Pregnancy pay-out nonsense

The Department of Stupid Ideas has been hard at work:

Pregnant women are to receive a grant from the Government in a bid to encourage them to eat better and improve the health prospects of their unborn child...
Women in their 29th week of pregnancy will be given a one-off payment of as much as £200 along with professional health advice on maintaining a balanced diet.

Now, it's a good thing if pregnant women eat heathily; low birthweight is associated (pdf) with bad outcomes for children as they grow up. But what evidence is there that pregnancy pay-outs will be spent on good food?
Diddly squat. Let's have a look at what child benefit gets spent on, according to this paper.
It shows that if couples get an extra £1 of child benefit, 49p is spent on drink, and 40p on adults' clothing. If single parents get an extra £1 of child benefit, 71p goes on women's clothing.
If child benefit doesn't get spent on children, it's unlikely that support for foetuses will be spent on foetuses.
There's a simple reason for this. Good parents are already doing as much as they can for their kids, born or unborn. And bad parents don't bother anyway. Either way, more money doesn't mean better upbringing.
More likely, pregnancy pay-outs will, at the margin, simply encourage more pregnancy among the sort of people who'd be bad mothers.
What Alan Johnson is doing here is the politics of symbolism. He wants to signal that he cares about the ickle-wickle kiddie-widdies. Results don't matter

Comments

[Matt Munro]

There are so many problems with this it's hard to know where to begin

a) Claimants do not have to prove the money was spent on healthy food (or anything else) so that'll be a months supply of budget vodka, greggs pasties and mayfair fags then.

b) What is "Healthy food"

c) Is the answer to b really more expensive than "unhealthy food"

d) Does anyone really imagine that a teenage chav mother who lives (and thus her kids also live) on KFC, MCdonalds and frozen pizzas is going to wake up one morning and start browsing for organic sun dried kiwi fruit at her local fair trade farmers market ? It's another absurdity driven by a welfare state trying to social engineer middle class values onto the masses.

[Roger Thornhill]

Chris, what would be wonderful is if anyone has any stats about what an additional £1 EARNED would be spent on by couples and single mums.

[Roger Thornhill]

Interested to know what an additional £1 EARNED would be spent on.

[P]

This blog post is spot on. Healthy eating is good. It is depressing we even need to consider this payout as an option. But what a cack-handed scheme for squandering public money.

[Ken Houghton]

matt Munro c) - Yes.

That said, the allocation would have to be dedicated the such foods, and the current food allocation ("budget") shifted as well.

Virtually impossible to manage, even if you could.

(Btw, if one were going up a dress and a cup size every couple of months, one would need new clothing, too--if only to be able to go to the local greengrocer to buy the wheat grass and tempeh to which the stipend is allocated.)

[Ken Houghton]

Clarification of that second 'graf: possibly possible to manage on an individual basis; rather impossible to administer on a wide basis.

[SP]

I believe your incorrect in the final paragraph to suggest that Mr Johnson and the governments motives are just symbolic.

They are deliberatly trying to encourage the growth of single mothers in any way possible as a means to further weaken society.