FactCheck: too many workless households?
Updated on 02 October 2007
Are there really more children without an earning parent in the UK than anywhere else in Europe?
The claim
"We have more children brought up in workless households than anywhere in Europe, and that includes Romania and Bulgaria."
Chris Grayling, Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions, speech to Conservative party conference, 1 October 2007
The background
Among Labour's big box-office boasts are a reduction - despite a recent blip - in child poverty, and an increase in employment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, workless households - defined as those with at least one adult of working age, but no one actually working - are more likely to fall below the poverty line than their earning counterparts.
So are there really more children without an earning parent in the UK than anywhere else in Europe?
The analysis
Let's start by looking at the number of children living in workless households in the UK. Initially, the recent figures look as though they should be giving the government a warm, toasty glow.
In the five years before Labour came to power, the proportion of children in workless families hovered around the 19 per cent mark. In 1997, the figure was 18.4 per cent.
The proportion has broadly declined since 1998, going to 16.1 per cent in 2003, 15.7 per cent in 2005 and 15.3 per cent in 2006.
The most recent figures, for the three months to June 2007, showed the proportion was 15.9 per cent in the three months to June 2007, up 0.3 percentage points from the same period in the previous year, but down 0.9 points on five years ago.
The proportion of poverty-stricken children in workless families has also gone down.
So, what about the Tories' claim? Although it's sometimes wise to err on the side of caution when comparing international data because of possible differences in the measures used, statistics based on the Europe-wide Labour Force Survey give a pretty reliable indicator in this instance.
And indeed, Britain has the highest proportion of any of the 24 countries included in figures published by the EU, which compare the number of jobless families with a child aged 0-17.
The latest statistics put 16.2 per cent of UK children in jobless families. The second-highest rate, that of Bulgaria, was 14.5 per cent, and the EU average was between 9.3 and 9.7 per cent, depending on how many countries were included.
Why is this?
Most of the UK's workless-family children (68 per cent, or 1.2 million) are living in lone-parent families. Despite Labour efforts such as the New Deal for Lone Parents, this has been the stickiest group to budge back into work.
The UK also has far more lone-parent families than other European countries. The most recent EU figures show that, in 2005, a single parent with children made up eight per cent of British households - double the EU average.
"Lone parents in Britain are less likely to have a job than lone parents in other countries," said Professor Richard Berthoud, of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University.
"The benefits system supports lone parents in a way that it doesn't necessarily in other European countries."
This is something about which the Conservatives started to make noises about in 1993, when John Major talked about "single mothers" in the Back to Basics campaign.
Since 1997, Labour has been trying to get more lone parents into work, and is currently consulting on more ways to do this.
At the moment, 57 per cent of lone parents are working, up from 53 per cent five years ago. The government has set a target of increasing this to 70 per cent by 2010.
The verdict
It might sounds surprising, given the higher rate of employment of which the government often boasts, but the Conservatives' claim is right.
What they neglect to say, however, is that Labour could have hit John Major's government with exactly the same figures, back in the days when a youthful Tony Blair led the opposition.
Although the EU was a smaller beast in 1997, and its figures for cover 15 countries rather than the 25 today, the UK was still the clear leader of the jobless-family pack.
The number of children in workless families has reduced since Labour came to power, in contrast to the trend in the preceding years.
Still, whether this is enough progress is a matter on the Conservatives are well entitled to continue to challenge the government.
FactCheck rating: 1.5
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Sources
Chris Grayling speech
Office of National Statistics: Work and worklessness among households: time series - calendar quarters
ONS: Lone parents in employment
Department for Work and Pensions Indicator 1: A reduction in the proportion of children living in working-age workless households
Joseph Rowntree Foundation: Monitoring Poverty and Exclusion in the UK 2006
Eurostat: Jobless families
Institute for Social and Economic Research
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