Tories have shamed single parents and heaped financial pressure on them | Morag Treanor

Policies such as the benefit cap have hurt the most vulnerable in society, particularly single mothers

• It's hard getting money to stretch': single mothers say they need support
• Half of all children in lone-parent families are in relative poverty
• I'm feeling the squeeze': single mothers on the living costs crisis

If we can judge a society by how it treats its weakest members, then a special type of judgment should be reserved for a society that deliberately weakens certain of its members. During more than a decade of austerity, successive Conservative governments have fanned the flames of shame surrounding single parents, and used the benefits system to heap financial pressure on their already vulnerable families.

Take Iain Duncan Smith's 2015 party conference speech. Introducing the two-child limit to benefit payments, the then work and pensions minister said it was about bringing home to parents the reality that children cost money".