Ms Louise Bayliss:

That is a really good question, especially with regard to access to public services because we know, as CEDAW pointed out in its final observations yesterday, about the disproportionate level of poverty and homelessness among one-parent families.

There are real problems with accessing services. I will talk about one that is very specific and very discriminatory, which is when lone parents try to access emergency hospital services. If they get sick in the middle of the night and they have nobody to mind their children, and this is a topic that comes up again and again among lone parent groups, they often go to the hospital and present as ill and they are turned away because they are told that children cannot be in the emergency accommodation. If that is on any other ground, be it is disability or language barriers, there are reasonable accommodations made, but there are not reasonable accommodations made for sick lone parents. That is the point that Ms Bailey and the National One Parent Family Alliance were making, that we need that very specific ground to make sure that public services recognise that having a child with you is an additional barrier just as much as being a blind person, having a disability or having a language barrier, and we need those similar accommodations so that the parents we represent can access those public services.