Introduction

With reference to the specific impact on lone parents, this chapter examines the retrenchment of the notion of welfare as an entitlement that has occurred alongside an increased emphasis on the contractual nature of the relationship between citizen and state. Lone parents have received some financial assistance and been permitted to remain outside of the labour market to focus on the care of their children since the enactment of the National Assistance Act 1948. Changes in entitlement to Income Support for lone parents under the New Labour government in 2008 represented the first time that the eligibility of lone parents to this financial assistance was restricted (Haux, 2010, p 1). The UK coalition government has further tightened the conditionality rules for lone parents.

This chapter discusses these reforms alongside the increasing influence of behavioural economics, as coalition government policy making continues to focus on exploring the ways in which conditionality can be harnessed to influence both economic and social policies (Standing, 2011a, p 27). This engagement with behavioural economic theory, rather than the following of neoclassical economic models, appears to be underpinned by the belief that this ‘new economics’ can effect sustained changes in behaviour (NEF, 2005). These concepts remain intertwined with a paternalistic approach in which an engagement with the paid labour market is conceptualised as a civic duty while also being good for individuals and their families, lifting them out of poverty while positively affecting wider indicators of health and wellbeing (Waddell and Burton, 2006). The chapter considers how this may impact on the provision of care for children as lone parents attempt to balance their responsibilities as the sole adult in the household.

New Labour's policies on work and the family

As Churchill (2011, 2012) has argued, one of the primary functions of social policy is not to respond directly to needs, but to promote particular sets of values while attempting to encourage parents, families and the state to engage with their social roles and responsibilities. A key aim of the New Labour government's modernisation project was to change social behaviour by using legislation to ‘sustain and induce particular types of partnership and parenting and to discourage other, less favoured, forms’ (Barlow et al, 2002, p 110).