Careful or Lenient: Welfare Reform for Lone Mothers in the Netherlands

Abstract

The 1996 welfare reform that attempted to get lone parents out of social assistance represents a major shift in social policy in the Netherlands. Instead of having the financial right to care for their children, lone mothers are now obliged to earn their living by paid work as soon as their youngest child reaches the age of five. This policy shift is accompanied by additional incentives to support lone mothers in engaging in (part-time) work. Nevertheless, the measure has met considerable resistance among lone mothers as well as the caseworkers and municipalities that have been granted discretionary powers to implement the new law. Several years after its introduction, it can be concluded that the law has not been very successful; only slightly more than one out of ten lone mothers have actually left social assistance. In this article, we explain these meagre results by analysing the assumptions and incentives of the national policies, and by describing the mechanisms of discretion at a local level.