Households where no one has EVER worked doubles to 297,000 in 15 years



The number of homes where no one has ever worked has doubled in little more than a decade.

There are now nearly 300,000 homes where no one has had a job in their lives, and more than 300,000 children living in families where no one knows what it is like to go out to work.

These numbers have more than doubled in the years since Labour came to power. However, in a welcome development, the number of homes where no one is currently in work has fallen.

The number of British homes where no one has ever worked doubled in the space of 14 years

There are now 3.88million such homes, excluding pensioners. Although they make up almost one in five of all homes in the country, there are 38,000 fewer workless homes than at this time last year.

Ministers acknowledged that the figures published yesterday show a ‘huge’ rate of welfare dependency, and that efforts to encourage hundreds of thousands who have lost the habit of work into looking for jobs have yet to have any effect.

Employment minister Chris Grayling said: ‘While the slight fall in the numbers of workless households and children living in workless households is encouraging, these figures still underline the sheer scale of the challenge we face.

‘Over the last decade thousands of people were simply abandoned to a lifetime on benefits, and a staggering 1.84million children are living in homes where currently no one works.’



Working nine to five: But 1.8 million children now live in a home where they have never seen anyone go out to work

At the heart of the picture of benefit dependency and feckless families painted by the figures from the Office for National Statistics are the homes where no one has worked in their lives.

Surveys on which the ONS based its figures do not count the numbers of individuals involved. But there are likely to be around 700,000 men, women and children who have no everyday experience of anyone going out to work.

Families with no history of the habit of work are those most likely to be involved in crime and disorder and whose children are most likely slip into truancy, drug abuse, crime and single parenthood.

According to figures gathered by the ONS, the rate of worklessness among married families is half that among families headed by live-in parents.

The breakdown found that 91.3 per cent of married fathers have a job, compared with 81.7 per cent of cohabitee fathers in families headed by a live-in couple. Just over half, 57.3 per cent, of single parents have work. The figures on worklessness among married and unmarried parents have not been published by the ONS, but remain available only by special request.

Instead, the state statistical body published a figure for worklessness among both married andand cohabiting parents, which said that when they are counted together, 89.5 per cent are in work.