Almost thirty years separate these two statements about lone parents and employment. When the official Finer commission reported in the early 1970s, there were about half a million lone-parent families (8% of all families with children) in Britain, and concern was growing about the high levels of poverty they faced. The commission's proposals were never fully implemented, but the principle – that lone parents should be able to choose between paid employment and staying at home to care for their children – became the guiding precept for UK policy for the next three decades. Lone parents receiving social assistance are still not required to be available for employment if they have a child less than 16 years old, the minimum school-leaving age.

The social, economic, and political world has changed radically since the 1970s. The number of lone-parent families has more than tripled, their employment rate has fallen, their receipt of benefits has risen, and their poverty rate has increased dramatically. But even the politically secure and strongly neo-liberal Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s did not directly challenge this non-employment-based model, despite concerns about the rising rates of benefit receipt among lone parents. However, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown's statement indicates, the current Labour government has initiated a significant policy shift, one that begins to reconceptualise lone parents as workers as well as parents and that, for the first time, sets an employment target for policy.

One justification for setting this target comes from cross-national comparisons. In an earlier speech, Gordon Brown pointed out that “the UK still lags behind other countries in the ‘league table’ of international comparisons of the numbers of lone parents in work” (Gordon Brown, October 2000a). He quoted figures to show that lone mothers in the UK have much lower employment rates, especially for full-time employment, than those in France, Germany, Sweden and the US.