Letter: Lone parents singled out for blame

Sir: It is becoming clear that the Government is proposing to take a punitive, rather than effective, approach to one-parent families. In his speech to a Tory Party conference fringe meeting on Tuesday night ('Single parents targeted for welfare cuts', 6 October), Michael Howard referred to the programme in New Jersey, where extra benefit is denied to second and subsequent children born to a mother dependent upon social security.

In fact, the majority of unmarried mothers in this country only have one child, and the added benefit for a second child is a mere pounds 15.05 per week until the child is 11 years old. Obviously, this meagre increase in benefit is not proving an incentive for the majority to have more children.

If Government go ahead with this policy, they know they will be risking the welfare of children. They are ignoring the more progressive elements within the New Jersey programme, which provide child care, training and education, and which lone parents there have found useful aids in returning to work. The Maryland project, which includes explicit sex education, has been the most effective in bringing down numbers of births to unsupported women.

Mr Howard seemed to suggest that children born out of wedlock to one-parent families should be placed for adoption. This is both offensive and cruel.

All professionals working with families these days consider it a priority that families should be kept together. Mr Howard appears to be proposing a return to the beginning of the century when young unmarried women had their children removed from them straight after birth, causing immense distress and trauma to all concerned.

His suggestion seems to be based on the presumption that the children of one-parent families are responsible for the current rise in crime. This is not borne out by the evidence, which shows that many other factors, including the quality of parenting, poverty and bad housing, have greater weight in determining the criminal tendencies of the young.

Yours sincerely,

SUE SLIPMAN, Director, National Council for One Parent Families; MARGARET JONES, General Secretary, Brook Advisory; CHRISTOPHER BROWN, Director, NSPCC; IAN SPARKS, Director, The Children's Society; TOM WHITE, Chief Executive, National Children's Home; MICHAEL JARMAN, Director of Child Care, Barnardo's; DOREEN MASSEY, Director, Family Planning Association; SALLY WITCHER, Director, The Child Poverty Action Group

London, NW5

6 October