The Budget and unemployment

<p>The number of lone parents has risen very rapidly in the UK in recent years, as it has elsewhere. There are now more than 1 million lone parents representing almost 15 per cent of all families with children. However, the labour force attachment of these parents has declined considerably over the period which we analyse here, 1979-84, and a corollary of this decline has been a growing proportion of lone parents who depend on supplementary benefit (SB), which Figure 1 demonstrates.</p>