‘Making work work for working families’

Today, around three in four children growing up in poverty live in a working household. 

A generation ago, that figure was less than one in two. Child poverty in Britain has for some time now been a largely in-work phenomenon, yet policy has lagged behind, more focused on boosting employment figures rather than raising pay and job quality. 

Anna’s story – a hard-working parent

Consider Anna’s story. Anna (not her real name) works full time in a GP surgery and claims Universal Credit. She pays her rent, budgets carefully and buys only what she needs. Before every trip to the supermarket, she checks her bank balance to make sure she can afford the essentials. Anna is a single parent raising her daughter alone, doing exactly what successive governments have told parents to do: work hard, and everything else will follow. 

Yet the day she had to call a friend because she couldn’t afford baby milk isn’t one she’ll ever forget. 

What about the Child Poverty Strategy?

Child poverty and the security and dignity of work are both foundational issues for the Labour Party. The government’s child poverty strategy, published in December, was a landmark moment long called for by organisations like ours. Scrapping the two-child limit and extending free school meals will lift hundreds of thousands of children out of hardship. Just as importantly, the strategy challenged the tired mantra that work is the best route out of poverty, recognising instead that structural features of today’s labour market often leave work too low-paid, insecure and inflexible to provide a reliable escape from poverty. 

READ MORE: ‘Social security isn’t the answer to everything, but on child poverty it goes a long way’

However while the diagnosis was welcome, the strategy had rather less to say about concrete measures to boost parental pay and progression at work. Promised reforms to transform jobcentres into a genuine public employment service centred on personalised support, skills and careers development have been modest and incremental, and it remains unclear when ambition will translate into meaningful change for working parents. 

What do the experiences of working parents show us right now?

 Our Work isn’t working report, produced with the Institute for Public Policy Research, draws on new analysis and research to call for a stronger focus on helping working parents on low incomes to progress in the labour market. This isn’t a story about parental effort, but about the changing structure of the modern labour market and what it offers in return. The mothers and fathers we spoke to put in long hours under often difficult conditions. Too often, extra hours bring minimal reward once childcare costs and the tapering away of social security income are taken into account. Only four in ten low-paid working parents reported having access to flexible working, and fewer still had benefits such as enhanced sick pay, paid family leave and paid training that would allow them to invest in their future.

Our analysis found that earnings are closely linked to how families move in and out of poverty. More than sixty percent of exits from poverty involve a meaningful rise in earnings, and more than seven in ten entries into poverty follow an equivalent fall. This underlines a key question for government policy: how can we better support low-income working families to earn more and progress at work?

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For couples, going from one worker to two is particularly impactful for escaping poverty, but often difficult in practice. Even when second earners, often mothers, do enter work, they find it much more difficult to increase their hours or wages than main earners. This reflects a labour market that penalises part-time and flexible working, despite its importance to working parents. 

Our research highlights that single-parent families face particularly high risks of in-work poverty and greater barriers to progression. Three in ten children in working single parent families are in poverty. As Anna’s story shows, full-time work is no guarantee of security: since 2000, the proportion of children in full-time working single parent families who are in poverty has risen by half from 9% to 14%.

What does that mean for reform?

The report identifies five clear priorities for reform. 

• First, going further on childcare, the single biggest constraint on parental progression, by fixing flaws in the system and allowing more disadvantaged families to access childcare from nine months. 
• Second, strengthening work incentives for single parents and second earners so families keep more of what they earn as hours or pay rises. 
• Third, testing a proper progression offer for parents on Universal Credit with specialist employment support, wraparound childcare and training and personalised plans focused on long-term earnings rather than rapid entry into low-quality work. 
• Fourth, investing in adult skills and expanding access to high-quality, affordable learning designed around parents’ lives.
• And finally, working with employers and unions to drive cultural change, expanding decent part time and flexible full-time roles in sectors where rigid hours and weak progression are most entrenched. 

For years, parents like Anna were promised that work would bring security. For too many, that promise has worn thin. The government’s Child Poverty Strategy and its Get Britain Working agenda offers the chance to put that right. 

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