The cuts outlined in the 2010 emergency budget will come as a hammer-blow to all workers. However, it is working class women – especially the low paid and single parents – who will be amongst the hardest hit. For them, the changes to Child Tax Credits and benefits will be a particularly bitter pill to swallow.
Specifically, pregnant women and new parents will be affected thanks to the abolition of the ‘baby element’ of Child Tax Credits and the ‘Health in Pregnancy’ grant as well as the restriction of the ‘Sure Start Maternity’ grant to a mother’s first child only. The ‘Health in Pregnancy’ grant was introduced last April with the aim of giving expectant mothers the funds needed to eat healthily in order to reduce infant mortality rates. We all know that staying healthy costs money and it will be the poorest women (and their babies) who rely on these benefits who will be the most severely hit.
As well as this, the household income threshold for eligibility for Child Tax Credits is to be lowered to £40,000. This means that hundreds of thousands of families will be without support. £40,000 is equivalent to two parents earning the relatively modest salary of £20,000 a year. The Office for National Statistics estimates the ‘average’ salary at £26,020, but, this figure is inflated by a relatively small number of very high earners. Most families get by on much less. However, it is those families who are just over the threshold, still not highly paid, who will suffer from the loss of these tax credits.
The ConDem policy of making single parents work once their youngest child starts school amounts to penalising vulnerable single mothers who will struggle to find a job in a time of recession because many employers (75%, according to a Daily Mail survey) refuse to employ women of childbearing age or who have responsibility for young children. Single parents who do have jobs have the added financial pressure of finding child care while they work.
Of course, the ConDems “support the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children”, they just want it to be provided by “a diverse range of providers” – meaning someone else.
The hypocrisy of the ConDems is staggering. The coalition government holds up the family as “the bedrock of a strong and stable society”, but the cuts they have set out will serve to undermine it. The first policy in the ‘Families and Children’ section of the ‘Programme for Government’ document is the goal of ending child poverty in Britain by 2020. How do they propose to do this when they are slashing child benefits and tax credits without finding any solution to the problem of poverty?
This government of millionaires knows nothing of the problems of working class mothers. These cuts must be resisted not only by those affected but by the whole Labour and trade union movement.
