Extending time on benefit by adding children

From the Taylor Fry actuarial report released yesterday here's a couple of interesting graphs. The first shows how many sole parents fall into each group by age of youngest child. Note that the largest group is those who have a youngest child 5 or older and have been on a benefit for more than one year. The smallest group is the same by age of child but have been on welfare for less than a year.

The second graph shows the movement between these groups. Here we can see that 360 people who have been on a  benefit more than a year who had a youngest child aged 5 or older have returned to the group with a youngest child 0-2.  All up, in the year to June 2012, 3240 ( 810 x 4) sole parents returned to the group with children aged 0-2.

That is interesting because the average annual number of  children added to a sole parent benefit during 2006 - 2010 was 4,400.

The difference may be explained by the fact that someone can only return once within two years but could, during that period, have yet another child. 

The new policy that only suspends work obligations for one year when a subsequent child is added (dependent on the age of next oldest child) didn't kick in until October 2012  so it'd be surprising if there has been a big reduction. Especially as the rate of adding children had been increasing.