Mothers who work in the home are being forced to go back into paid employment because of financial pressures, a UK cabinet minister has warned.

Secretary for Employment, Chris Grayling said that the demise of the stay-at-home mum was one “very obvious” trend from the current jobs market, according to the Daily Mail.

He said: “I think we are seeing more stay-at-home mums saying, ‘I think I’ll look for a part-time job’.” When asked if they were returning to work for financial reasons, Mr Grayling said: “I suspect so.”

His comments come after the Coalition Government was hit by a storm of protest in 2010 after it emerged that changes made to child benefit system would hit one-income families with a stay-at-home mother much harder than two income families. Under the proposals, child benefit is to be removed from any household which has someone earning above the higher-rate tax threshold of £42,745.

However, the scheme penalises stay-at home mothers. A family with two people earning £40,000 – a total of £80,000 – will keep the state handout while less-well off families, where the mother is caring for the children, will lose out. In January, Prime Minister David Cameron said he would look at ways of softening the blow to single income families.

Siobhan Freegard, founder of the parenting website NetMums, said that Mr Grayling’s comments were “100 per cent right”.

She added: “The vast majority who are going back to work, or who are working already, are doing it because they have to, not because they want to.

“Most women who are going back to work have a job, not a career. They are doing soulless, heartless jobs, such as working on a cash till at a supermarket.”

Official figures show that the number of women who do not have a job and do not want one fell by 72,000 in the past year.

In 2009 a report criticised the policies of the then Government which pushed women into employment after finding that most find fulfilment in motherhood rather than in full time careers.

The report was written by Cristina Odone, a former deputy editor of the New Statesman magazine, and published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Using figures from polls conducted by YouGov, Miss Odone found that only 12 per cent of mothers wanted to work full time, while almost a third did not want to work at all.

Last year, it emerged that families where one parent stays at home to look after the children pay more than a third extra in tax in Britain than similar families in other Western countries.

A study showed that British single-earner families with two children on £33,745 a year were paying 39 per cent more in tax than comparable families from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, according to the study.

The report warned that disparity in the UK would worsen to 50 per cent by 2012-13. It said that part of the blame was due to the Coalition’s controversial decision to axe child benefit for families where one parent earns more than £42,000.

Researchers for CARE, a Christian social policy charity, said the tax system was “unfriendly to families” and was going to get worse.

They said that “those in the middle who are not rich are shouldering a heavy burden”, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s election pledge to make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe.

About 2.4 million children in Britain live in households where one parent is in full-time work and one is not working.

During the past few years, the report found, the tax burden had shifted markedly from single people without dependants to families. While the tax burden on most families and individuals was “not out of line with that in other countries”, it found that “this is not the case with one-earner married couples with children”.

In Ireland, one-income families pay far more tax than two-earner families on comparable incomes mainly because of tax individualisation.