The Challenge
Ending child poverty is a critical investment in Britain’s future.
Unless child poverty is successfully eradicated, future generations will face increasingly unaffordable costs. This will affect the families concerned and Britain’s social and economic well-being.
Disabled children and the children of disabled parents are at significantly higher risk than other children of growing up in poverty.
One in three children living in poverty has a disabled parent.
Over half of all families with disabled children live in or at the margins of poverty.
For some black and minority ethnic groups, the risk of child poverty is far higher. Amongst families that include a disabled adult, the risk of poverty is:
- 36 per cent in white families
- 52 per cent in Indian families
- 63 per cent in Pakistani families
- 83 per cent in Bangladeshi families.
Many children of disabled parents live in couple families but in 2006 there were also 264,000 lone parents meeting the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) definition of disability whose children were living in poverty.
Successive surveys point to the unavailability of appropriate childcare as a primary barrier to work for parents. Only 16 per cent of mothers of disabled children work, compared with 61 per cent of mothers of other children.
The children of working parents are not exempt from poverty. Of all disabled parents living below the poverty line (defined as 60 per cent of median income), one quarter are in work. Employment discrimination against disabled people remains widespread, with some groups, such as people with learning disabilities, mental health problems or visual impairments, experiencing particularly marked disadvantage. The proportion of children who are disabled is expected to continue increasing, with more children surviving with complex conditions. Many families with disabled children face major additional costs, often leading to debt and material deprivation. Income alone is an inadequate indicator of whether families have a decent standard of living.
With the additional costs of disability, an income exceeding the poverty threshold does not necessarily deliver a decent standard of living to a family with disabled children and/or parents.
Child poverty predicts poorer life chances, which contribute to social exclusion in adulthood. It is often handed from one generation to the next. It undermines health, educational achievement and the quality of family life. It weakens communities. It prevents children and families from fulfilling their potential and participating fully in society. It creates significant demands on public services and too often sets in train a lifetime of costly welfare dependency.
The Government has targets for halving the number of children who were in poverty in 1999 by the year 2010, and of eradicating child poverty entirely by 2020.
This paper proposes policy solutions to the complex challenge of ending child poverty amongst families affected by disability. It is part of a series offering the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) proposals for a future public policy agenda.
Everything in this paper should be taken as relevant to all three countries of Britain unless otherwise stated.
An alternative future?
The DRC believes the link between disability and child poverty can be broken and that child poverty can be eradicated by 2020.
The key objectives of an effective reform agenda are to:
- Deliver family-focused policy and services that provide genuine pathways out of – and resilience to – poverty.
- Mitigate the additional costs that prevent many families affected by disability from achieving a decent standard of living.
- Extend the range and affordability of flexible and part-time working opportunities so that more parents can enter and remain in the labour market.
- Reduce ‘in-work’ poverty.
Recommendations for action
1. To deliver family-focused policy and services that provide
genuine pathways out of – and resilience to – poverty
Governments should:
1.1 Set targets for social, health and education services to support families affected by disability out of poverty, with clear milestones set for 2010, 2015 and 2020.
1.2 Undertake poverty and disability equality impact assessments on new policies to ensure that they deliver against these targets. Race and gender equality impact assessments should also ensure that policies are revised to reach families with disabled parents and/or children from ethnic minority communities.
1.3 Ensure consistency between policies to promote employment for disabled people and similar policies for parents (such as Pathways to Work and the New Deal for Lone Parents), so that disabled parents benefit.
1.4 Target programmes at people in greatest need and set up child poverty prevention pilots in at-risk local authority areas. These programmes could be supported by a new national early intervention centre to evaluate cost benefits and promote good practice. When commissioning programmes such as Pathways to Work, government should specify the need to support families at highest risk of child poverty.
Social, health and education services should:
1.5 Include child poverty reduction as a core measure for promoting equality in the development and measurement of their Disability Equality Schemes.
1.6 Ensure all families requiring support from children and/or adult services are allocated ‘key-workers’ or ‘navigators’ who work to performance measures that include reducing child and family poverty. Such workers should be free to work across and outside departmental silos, working one to one with families to develop creative and personalised packages of support.
1.7 Make prevention and early intervention the key organising principles of services for children and adults.
Jobcentre Plus and other employment services should:
1.8 Increase their capacity to support disabled parents and the parents of disabled children to secure the full range of resources necessary to make a manageable transition from benefits into work. This should include advice on benefits and tax credits, support to secure affordable, appropriate and accessible childcare and brokerage with child and adult social services.
2. To mitigate the additional costs that prevent many families affected by disability from achieving a decent standard of living
Governments should:
2.1 Adjust the way poverty is measured, to assess whether the financial circumstances of families with disabled children or disabled parents enable them to achieve acceptable outcomes, such as those set out in ‘Every Child Matters’. This should take account of extra disability-related costs before calculating poverty rates; developing disability-sensitive deprivation measures that focus on participation; accounting for the accessibility, and not merely the affordability, of childcare; and translating ‘choice and control’ (as desirable outcomes) into measurable targets.
