Over 5,000 lone parent families will lose their entitlement to One Family Payment from this Thursday but this will rise to 9,000 by the end of the year.
By highlighting the fact By July 2015, almost 60,000 families will lose One Family Payment when their youngest child turns seven, SPARK (Single Parent Acting for the Rights of Kids) has called on the promise made by Minister Joan Burton in April 2012 not to proceed with these ‘reforms’ unless there was “system of safe, affordable and accessible child care in place, similar to what is found in the Scandinavian countries to whose systems of social protection we aspire.
“There have been 800 after school childcare places provided (ASCC) for all low income families and this is nowhere near the requirement needed to assist the 60,000 effected families.
Minister Joan Burton has cited the fact that lone parent families are the poorest group in Society as the reason for reform, however, the changes being introduced have a drastic financial impact on working lone parents and no financial impact on non working lone parents. We completely disagree that cutting working lone parents income is a way to improve the outcome for children in lone parent families. There has been no additional training or employment supports being provided for lone parents, there is no childcare so we can avail of jobs bridge and we are actively hampered by our exclusion to the Jobs plus grant available to other job seekers,” said a SPARK’s spokesperson.
“We call on Minister Burton to explain how she can proceed with these cuts
to working lone parents, while ignoring her promise to provide an
affordable childcare system. We ask if she becomes Labour Leader will she
continue to ignore her promise?”, the spokesperson added.
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.