Britain must end its obsession with getting young single mothers into work, and focus on young, unemployed fathers whose historic role as the family breadwinner has had to be taken over by the taxpayer, Frank Field, David Cameron's poverty adviser, has said.
Field claimed many of these young, unemployed fathers will not accept offers of work for less than £300 a week since they feel it is not worth their while.
He suggests that men who refuse to take up a government offer of work should have their benefit removed altogether, a far tougher sanction than they face under the current benefits regime.
Field, the Labour MP who was commissioned by the government to carry out a review of poverty, said: "The reason why we have so many single mums is because we have so many single dads who cannot fulfil what most single mothers want from their partners, and the children from their fathers."
Ministers this week signalled a crackdown on incapacity benefit, with plans to reduce the benefit levels of claimants who are found capable of doing some work.
There are also plans to cut the housing benefit budget. The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has spoken of encouraging people to leave "under-occupied" council homes and move into smaller properties.
Field's remarks underline the extent to which he believes the causes of social immobility lie not just not in material poverty, but also in character, child rearing and the loss of work for unskilled, working-class men.
He said successive governments had focused too much on monetary means to cure poverty. "Labour's very existence had become bound up with high public expenditure," he said. In remarks made in a lecture to the Attlee Foundation, a charity which works in disadvantaged areas, Field called for the welfare debate to shift from single mothers, and for the issue of unmarried fathers to be taken out of the shadows. He claimed "the feminisation of debate about poverty has largely been run by upwardly mobile, very successful women".
He said this debate has "largely ignored the agenda of working class women".
He explained: "For a large section of what used to be the core of the Labour vote – working class women – what they say they most want is a husband or partner in work which allows them their private domain of the family in which they can not only nurture but take on work when they think it is right, for their children, to do so."
The Tories are to require single mothers with children aged five or over to make themselves ready for work.
Field, a former welfare minister in the Blair government, said the drive to put lone mothers into work had also led to employers exploiting women by making it easier to drive down the wage rates of women who want to work full time.
"I believe we have been obsessed with getting young mothers back to work, irrespective of what they think and whether we think it is best for their children to do so," he said.
He hoped his poverty review would take out from the shadows "the unmarried father who is often young, unemployed and often unemployable and who is unskilled, and the way society has changed has made him redundant.
"The position he once held as breadwinner has been taken over by taxpayers. If they ever dare think about it, they are entering into an abyss of a life on benefit, trying to make ends meet with petty crime and drug dealing."
Field also called on the government to reinstate some version of Labour's jobs fund that guaranteed work for the unemployed. He said: "We need a reserve army of jobs for those who are desperate to get a job, who are drowning in their inability to do so."
He added that for those who have no intention of working, and who refuse a temporary public sector job, "there is no benefit whatsoever".
In remarks that will anger some of his fellow Labour MPs, he said Labour "has been becalmed by its concern, if not obsession, at seeing socialism being intimately related to the size of public expenditure".
He said he hoped the current debate about last week's coalition budget would be a "spur to rethinking, rather than being an agent through which we can retire on to safe territory".
He argued: "For what we have seen [during Labour's response to the budget] is that a central, if not the central idea now of what the Labour party stands for, which is high public expenditure, is not only being surmounted by opposing forces – but they are letting the ball and chain rain down on their heads as a result."
He said at some point in the 1960s the issue "how much are we spending" became Labour's new political virility symbol.
Labour thinking, he added, became "were we not only spending more than the last Labour government, but much more than those wretched Tories would ever spend?"
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