State, Family and Personal Responsibility: The Changing Balance for Lone Mothers in the United Kingdom

In the UK there are about 11/4 million lone-parent families, making up 19 per cent of all families with children. The numbers of lone parents have almost doubled since the early 1970s and this increase is part of wider patterns of change in family structure. These are the result, for example, of the rise in extramarital births (now accounting for over a quarter of all births), the increase in cohabitation (half of women have cohabited prior to marriage), the rise in divorce (one in three marriages currently contracted will end in divorce), and the extent of remarriage and cohabitation after divorce (about a quarter of all marriages are second marriages for one or both partners). Kiernan and Wicks (1990) suggest that by the year 2000 it may be that as few as half of all children in Britain will have spent all their lives in a conventional two-parent family with both their natural parents. These changing family structures present something of a challenge for social policy, especially in relation to the issue of state financial support for families. The British post-war social security system was founded on three important assumptions: full employment, male breadwinners and stable families. Thus the main form of family support is male wages, which the state will replace under certain conditions (for example, in the case of involuntary unemployment, sickness, disability and death). The state will also supplement male wages with child benefit for all families, and more recently with means-tested benefits for families with low wages. Otherwise the financial arrangements of families are considered to be essentially private. This has two particular consequences. First decisions about how families allocate and spend their money are seen as the responsibility of the family and not the business ofthe state. Secondly, because male wages are perceived as the main element of family support, decisions about whether or not the