By Michael Rafferty
LONDON — Winter in Britain this year looks like being a bitter and stormy one, with news that the November 30 budget is to target welfare cuts to single parent families and to entrench a harsh new tax on separated fathers.
John Major's government is about to launch its "war on the single parent", as one newspaper here has called it. The exact shape of the offensive will become clearer in the budget. However it is already clear that the single mum is to be "discouraged" (from separating from her husband in the first place, or from having kids at all) through a series of financial penalties.
Planned cutbacks on welfare entitlements of single parents are likely to include reduced child benefits and closing of preferential access to public housing (stopping what Tory politicians have called "queue jumping" by single mums).
The stereotype of the teenage, queue-jumping, bed-hopping mum might make for good headlines but is contradicted by the government's own figures. The overwhelming majority of single mothers are in their late 20s and early 30s, having separated from husbands after several years of marriage.
Three months ago the Welsh secretary, John Redwood, accused young mothers of deliberately becoming pregnant to get council housing. Last month's Tory conference was the culmination of several months of softening-up for the planned budget cutbacks.
The budget crisis provides the backdrop to the next case of government child abuse. In April the government set up a new government department, the Child Support Agency (CSA). This Orwellian-sounding agency is now at the centre of an explosion of protest about its iniquitous and invasive activities.
When the CSA was set up, government ministers said its main task would be to force so-called absent fathers who were not paying any child support, to contribute. But quite early on the CSA found that many of those not paying maintenance (the absent parents) are itinerant workers, unemployed or on some other state benefit themselves. To meet the demands from the Treasury for mechanisms to cut state welfare payments, the CSA has targeted those fathers already making maintenance payments. For instance, even where a non-custodial parent is paying maintenance and looking after the child for 40% of the time, he or she is still classified as "absent".
Leaked documents have revealed that in an effort to meet the Lstg530 million new collection target Agency staff were told to target single mums on benefits where the fathers are already paying maintenance.
Over coming months, every parent on income support or family credit must have their welfare eligibility reassessed. In most cases these assessments will result in big increases in existing maintenance orders.
The case of Les McLean of Woodham, in Durham, is typical of what the CSA is doing. Under a court judgment, McLean had been paying Lstg120 ($250) a month to his former wife for the upkeep of three children. But after the CSA was set up, his former wife had the court order revoked, with the agency's encouragement. The court was then asked to rule that no maintenance was being paid. The mother then applied for an assessment by the CSA, which raised the maintenance charge to Lstg480 per month.
Since their divorce in 1986, both parents have remarried. McLean has set up home with a woman who has a 10-year-old boy from a previous marriage, but because the boy's father lives abroad, no maintenance is paid. They now have a 10-month-old girl together.
There is no appeal mechanism on the level of the CSA's assessment, so McLean can only appeal against the revoking of the existing court order. In the meantime, his new family is being impoverished.
In fact, if McLean's new spouse worked, that income would be added into the calculation of how much he has to pay. The same applies for any children living at home who might be working.
Included in the sharp increase in maintenance assessments is a standard charge of Lstg44 per week for the upkeep of the custodial parent. In the past, upon divorce the husband and wife became legal strangers. That was the clear intention of "no fault" divorce and "clean break" settlements. Now the non-custodial parent will have an implied lifetime responsibility for the upkeep, not just of any children but also of the custodial parent as well, if that parent is in receipt of welfare benefits.
In the words of the chairperson of the Social Security Committee, the government is trying to effect a "cultural shift", a recognition that fatherhood bestows inescapable and lifelong responsibilities. In fact, the intention is to shift social responsibilities from the state on to individual parents.
Ros Hepplewhite, chief executive of the CSA, was more frank when she told parliament the basic intention of the CSA is to "achieve a significant redistribution of income". Her agency will be redistributing money not from rich fathers to poor mothers and children, but from wage and salary earners to the state.
In fact, only a tiny fraction of the extra maintenance collected by the CSA will ever go to the custodial parent. The government's own forecasts show that of the more than Lstg500 million the CSA is expected to collect this year, less than Lstg50 million will go to the custodial parent. The overwhelming bulk of the tax will go into Treasury coffers, because they will be deducted from any welfare payments to the custodial parent.
In fact, many custodial parents will actually be made worse off by the new arrangements through the loss of pension entitlements and concessions like housing, council tax benefits and free prescriptions.
CSA boss Hepplewhite is hanging tough in the face of sharply mounting criticism. She was quoted in the press in early November as saying "the CSA has never sought to hide the fact that maintenance levels will, in a number of cases, go up".
Social Security minister Peter Lilley has until now been solidly behind his agency boss. But parliamentarians on both sides of the House have been inundated with complaints from constituents. A fortnight ago, the operations of the CSA were the subject of an all-party review.
When Hepplewhite appeared before the committee she admitted that the priority of the agency is not absent parents but those where the parent is receiving some sort of welfare benefit, and where maintenance is already being paid.
The Prime Minister's office then announced its own review of the formula used to assess maintenance payments. But with the task of reducing the rising budget deficit now depending heavily on a new source of revenue, Major may have little choice but to back this new tax on parents.
The postwar welfare state was one of the most important glues of the social fabric of advanced capitalist countries. It has always involved a redistribution of income within the broad working class, and required conditions of nearly full employment to achieve it. With mass unemployment, the capacity to extract revenue from the working class in the old ways has been eroded at the very time that demands for benefit have climbed rapidly.
There are now approximately 10 million people in Britain (around 3 million of whom are children) dependent on government income support out of a total population of 57 million.
But while the Tories try to outdo each other in attacking the remaining planks of the welfare state, the conditions that allowed the construction of Mrs Thatcher's unstable constituency during the 1980s are also unravelling.
Opposition to the new maintenance tax is coming not only from women's groups and the left, but also from right inside Thatcher's Tory heartland: from policemen, firemen, professional and middle managers. The sight of them engaging in civil disobedience against their government may be very interesting.