In terms of speeding things up, it's somewhat amusing when you look back on it. When the targets to reduce poverty were set in 1997, they were set on the basis of older figures, as those were the most available knowledge at that stage. When they came to do a survey of poverty subsequently, they discovered that the targets had already been exceeded when they were set in 1997 because they were basing them on older information. What happened, of course, in the meantime was that there was a huge period of economic growth, one of the most rapid we had ever experienced in our history. Therefore, a huge amount of new resources came in. In addition to that, there was a decline in unemployment; therefore, the cost of unemployment went down dramatically.
But you put your finger on it, because there were groups that lost out—not so much lost out, but didn't make progress at the same level as others. One of them was lone parents. That was because there was an old attitude. When we introduced weekly allowances for lone parents, they were really designed to enable lone parents to stay at home to look after their children, like everybody else. But by the late 1990s, they had to be designed to help lone parents go to work, like everybody else, because female participation had increased substantially in the workforce and there were significant barriers to lone parents getting into employment and getting the support they needed.
So there's been a major shift in policy focus. Now the focus is on trying to facilitate lone parents' participation in employment. Thus it involves the provision of child care, and it involves the provision of education and training, because our surveys show that a significant proportion of lone parents have a level of education below the norm, which is a barrier in itself. And it involves making improvements in transport to work and trying to get more flexibility in hours, and whatever.
The process is obviously clarified, but the problem is there. We now have a lot more people in jobless households for reason of being lone parents or having disabilities and whatever than we have because they're unemployed. Many of these households have children, which adds to our relatively high levels of child poverty.
So it's all designed to try to tackle poverty across a whole range of policy areas, which I've just outlined.