Obviously the most important thing about resolving poverty is access to work. There is no question about this. If ultimately the family is to be free of the state of poverty, work is critical. There must be work.
One of the points I make throughout is that we should stop talking about lone parents or couple families and we should talk about families. For a family to be free of poverty, the fact is that family needs to have access to full-time work. Somebody in that family needs to be able to work. Whether they are lone parents or couples, that equation still stands. Therefore, it is resolving how a lone-parent family is able to do that with all the responsibilities that go with it.
Clearly one of the main things government can help with is trying to encourage people into work. That would arguably be the best thing that can happen. The trouble is that governments have created a complex benefit system, which acts as a block against people going to work.
I gave an example earlier of the withdrawal rates. That acts as a major disincentive. On the one hand, you have the government saying it is going to encourage everyone into work; on the other hand, when they get to a certain point, the treasury says--which the treasury always does--it wants its money back: “We're damned if we're going to let these people hang onto any money any further than they should because we have a responsibility to the taxpayer.” You have these two ends working against each other.
This has not been resolved, frankly. We talk about that in our report. After a huge amount of study, we're about to publish a system of benefits that we think will change all that--essentially everything that leads to stabilizing families so they can get into work.
But critically, we think the government needs to stop chasing children and start looking at the family structure--in other words, supporting family structures, encouraging people to be in stable family structures that help them provide for their children. That process is almost non-existent in the U.K.