2.2 Ensure that families with disabled children in receipt of disability living allowance (DLA) can benefit from more generous payments from the Child Trust Fund.
2.3 Ensure that the social fund can purchase essential household items for families with a disabled child or disabled parent. This would ensure that the Family Fund, which is solely for families with disabled children aged 15 and under, can focus its resources on provision relating directly to the needs of disabled children.
2.4 Review the current exclusion from support from the Family Fund of families with incomes of over £23,000 per year. This rule takes no account of regional variations in housing costs or other costs of living, nor sufficient account of the extra costs involved in families with disabled children.
2.5 Undertake audits of the additional costs faced by families affected by disability and prioritise action to ameliorate those costs (for example by reducing hospital car park charges for those requiring frequent visits). Economies of scale should be delivered by the Department of Health, the Scottish Executive and the Welsh Assembly Government, or their agents, through bulk purchasing of special diets, equipment or assistive technology.
Social, health and education services should:
2.6 Offer families with disabled children or disabled parents greater control over the planning, commissioning and delivery of services, including greater access to individualised budgets. Integrated services can deliver economies of scale through direct payments or individualised budgets.
3. To extend the range and affordability of flexible and part-time working opportunities so that more parents can enter and remain in the labour market
Governments should:
3.1 Extend the right to request flexible working to all employees from the point of recruitment. This would enable more parents of disabled children and disabled parents (those with mental health problems in particular) to achieve their full potential in employment. Covering all employees would be simpler than the present system of categories of employees and would complement employers’ reasonable adjustment duties under the DDA.
3.2 Monitor implementation of the strategies on ‘Ten Year Childcare’ in England, ‘Childcare is for Children’ in Wales and ‘Closing the Opportunity Gap’ in Scotland to ensure there is sufficient affordable, appropriate and accessible childcare for disabled children and young people. The Scottish Executive should implement a national childcare strategy.
3.3 Modify the rules governing tax credits to provide greater flexibility, security and incentives to support parents to work. This could be done by making working tax credits available to parents on low incomes with disabled children, who work at least 10 hours a week, rather than the current minimum of 16 hours a week. There should be an increase in childcare allowances to match the additional costs of childcare for disabled children. Enabling 100 per cent of the costs of childcare to be met for a temporary period after job loss would allow parents of disabled children to maintain the particular, often specialist, childcare they have sourced while they look for new work.
3.4 Strengthen protection from employment discrimination on all grounds, including parental and carer status, via the proposed Single Equality Act.
3.5 Review and monitor national digital inclusion schemes to ensure that disabled people have access to new technologies and can benefit from opportunities for home working and for a better work–life balance.
Employers’ organisations, with governments, should:
3.6 Establish an employer-to-employer campaign and advice line support that explicitly include good practice in employing disabled parents and parents of disabled children. Employers need advice and support to develop effective policies and working practices in relation to their duties both to disabled employees and to parents and carers.
4. To reduce in-work poverty
Governments should:
4.1 Use welfare reform to remove disincentives to voluntary and community activities, enabling parents on benefits to participate. Activities should be recognised through national vocational qualifications in ‘citizen participation’, allowing people to improve their skills and qualifications and enhance their employment prospects.
4.2 Ensure that the ‘National Skills and Enterprise’ strategies in England, Scotland and Wales target disabled parents and parents of disabled children to support them in finding, progressing and staying in work.
Social, health and education services should:
4.3 Encourage parents to engage in the delivery of children’s centres, through which they can meet other parents and build new support networks. Efforts to recruit parents into other learning opportunities might usefully be focused in such centres.
Jobcentre Plus and other employment services should:
4.4 Enable disabled people who are successfully supported into work to retain access to an advisor who can work with them and their employer to develop and implement a personal and career development plan. This plan should take account of family responsibilities and be linked to new individual development budgets, for a period of at least two years. Such contact could provide opportunities to review financial circumstances, the effectiveness of childcare arrangements and the performance of child and adult social services.
Public authorities should:
4.5 Undertake equal pay audits of disabled people and implement action plans to reduce the pay gap. As evidence suggests that disabled people earn on average 10 per cent less at every level of qualification, concerted action is needed.
Measuring change
1. Governments should monitor child poverty rates amongst families with disabled children and/or disabled parents.
2. The Department for Work and Pensions should report on performance against its public service agreement target on reducing child poverty by breaking down the figures for families with disabled children and/or disabled parents.
3. Governments should track progress on the specific objectives in this paper, including mitigating the extra costs of disability and reducing in-work poverty.
4. Progress should be reported under the Disability Equality Duty requirements by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Scottish Ministers and the Welsh Assembly Government First Minister. Reporting should also relate findings to ethnicity, age, gender, parental and carer status, religion and belief, and sexual orientation.
5. Governments and partners should improve the evidence base on poverty. The report on ‘Households Below Average Income’ should be used to analyse the data collected by the ‘Family Resource Survey’ on disabled children and on families with disabled parents according to regional and national context and family characteristics, such as the numbers of lone parents and ethnicity.
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