The Department for Work and Pensions launched its White Paper on the Universal Credit last week. One of its most heavily trailed elements was the increase in sanctions for those who fail to seek or find work (on top of the already announced automatic sanction of 10% of Housing Benefit for those on Jobseeker’s Allowance for more than a year).

The White Paper wants to introduce the power for advisers to remove people’s benefits for periods ranging between one week and three years. When advisers believe that claimants would ‘benefit from experiencing the habits and routines of working life’ they will have the power to mandate them to four weeks of compulsory work activity. And advisers will also be able to

“require some jobseekers to attend their local office more frequently to demonstrate the steps they have been taking to return to work; require some people to broaden their job search earlier in their claim; and raise the number of steps they expect a customer to take in any week to have the best prospects of finding work”.

There’s little evidence that these proposals will help those out of work to find jobs, given that there are currently over five jobseekers for every vacancy. But work on Community Links’ Deep Value project, which is examining the importance of effective one to one relationships in public services, suggests that giving advisers more power to sanction claimants may in fact make employment programmes less effective.

The literature review we are undertaking as part of this project shows that the relationship between the Personal Adviser and the claimant is one of the most important elements of welfare to work programmes. As a 2007 review for the DWP of ‘what works for whom’ concluded:

“Friendly staff, welcoming accommodation and a sense of shared purpose are not just desirable rather cosmetic aspects of provision but may be essential elements in the effectiveness or otherwise of provision….a key to effective provision would appear to be for Jobcentre Plus and programme providers to engage effectively with customers and to ‘buy in’ to any provision to which they are referred.”

Developing an effective relationship between a personal adviser and a client requires trust, and collaboration. It’s not clear that this trust can survive the adviser’s decision to require someone to undertake unpaid work activity, or to leave them without benefit for a month. Research already shows that Jobcentre Plus Advisers, who have to police the benefit system, find it less easy to establish effective relationships than those in Employment Zones (currently the Flexible New Deal, soon to be the Work Programme…) who have more autonomy, and are further away from the system of sanctions.

Every welfare reform over the past ten years has trumpeted the need to ‘get tough on welfare’ and to ‘return’ to Beveridge’s aim of ensuring that there is always an incentive to take paid work. But examination of what has actually been going on in employment programmes suggests that it’s when advisers have treated claimants as individuals, and with respect, that they’ve had the most success. Greater sanctions could jeopardise the very thing that makes these programmes work.

Hidden amongst the barrage of cuts announced in the June Budget was a further extension in the work requirements applied to single parents. The last Government had already compelled those with children aged seven and over to seek work from this October. The Coalition announced that it will bring down the age to 5, reckoning that this will save £380 million, and see 100,000 more parents in work.

The Coalition seems to follow the last Government in believing that single parents are not in work because benefit conditions are not tight enough. But we know that nine out of ten single parents want a paid job; the problem is that the jobs they could fit with their family life aren’t out there.

Gingerbread surveyed our members and users of the NetMums website. 62% told us there were no or very few jobs at part time hours that they could apply for; 97% had seen none or very in school hours, and 95% had seen none or very few job-shares.

A scan of the London job pages over two weeks backed up what parents had told us – we saw only 11% of jobs advertised at part-time hours, with none advertised within school hours or as a job-share. We know that across the labour market, there has been a fall in full-time working during the recession. But we think that, rather than opening up new part-time jobs to employees, employers are reducing the hours of their existing workforce to save costs without making redundancies.

Single parents can’t move into jobs that aren’t there – and although the right to request flexible working has helped, workplace reform remains the missing piece of the jigsaw of parental employment. The Coalition has said it wants to extend flexible working to all – we think such moves should come before work requirements are extended to more parents.

Government can also lead the way in changing employment practices in the public sector. Jobs could be offered as flexible or job-share as standard – unless there is a good, demonstrable business case for why this isn’t possible. The ‘business case’ for flexible working is clear – with companies of all sizes seeing benefits in terms of motivation, engagement and commitment.

It’s time that Government took the lead in making sure that more parents benefit from better working practices – rather than simply placing more pressure on them to move into a labour market that doesn’t fit with family life.

We’ve secured a pledge from Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to challenge prejudice against single parents in the run up to the election. We’ve also written to editors of leading newspapers and broadcasters news to ask them to do the same. We’re going to be highlighting good and bad practice on our website and asking all MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates to sign up. We hope that by highlighting the continuing distortions of the debate about single parenthood we’ll also contribute to a more sensible conversation on the issues of poverty and welfare reform.

Times have moved on since Peter Lilley MP spoke in 1992 of ‘young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list’. But our members tell us they still feel stigmatised and stereotyped today, portrayed alternately as ‘scroungers’ or ‘bad mothers’ responsible for ‘broken families’. 83% say the media portray them in a negative light.

These debates distort the public perception of who single parents are. YouGov polling this month found that the average estimate of the proportion of single parents in work was 34% – the real figure is 57%. This estimate has fallen from when we asked the same question two years ago – despite a rise in the number of single parents in work. We think that it’s likely that ‘tough’ rhetoric around welfare reform has been driving these perceptions.

Estimates of teenage pregnancy are also wildly out of line with reality – MORI in 2009 found that the average public estimate of the number of girls under 16 getting pregnant was almost thirty times the actual figure.

We’re campaigning on this because single parents are angry about the way they’re portrayed. But the stereotypes also fuel bad policy. Focusing on non working parents distracts attention from tackling the fact that a third of working lone parents are still poor. And a focus on family type won’t help with family functioning, which we know makes the most difference to children.