1.4m children live in homes where no one has worked for a year

MORE than one in ten children live in a home where no one has had a job for more than a year, official figures said yesterday.

They showed that the overwhelming majority of children in families burdened with worklessness or unemployment are living on state benefits for years at a time.

In all 1,369,000 children under 16 live in homes described as ‘long-term workless’, a new category published for the first time as part of a Government drive to encourage more people to work.

They make up 11.4 per cent of the 12,000,000 children in the country, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The number of children in families mired in benefit dependency brought warnings of a generation growing up with no understanding of the need to work or the demands of holding down a job. Jill Kirby, a former head of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said: ‘It is very worrying that such a high proportion of children have no example of a working parent in their lives. The prospects for these children are not encouraging.’

Ministers ordered the figures to be published under the Welfare Reform and Work Act, pushed through with the intention of enforcing the £23,000 benefit cap and freezing key state handouts while speeding up social mobility.

Based on large-scale state-run surveys, they show the number of under-16s who live in homes where either no one has ever worked or where no one has had a job in the past 12 months.

A central finding is that only around one in seven of all the children in workless families are likely to see a parent or carer who is out of work find a job in the course of a year. The breakdown said that of 1,609,000 children in families without work, only 15 per cent are in homes considered short-term workless.

Department of Work and Pensions officials said that seven out of ten of the 1.369million children in long-term workless households live in a single parent family, and nearly half live in a home where some or all adults have a disability. Only 17,000, 1.2 per cent, have parents who do not work because they are students. The figures point to success in reducing worklessness over the first five years of David Cameron’s term as Prime Minister.

Numbers of children in longterm workless homes dropped by 276,000 between 2010 and 2014, the report from the ONS said. The fall, from 1,645,000 children in long-term workless homes in 2010, went alongside benefit reforms introduced by former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. He introduced a series of controversial measures, including the benefit cap, which is to limit the total benefits any family can receive from this autumn to £23,000 in London and £20,000 outside.

Mr Duncan Smith quit the Cabinet in March in a row over Chancellor George Osborne’s cuts to disability benefits.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: ‘We are committed to improving the life chances of the most disadvantaged ... Work is the best route out of poverty and these figures show that the numbers of children living in longterm workless households are down 17 per cent since 2010. But there is still more we can do.’

But Javed Khan, of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said: ‘Having a job does not guarantee a way out of poverty. The Government must ensure work pays for working families, and children in workless families are adequately supported, so they can live up to their potential.’

‘Still more we can do’