The unfair hell of benefit cuts

We've heard quite a lot recently about the work that women in Parliament are doing to try to help mothers who are having a hard time. Some MPs have got together a petition to agitate for more family-friendly working hours at Westminster. And one MP, Julia Drown, has said that she will fight the regulations that prevent her from breastfeeding her baby in the committee rooms or the chamber of the House of Commons.

It is, of course, hugely important that MPs try to attack the problems that parents face. But sometimes you can't help feeling that when women in Parliament talk about what they want to do for mothers, they have become fixated on their own problems. There are just 120 women in Parliament whose problems are trumpeted throughout the media. But there are thousands of mothers throughout the country who may deserve just a tad more sympathy. It's a good idea for women MPs to get together a petition to try to make their lives easier. But didn't we vote them in so that they could also attack the problems of women outside Westminster?

Too many MPs are happy to ignore the problems that other women in Britain are facing. Take one issue that they have shrugged off. Having passed through the Commons, the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Bill receives its second reading in the Lords next week, and will soon become law. This Bill confirms and extends the cut in income support that has for years been meted out to those women who refuse to co-operate with the Child Support Agency without what the agency sees as a "good cause".

You might think that was a pretty marginal measure. As the Department of Social Security was keen to point out to me the vast majority - over 80 per cent - of parents contacted by the CSA now co-operate with its demands. But even so, the benefit cut, usually of 40 per cent of income support, affects thousands of women. In November 1999, the most recent month for which statistics are available, more than 13,000 women were being penalised in this way.

It can be hard to imagine how any parents living on benefit manage to bring up their children. Think what it must be like when you have even less money than the amount that the Government sees as the necessary minimum to support a family. Last week I met one woman, Isabella, who lived in that situation for nine months last year [her name has been changed]. She is a small, conservatively dressed woman of 38.

In January last year she decided to leave her low-paid job in order to concentrate on getting the qualifications she needed to fulfil her long- held ambition to become a teacher. During our conversation, I was struck by her realism and fortitude. No doubt she will eventually become a qualified teacher, and one day her children will be proud of her for working towards her goal.

And yet as soon as she signed on to income support she entered a strange hell. For nine months last year her income support was cut by 40 per cent. That meant that she lost pounds 20. After adding in the other benefits she was due, she was struggling to bring up three children on just pounds 49.65 plus child benefit. For many of us, the idea of living on pounds 50 a week may sound no more preposterous than living on pounds 70 or pounds 80. But to people who experience these low incomes, every penny makes a difference, and pounds 20 makes an enormous difference.

Isabella is a proud woman who takes her job of being a parent very seriously. "We are the educators of the citizens of future generations," she said. But she found she didn't have the money to buy her children's shoes and school uniforms. "And what could I feed them? It was okay in the term- time, because they could get school dinners, which meant one proper meal a day. But the nightmarish time was during holidays. Sometimes we ate cereal three times a day. I did my best for them. I begged from the manager at my local Tesco's. I did steal once, I stole nappies for my baby from the supermarket. I couldn't see my friends - the way I looked, the way my flat looked. I became very alienated. Eventually I got sick, I got pleurisy."

Many people will be puzzled at Isabella's story. Why didn't she name the father of her children to the CSA? She had a very good reason not to, as the CSA eventually agreed. One of her children was conceived as the result of a rape by a man whom she knew. As time went on, he put pressure on her to allow him access and eventually, when the son was three, she started allowing him to see his child once a week. Over a couple of years, her son's behaviour deteriorated. Eventually he managed to say why; he talked about abuse, and Isabella had to bring in social workers and the police. Isabella is now trying to put as much distance between her family and this man as possible.

Although the Child Support Agency has agreed that Isabella had good reason for not naming the father of her child, they have only paid back half of the benefit they docked last year. And she isn't sure if the trauma that she and her children experienced during those nine months has yet left them. "Children seem very resilient," she said thoughtfully. "But I think the scars are still with them. They saw me declining, they saw me get sick from worry. They were teased at school. I don't know if they have recovered."

Other people who provide services to vulnerable women told me that they have seen the benefit cut push them over the edge. The Government insists that only parents who refuse to give a reason for not co-operating with the CSA have their benefits cut. And it insists that the Benefits Agency staff who deal with CSA business are sympathetic and trained to respond kindly to any reason that a woman puts forward for not naming the father. I'm sure that is a well-meaning policy, but I have also heard that things can look very different on the ground.

Laurie Matthew is the co-ordinator of the Young Women's Centre in Dundee, a project that provides services to young women who have experienced sexual or domestic violence. "I think the Benefits Agency staff are sympathetic, but they don't get it," she said in a torrent of anger and frustration. "They don't understand that if a woman is seriously traumatised, seriously at risk, she may not be able to open up to a man in a suit. She may not be able to say, I've experienced horrendous violence.

"I've known very young women whose babies were conceived by abuse in their own families. They can't say who the father is, and they can't say why they can't say, so they get their benefits cut. Then what do they do? They survive by shoplifting, by prostitution of one kind or another. You know, these are already women with low self-worth. They get by by not eating themselves. They don't go out. I see women here who look like scarecrows. It's really horrible. It's just a vicious circle."

The new Child Support Bill does put one positive proposal on the table. For the first time it will give parents on income support an incentive to co-operate with the CSA, since they will be able to keep up to pounds 10 of the maintenance collected, on top of their benefits. But why can't the introduction of this incentive coincide with the withdrawal of the punishment of benefit cuts?

"This government talks about social inclusion but they don't seem to want to help really vulnerable women and their children," Laurie Matthew says bitterly. She's right. This is a punitive measure, which hurts the the poor, the socially excluded, the vulnerable - the very families that a Labour government should want to protect.

n.walter@btinternet.com