Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain by Kiernan Kathleen;Land Hilary;Lewis Jane;

Author:Kiernan, Kathleen;Land, Hilary;Lewis, Jane;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Unknown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 1998-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The 1970s

The central issues in the social security debates at the beginning of the 1970s were therefore very different from the two previous decades. The relationship between the wages and benefit systems had been called into question by the rediscovery of poverty among children of working fathers and by the growing numbers of two- parent families subject to the wage-stop when fathers were sick or unemployed. (There was evidence that the difference between median male earnings and the lowest 10 per cent of male wage earners was growing despite the Labour Government’s attempts in incomes policies to target proportionally higher wage increases on the low paid.) Increases in family allowances had been linked to adjustments in child tax allowances thus raising the issue of the relationship between the tax and social security systems. Evidence of poverty among children, particularly among children of lone parents, was growing. Dennis Marsden’s study of lone parents living on what was national assistance at the time of the research was published in 1968. The Government was committed to collecting and publishing. more evidence about the circumstances of lone parents and there was an active lobby monitoring both the extent and nature of poverty among families as well as evaluating policy responses. Claimants were beginning to find a voice and getting informed advice from a growing welfare rights movement and the re-emerging women’s movement at the end of the 1960s enabled women, including lone mothers, to speak for themselves.

The reforms of the social security system proposed in Richard Crossman’s White Paper in 1969 did not reach the statute book before the Labour Government was replaced by a Conservative Government in 1970. The incoming Government’s response to poverty among children in families with working parents was to introduce a means- tested scheme of family support—Family Income Supplement (FIS). They were opposed to across-the-board increases in family allowances, even coupled with an extension of ‘claw-back’ because this would bring more family men into the tax system and their intention was to reduce tax and the number of taxpayers. At this time the tax threshold was below the SB level for a married man with two children. (Jim Callaghan, Chancellor of the Exchequer when family allowances were increased in 1967 and 1968, and Dennis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1970s Labour Government, had also favoured a means-tested increase.)

FIS was a new benefit ‘for families with small incomes where the breadwinner is in full-time work and there are dependent children’ (FIS Bill, clause 1). The amount to be paid was based on half the difference between the family’s ‘normal gross income’ and the ‘prescribed amount’ which increased with the number of children (£15 for a one-child family and £2 for each additional child). Breadwinners could be a man or single woman—a single woman being defined as ‘any woman other than one who is a member of the same household as a man to whom she is married or with whom she is living as his wife’ (FIS Bill clause 17).

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