A three-year campaign to fight for single parent families is being launched as fresh research reveals the extent to which single parents in the UK are struggling to escape unemployment or in-work poverty.
At least 1.16 million children in Britain are growing up in single parent families where no one at home works. For those who do work, a job is still not a guaranteed route out of financial hardship: more than 300,000 children in working single parent families are growing up below the poverty line.
On the eve of its campaign launch, the charity Gingerbread criticised successive governments for failing to make work pay or tackle single parent unemployment. Although 59% of the UK's single parents do work, their employment rate is still well below that of the European average of 71%, the charity found.
Single parents with children aged over 12 face double the rate of long-term unemployment compared with other groups – evidence, the charity says, that the government's attempts to get more single parents into work are failing.
Of the single parents who do manage to find a job, almost a quarter are out of work again within a year as they struggle to find a job that offers security.
"Successive governments have recognised that getting single parents into work is vital if we're going to tackle child poverty, reduce the number of children growing up in homes where no one works, and cut the cost of the benefits bill," said Gingerbread's chief executive, Fiona Weir, "Yet years of political rhetoric have made very little practical difference to hundreds of thousands of single parents, who are desperate to lift their families out of poverty and be a role model for their children."
The research found the biggest barriers to work for single parents are childcare costs and a shortage of flexible jobs that pay enough to make work worthwhile.
Jo Kerwin, 40 and from Kent, now works for herself after struggling to balance being a nurse with caring for her sons. "The main thing is finding work that fits around school," she said. "Getting childcare, if that's not possible, is just not that simple.
"But not having childcare had an impact on my work, if I wasn't doing 16 or more hours I wouldn't be better off at the end of it. It's all very well the government saying 'work these hours, get this support' – but it's just not that straightforward."