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Continuing difficulties for unmarried mothers and their children despite improvements. Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Governments, cuts to welfare, pressure on mothers to work, but childcare hard to find and contracting labour market. ‘Broken families’ blamed for social problems as divorce, cohabitation, and babies born out of wedlock rose to unprecedented levels. Government claims that ‘teenage mothers’ got pregnant to get a council house and welfare benefits. Disproved by research but accusations continued into 1990s. Successful efforts by OPF to set up courses to help mothers into work, strongly supported by mothers. In 1987, all legal differences between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ children eliminated after long campaign by NC/OPF. In 1991 the establishment of Child Support Agency, badly designed in a hurry and made access to maintenance and benefits more difficult and conditions worsened. Intensified government attacks on lone, especially unmarried mothers, until Conservatives lost 1997 election.

For many years, married women who needed protection used the Magistrates’ Courts, which had a (very restricted) jurisdiction to make orders in cases where wife and children needed financial support from the husband. How should those orders be enforced? Was there any scope for social work intervention? The State provided support through the Poor Law and then, after World War II, through welfare benefits; but should the adults involved be ultimately responsible for the cost? Eventually the Child Support Act 1991 introduced what was intended to be a modern and scientific system under which a Child Support Agency would use a formula to calculate responsibility for family support and have recourse to efficient business management tools to enforce the obligations. The scheme did not work out wholly as had been hoped.

Doctors owe a duty of care to their patients, and this duty will be owed regardless of whether the doctor is a public sector employee operating within a statutory framework or is providing health care privately. Medical negligence claims in relation to the care which doctors provide to individual patients are outside the scope of this book. Cases arise, however, that do not involve individual doctor-patient relations and raise broader questions of medical policy. In such instances, the fact that the defendant is a public authority exercising public powers is likely to be material to a determination of whether a duty of care should be imposed, and it is such cases we consider in this section. It should be noted that the potential liabilities in negligence of the bodies that regulate the medical profession are not considered in this chapter, but are examined in Chapter 14, where we consider professional regulators.

The following chapter examines claims that can be brought under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). The HRA makes it unlawful for a ‘public authority’ to breach the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the Convention’). The HRA accords to the victims of a breach of the Convention the right to pursue a claim against the offending public authority in the UK courts, when previously they were required to apply to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to vindicate their Convention rights.