Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry was launching a consultation paper Work and parents: Competitiveness and choice (DTI, 2000). He made it very clear that ‘parents’ includes both fathers and mothers. However, it is also clear from reading the paper that any measures to help parents ‘to balance work and family life’ so that they ‘may contribute fully to the competitiveness and productivity of the modern economy’ must be based on giving families ‘reasonable choices’ taking ‘the needs of business into account’.

In the past, the ‘reasonable’ choices facing mothers in the UK were constructed differently. The big increase in economic activity rates, which had occurred among married women in the UK since the Second World War, was almost entirely accounted for by an increase in part-time employment. Very few (5%) of married women had full-time employment while they had a pre-school child. Until 1980, lone mothers irrespective of the age of their child(ren) were more likely to be economically active than married mothers in the UK. There was little difference in the level of qualifications of married and lone mothers – neither were well qualified (see Land et al, 2000). Social assistance was there for those without earnings. As the Supplementary Benefit Commission, responsible until 1980 for the means-tested supplementary benefit system (now called Income Support) wrote in their last annual report: