Charity rejects need for greater sanctions and calls for more support

Commenting on the launch of the Freud review of welfare to work, Kate Green, Chief Executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said:

“Many parents who are currently out of the labour market want to work – helping them to attain and to sustain employment is in everyone’s interests but to achieve this policy makers need to address the real reasons for why many parents are locked out of the labour market, not to jump to knee jerk reactions around extending sanctions.

“The key to increasing the employment rate is to improve the levels of support available to parents, which means addressing the barriers to work – prohibitively expensive child care, low pay, low skills and inflexible employment.

“To talk of increasing sanctions is both to miss the point of why it is that some parents are not in work and to place children in sanctioned families at serious risk – reducing poor families’ incomes worsens child poverty.

“Proposals to extend the role of the private and voluntary sectors in delivery need greater thinking through, care is needed if contracting out of delivery to the voluntary sector is to be done without damaging the role of independent advocacy, we do not see how it is possible for voluntary sector to act as both advocate and judge.”

Notes to Editors

• Child Poverty Action Group is a Member of the End Child Poverty Campaign

For further information please contact:
Paul Dornan
Tel. 020 7812 5216 or 07816 909302
pdornan@cpag.org.uk