The government seems set on taking us back to an era when single mothers were penalised most. What next? The poorhouse?
Nichola Edwards, a 25-year-old mother of two young children, is living temporarily in a hostel that offers refuge to desperate cases such as hers. Banned from all social housing as a single mother, she faces a bleak choice: move back in with her mother, who is too ill with renal failure to take her in, or go to the homeless hostel. This, at least, is the choice that Nichola would have faced in 1949. She is one of five applicants for social housing taking part in a reality-TV time-travel experiment to be broadcast on Monday.
The three-part Channel 4 documentary series, Benefits Britain 1949, transports Nichola back for one week to the way things were in the dole offices in the newly-formed welfare state. "It shocked me to be told that I don't deserve a council place because I'm not with the father of my children," says Nichola, who felt she had no choice but to end a difficult relationship with her daughters' father.
The harsh treatment of single mothers in the postwar period is not something stuck in the annals of history, however. A few weeks ago, the 40 Group, a collection of Tory MPs from the 40 most marginal Conservative constituencies, called for Britain's youngest single mothers to be denied social housing as part of a new drive to reduce teen pregnancy. This, despite the fact that teen pregnancies are at a record low. The report was welcomed by David Cameron; the proposals suggesting that benefits be removed from teenage mothers unless they live with their parents, or in supervised hostel accommodation.
According to Gingerbread, single parents – of whom the vast majority are women – form two-thirds of all households affected by the government's new benefits cap. Under the new universal credit system that is gradually replacing income support, housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance, 900,000 single parents are already worse off .
"Children from single-parent families are now twice as likely to live in poverty as those from couple families," says Gingerbread's chief executive Fiona Weir. Because of my own family history, I was asked to take part in the documentary and tell Nichola on camera what life was like for my mother back in 1951 when, after being abandoned by my father, she gave birth to me in an austere hostel for unmarried mothers. It's the kind of place that will once more corral and stigmatise today's teenage mums if the 40 Group ever gets its way. I told her that the experience emotionally damaged my mother for ever: she never really recovered from the shame of having to give birth in a hostel that made the mothers pray for forgiveness every day for their "sins', and march to church like children twice on Sundays. Instead of being a place of refuge, the hostel was known locally as "the home for naughty girls".
In Channel 4's TV experiment, not only does Nichola lose her 2013 two-bedroom council house, she is grilled by an actor playing a prejudiced 1949 moral welfare officer who tells her that her mixed-race children, Tiarna, four, and Sienna, two, "stick out like a sore thumb" and will get "picked on". Little wonder that Nichola says she found the week's filming "an emotional ordeal. It had a real impact on my life; I'm even more clingy with my daughters now."
Nichola spent time in care as a child because of problems with both her parents, so it's easy to see why preserving the sanctity of her own family unit is so important to her. Before having children, she was doing well at work with a silver-service waitressing award from London's Hilton Hotel, and feels strongly that single mothers "should be praised, rather than blamed – because it's such a hard job to raise children on your own."
Executive producer Stef Wagstaffe explains that when benefit rules were first introduced, "it was all about conforming. The state had no moral imperative to house single mothers, who would have been judged as unsuitable. They were expected to throw themselves on the mercy of their family or rely on charity from religious organisations. A lot of their children were then whisked away into care and then into adoption by nice middle-class childless couples."
These days, our atomised lives throw up much more complex needs than in those postwar years, when the extended family usually lived nearby to help out the lone mother. It is a fundamental change in our society that politicians conveniently ignore as they seek to impose a one-size-fits-all system on benefits claimants.
Wagstaffe's researchers found that in some areas the government provided 160,000 free childcare places to get mothers back to work, whereas now for working mothers the cost of childcare is the highest in Europe. "We worked out that in 2013, Nichola gets £7.40 an hour on benefits and the minimum wage is £6.80. Then she's got to pay for childcare in order to work," explains Wagstaffe. "Her cheapest local childcare is £3 an hour for two kids, so all of a sudden you understand the benefits trap for so many single mothers."
I ask Wagstaffe, herself a single mother, if she was worried her programme might even give ideas to the government costcutters. She admits that she was concerned, until she realised that the coalition government was already ahead of the documentary, in denying unsupported teenage mums social housing.
"The benefit reforms rolled out months before we hit the screen. They are dialling backwards," she says. "With all this new talk of deserving and undeserving poor, it's a hangover from Victorian morality. What next for people and, in particular, single mothers? A return to the poorhouse?"
