All the single parents

By Grace Fletcher Hackwood / @msgracefh

When you’re surgically attached to Twitter, you don’t need a TV. Twitter helps you fake it. It’s like that website Moss and Roy use on the IT Crowd to bluff their way through conversations about football. “Did you watch PMQs/Question Time/Beyoncé on Glastonbury?” “Yeah! Can you believe Cameron/Fern Britton/Zane Lowe said that to Angela Eagle/John Redwood/Lauren Laverne?”

So yesterday morning, when Michael Gove was doing his anti-union thing over on Andrew Marr, Twitter gave me the highlights. A teachers’ strike this Thursday would make the public lose respect for teachers. (Dude, if ‘the public’ really was a synonym for ‘Tories’, your lot might have won the general election.) Schools could be kept open by bringing in parents to help. (Are we suspending CRB checks during strike situations now?) Oh, and “the public have a very low tolerance for anything that disrupts their hard-working lifestyles.”

There’s that ‘public’ again – not to be confused with the public sector, of course. ‘The public’ work hard, and they don’t go demanding daft things like the enforcement of their rights. ‘The public sector’, like teachers, apparently do not work hard. Instead, they strike at the drop of a mortar-board, and spend the rest of their time making up health and safety legislation and counting the days until they can claim their gold-plated pension.

Never mind the dozens of letters my boss, and presumably every other MP, has had from teachers begging for help negotiating with the government so that they don’t have to strike on Thursday. Never mind that picture of Michael ‘one rule for me’ Gove on a private sector picket line back in his NUJ days. Forget all that. Demonise the unions; divide and rule.

But Gove’s interview didn’t make me really angry until last night, when I was following #GlastonBey and catching up on my Google alerts. Because here’s the thing – once you rely on Twitter for rolling news, you worry that you’re missing stuff when you close it. (Yes, sometimes I close Twitter.) So I set up Google alerts for the ministers I’m most interested in (read: the ministers I consider most likely to destroy the universe while I’m distracted by a sticky bun or something), and now I regret it. Technology is amazing until you realise you’ve signed yourself up for a daily dose of The Adventures of Grant Shapps.

Anyway, my Gove alert took me to this Guardian piece, subtitled ‘Education secretary says walkouts over pensions on Thursday are premature and will hit single parents worst’.

First – you want to talk about premature? How about the significant increase in teachers’ employee contributions before the Hutton report on pensions was published? How about switching pensions from RPI- to CPI-linked, prior to any negotiations – which the Hutton report didn’t even recommend?

Second – that whole “WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE PUBLIC?!” response to striking workers, who are being screwed over as they go about their job of serving said public, is always grating. But it takes a new level of brass neck for this government to invoke concerns for single parents.

The strikes will hit single parents worst? Well, yes, Mr. Gove – most things do. Have you by any chance read ‘Singled Out‘, the Fawcett Society’s report to that effect? It states – with conclusive evidence – that ‘the government’s deficit-cutting approach is having a disproportionate cumulative impact on lone parents’. In other words, what’s really hitting single parents worst is your lot.

Fawcett have used research by the TUC to show the distributional impact of cuts to public services on different households – and lone parents are clearly the hardest hit. Thanks to the cumulative impact of cuts to income-related spending – further education and higher education, housing and social care – lone parents stand to lose the equivalent of around 18.5% of their net income, more than double the proportion lost by couple parents.

As of October this year, lone parents will no longer be eligible for income support when their youngest child reaches 5 (Labour lowered this to 7). Instead, they will have to sign on for JSA and look for paid work – just as adequate employment opportunities are disappearing, along with support for childcare and training. A grant to help support lone parents with the costs associated with training has been axed. Meanwhile, research from the Daycare Trust shows that only 45% of local authorities report sufficient childcare provision for children aged 5-11. Furthermore, the cost of childcare in the UK is among the highest in the world and rising.

Meeting such costs will get even harder due to a 10% cut in the amount of childcare costs, paid through Working Tax Credit, that low income families can expect to be covered by the state. A recent survey by Working Mums demonstrates that changes to Working Tax Credit are already affecting the ability of mothers – including lone mothers – to combine work and childcare. The survey found that 24% of mothers have had to give up paid work as a result of the changes.

Because it’s one thing to assert that lone parents can get back to paid work as soon as their youngest is at school – much harder is answering the question ‘what work?’ Fawcett’s report states ‘In particular, the rapidly declining number of jobs in the public sector [my emphasis] – which has been quicker than the private sector to adapt to women’s maternity and care needs through providing more quality flexible and part time jobs – will further exacerbate the barriers lone parents face to securing suitable work.’

Single parents and teachers have a lot in common. Both are entrusted with the safety, development, aspirations and futures of a lot of the people whose taxes will be funding our pensions one day. They both do a difficult, demanding and important job that should command great respect – I know I couldn’t do either.

And this is the bit Michael Gove seems to miss: they could be the same people. If the public sector employs a lot of single parents, then single parents make up a lot of the people currently wondering how they’ll afford their increased pension contributions: especially when they’ve just lost 18.5% of their net income through public service cuts and the government is – unbelievably – going to start charging them to use the CSA.

But when the government is making single parents’ lives harder, they don’t have the option to strike. Teachers have that option: and they have a right to use it. Rather than playing the two off against each other, if Gove really wants to avoid a strike on Thursday, he’d be better off getting the teachers back to the negotiating table by ordering a review of the RPI/CPI switch and the increase in contributions, and having the four-yearly valuation of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme carried out. As the Hutton report said, gold-plated public sector pensions are a myth. Teachers didn’t cause the deficit – bankers did. The government won’t go and get our money back from them for fear they’ll all up and leave the country. Teachers aren’t rich enough to make that kind of threat. All they get to do is strike.

And if Gove really cares about all the single parents, maybe he should draw the attention of his cabinet colleagues to the recommendations the Fawcett Society makes in its report. If they like a policy, they should’ve put a Gender Equality Impact Assessment on it. Until then, when single parents continue to be the hardest hit, Gove has no right at all to blame the teachers.