By Maeve McGoldrick
Following the Budget 2009 announcements the DWP select committee held a one off evidence session in June to evaluate how effective Government initiatives are in (i) breaking cycles of intergenerational worklessness and (ii) assisting out of poverty families in these groups who cannot work and whether the Government is doing enough to support parents into sustainable employment. (Watch it here) It also assessed the effectiveness of cross-government co-ordination to address child poverty and referred to the Take up Challenge report . Need NOT Greed submitted evidence to the session drawn from a series of Need NOT Greed workshops based in Bromley and organised by a group of lone parent, grassroots campaigners, from Maison Enterprises.
As the theme for the Child Poverty Bill is making the most of your potential, Need NOT Greed thought it relevant to submit evidence about helping lone parents out of poverty and harnessing informal economic activity to create sustainable self employment. This is a suitable option for lone parents with childcare concerns who have an entrepreneurial ability. Yet as Faisel Rahman, director of Fair Finance points out in his regular colum ‘Becoming an entrepreneur is a tall order for someone on the breadline’ and that ‘the biggest barrier seems to be the harsh benefits system’ However, with the right support he gives the example of Jannet who started trading informally and now is off the benefits system-and paying taxes.
Around the same time there was an article in the Guardian ‘Fraught in a trap’ where Amelia Gentleman highlighted the misdiagnosis made by the architects of the current Welfare Reform which proposes that people are work shy and that punitive measures is the best approach to take to get people back to work. Amelia interviewed two lone parents who expressed their desire to be employed in a job that did not keep them in poverty and the unnecessary pressures they felt coming from JCP advisers when there was not adequate childcare available.
From the workshops we ran in Bromley and the evidence submitted is apparent that for this group of single parents motivation is certainly not the problem, the benefits system is.
“We need to invest in our future and our children are our future. Poverty means that our children have to cope with things that they wouldn’t normally have to, it makes them grow up much faster. Tensions with the JCP adviser have a knock on effect with the kids.”
To offer families a real route out of poverty government policy needs to recognise the efforts people are already making to work and build on this activity through supportive and progressive measures. Need NOT Greed hopes to participate in more evidence sessions by government to tackle poverty, effectively reform the welfare system and look at harnessing informal work in the UK as a way to break the cycle of worklessness. Get in touch if you are intersted in getting involved in our Need NOT Greed workshops or have ideas about giving future evidence.
Download the transcript of the select committee hearing and the evidence we submitted here