Benefits Britain 1949 will be screened on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4 Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
Nichola Edwards, a 25-year-old mother of two young children, is living temporarily in a hostel that offers refuge to desperate cases such as hers. Banned from all social housing as a single mother, she faces a bleak choice: move back in with her mother, who is too ill with renal failure to take her in, or go to the homeless hostel. This, at least, is the choice that Nichola would have faced in 1949. She is one of five applicants for social housing taking part in a reality-TV time-travel experiment to be broadcast on Monday.
The three-part Channel 4 documentary series, Benefits Britain 1949, transports Nichola back for one week to the way things were in the dole offices in the newly-formed welfare state. "It shocked me to be told that I don't deserve a council place because I'm not with the father of my children," says Nichola, who felt she had no choice but to end a difficult relationship with her daughters' father.
The harsh treatment of single mothers in the postwar period is not something stuck in the annals of history, however. A few weeks ago, the 40 Group, a collection of Tory MPs from the 40 most marginal Conservative constituencies, called for Britain's youngest single mothers to be denied social housing as part of a new drive to reduce teen pregnancy. This, despite the fact that teen pregnancies are at a record low. The report was welcomed by David Cameron; the proposals suggesting that benefits be removed from teenage mothers unless they live with their parents, or in supervised hostel accommodation.
According to Gingerbread, single parents – of whom the vast majority are women – form two-thirds of all households affected by the government's new benefits cap. Under the new universal credit system that is gradually replacing income support, housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance, 900,000 single parents are already worse off .
"Children from single-parent families are now twice as likely to live in poverty as those from couple families," says Gingerbread's chief executive Fiona Weir. Because of my own family history, I was asked to take part in the documentary and tell Nichola on camera what life was like for my mother back in 1951 when, after being abandoned by my father, she gave birth to me in an austere hostel for unmarried mothers. It's the kind of place that will once more corral and stigmatise today's teenage mums if the 40 Group ever gets its way. I told her that the experience emotionally damaged my mother for ever: she never really recovered from the shame of having to give birth in a hostel that made the mothers pray for forgiveness every day for their "sins', and march to church like children twice on Sundays. Instead of being a place of refuge, the hostel was known locally as "the home for naughty girls".
In Channel 4's TV experiment, not only does Nichola lose her 2013 two-bedroom council house, she is grilled by an actor playing a prejudiced 1949 moral welfare officer who tells her that her mixed-race children, Tiarna, four, and Sienna, two, "stick out like a sore thumb" and will get "picked on". Little wonder that Nichola says she found the week's filming "an emotional ordeal. It had a real impact on my life; I'm even more clingy with my daughters now."
Nichola spent time in care as a child because of problems with both her parents, so it's easy to see why preserving the sanctity of her own family unit is so important to her. Before having children, she was doing well at work with a silver-service waitressing award from London's Hilton Hotel, and feels strongly that single mothers "should be praised, rather than blamed – because it's such a hard job to raise children on your own."
Executive producer Stef Wagstaffe explains that when benefit rules were first introduced, "it was all about conforming. The state had no moral imperative to house single mothers, who would have been judged as unsuitable. They were expected to throw themselves on the mercy of their family or rely on charity from religious organisations. A lot of their children were then whisked away into care and then into adoption by nice middle-class childless couples."
These days, our atomised lives throw up much more complex needs than in those postwar years, when the extended family usually lived nearby to help out the lone mother. It is a fundamental change in our society that politicians conveniently ignore as they seek to impose a one-size-fits-all system on benefits claimants.
Wagstaffe's researchers found that in some areas the government provided 160,000 free childcare places to get mothers back to work, whereas now for working mothers the cost of childcare is the highest in Europe. "We worked out that in 2013, Nichola gets £7.40 an hour on benefits and the minimum wage is £6.80. Then she's got to pay for childcare in order to work," explains Wagstaffe. "Her cheapest local childcare is £3 an hour for two kids, so all of a sudden you understand the benefits trap for so many single mothers."
I ask Wagstaffe, herself a single mother, if she was worried her programme might even give ideas to the government costcutters. She admits that she was concerned, until she realised that the coalition government was already ahead of the documentary, in denying unsupported teenage mums social housing.
"The benefit reforms rolled out months before we hit the screen. They are dialling backwards," she says. "With all this new talk of deserving and undeserving poor, it's a hangover from Victorian morality. What next for people and, in particular, single mothers? A return to the poorhouse?"
Benefits Britain 1949 will be screened on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4 Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.