Two-parent families with dependent children are known to be at lower risk of poverty and significantly less reliant on state financial help than lone-parent households. It might therefore be expected that the factors influencing partnership transitions among low-income women would represent a key area of policy interest. However, driven by concerns about weak work incentives, policy focus and research has to date concentrated on understanding lone parents’ labour supply and encouraging the transition from benefits into employment. Surprisingly little is therefore known about demographic decision making among women reliant on UK means-tested welfare. As part of a wider qualitative study exploring family formation, partnership dissolution and repartnering decisions among low-income mothers, this paper examines whether and to what extent entitlement to welfare benefits or tax credits influenced the decision to live with or apart from a partner or child's father. The research found that the aspects of welfare that remove or reduce a mother's access to an independent income and require one partner in a couple to be financially dependent on the other had been strongly influential in partnering decisions and living arrangements. Policy implications are discussed.

Intended to simplify the benefit system and ’make work pay’, Universal Credit (UC) is the UK’s first ‘digital by design’ benefit. Proponents of UC highlight the greater efficiency and effectiveness of digitalisation, while critics point to costly IT write-offs and the ‘digital divide’ between people with the skills and resources to access digital technologies, and those without. Less attention has been paid to automation in UC and its effects on the people subject to these rapidly developing technologies. Findings from research exploring couples’ experiences of claiming UC suggest that automated processes for assessing entitlement and calculating payment may be creating additional administrative burdens for some claimants. Rigid design parameters built into UC’s digital architecture may also restrict options for policy reform. The article calls for a broadening of thinking and research about digitalisation in welfare systems to include questions of administrative burden and the wider effects and impacts on claimants.

Unemployed and low-income couples entitled to means-tested benefits are known to have higher rates of separation and divorce than couples in which one or both partners are in regular, paid work. However, how and why unemployment and benefit receipt increases the risk of partnership dissolution remains the subject of much debate. In recent policy discourse, financial differentials in benefit entitlement between lone and couple parents are said to encourage intact couples to separate. Based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews with a group of low-income mothers who had been partnered prior to claiming lone parent benefits, this paper explores whether benefit entitlement or receipt influenced the decision to separate or divorce. The research found that more salient to partnership dissolution than the amount of benefits a couple may have been entitled to, was who had access to the money, how it was managed and how it was spent. To the extent that welfare systems influence which member of a couple has access to household income, the design and administration of benefits was having an important contributory effect. Policy implications of paying Universal Credit to couples in the form of a single monthly household award into one bank account are discussed.

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