’t do right for doing wrong”. If they work, they’re accused of being bad parents who are to blame for kids running wild. Yet Government policy penalises them if they don’t find work – even when there are just no jobs to be found.
She is particularly angry about recent news stories which claimed that more and more teenagers are getting pregnant and “choosing” not to live with men. She doesn’t recognise herself or her friends in any of the media coverage of single parents. She became a lone parent when she was older, simply because she had to move on from a partner who chose not to support her. She is angry that there is sympathetic media coverage of groups like Fathers4Justice, but nothing that reflects her own experience of being a single parent.
Tanya’s story left me further convinced that there’s a desperate need for our media and our welfare system to change. We have to do more to make decent, viable work available for Tanya and the many people like her, who desperately want to work. It’s absolutely unacceptable that we punish and demonise people for choosing not to work, when the jobs that are available would leave them no better off than they are now.
This post is part of Community Links and Church Action on Poverty‘s project looking at working age poverty, contributing to the European Year Against Poverty