Last week at the Labour party conference there was a lot of bleating about the
needs of “hard-working families”. Tony Blair promised wraparound childcare,
beginning at 8am in the local primary school and lasting until 6pm, for
children aged three-14.
Presumably he thinks free childcare will woo back the female voters who have
fallen out of love with him over Iraq. If so, he’s way out of touch. The
proposals smack of old-style feminism based on a grim kibbutz-style model of
society, whereby we all put our kids into care and go down to the factories
to get on with being economically productive.
He doesn’t even begin to tackle the real problem, which is that many mothers
who go out to work would rather be at home looking after their kids. In
reality only a small minority of women in western countries want to work
full-time throughout their children’s childhoods.
We already have childcare subsidies, through tax breaks, for mums who go out
to work. By providing universal childcare, the government sends a very
strong message that women should be out working, not at home caring for
children.
This may be good for economic productivity in the short term, but in the long
term it may be less desirable: well-raised children will be the taxpayers of
the future. And, as Patricia Hewitt pointed out last week, the birth rate is
dropping, storing up economic problems. We need women to be mothers.
Above all — while I’m not arguing that mothers shouldn’t work — there are
wider social issues surrounding childcare. Study after study shows that
willing maternal care is better for children than institutional care, and
should be valued. Women believe it’s a worthwhile use of their time, so why
doesn’t the government?
We have had a systematic failure in the delivery of good-quality childcare in
this country, not surprising when cleaners get paid more than childminders.
“Mass care of the young,” says Jill Kirby of the Centre for Policy Studies,
“cannot be both cheap and good. Day nursery care can only be of good quality
with a high adult-child ratio of well-qualified staff with low staff
turnover — which means offering attractive pay packages. Those costs cannot
be passed on to mothers, as it ceases to be cost-effective for them to work.
The cost to the government of staffing and regulating well-run schemes will
overtake the revenue gained from increased maternal employment.”
The money can be better spent. What mums want — and only the more affluent
have at present — is choice: whether to work and what form of childcare to
use. Other countries — Finland, Norway, France — subsidise mummy care as
well as daycare by offering home-care allowances to mothers who stay at
home. If Blair had offered this, he would have given women real choice —
between daycare, family care or a combination of the two.
France offers a child home-care allowance to mothers of £368 a month for
looking after a child aged up to six. There is an “allowance for parent
presence”, which is payable to a parent with a seriously sick child who
stops or reduces his or her work.
In Norway there are monthly cash benefits of up to £294 for parents caring for
children aged between one and three where there is non-use or limited use of
state-subsidised daycare centres. Finland has child home-care allowances for
families who care for their children under the age of three at home or by
other arrangement instead of using state daycare. A partial childcare
allowance of £45 a month is paid to a parent who has a child under the age
of three and who reduces working hours to a maximum of 30 hours a week.
Here there is little or no help, but a small tweak to the taxation system
could make an enormous difference to stay-at-home mothers. If tax allowances
were made transferable, both husband and wife could set £4,500 against tax.
Stay-at-home mothers currently lose this allowance. The tax credit system
gives them £545 a year, but this does not go far. By contrast, some working
mothers can claim up to £7,000 a year towards childcare.
Other countries also offer tax breaks that give flexibility to families with
young children where one parent wants to take some time out from work.
Income splitting (attractive to couples where earnings are not evenly split
— the vast majority of couples of working age) allows the incomes of both
spouses to be aggregated and split in two to compute the tax rate for each
spouse. This is the system of family taxation operating in Germany; slightly
varying forms of income splitting also operate in France, Belgium,
Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Switzerland and Ireland.
“Providing daycare is to suggest that one size fits all. The aim should be to
achieve a civilised work-life balance and recognise that every family is
different,” says Eleanor Laing, the shadow minister for women, who is
involved in a Tory examination of childcare policy ahead of the party
conference this week.
I started my career in the City as a solicitor. It was a transactional job
where the expectation was that you would be continuously available to the
client — 24 hours a day and at the weekend if necessary — making it
difficult to combine with a family.
My generation has had the luck to be able to road test some of the jobs to
which our mothers didn’t have access, yet many have proved uncompromising.
After I had children I left my job to look after them, working around them
in a way I could control. My youngest is five, so I expect to be working
this way for many years.
Allowing parents to work flexibly — or stay at home if they want to — makes
both economic and social sense. “Hidden” costs to farming children out
counterbalance some of the productivity gains: what price the armies of
educational psychologists, special needs teachers and — in extreme cases —
delinquency, courts and prisons?
The message broadly being received from the government (eg Hewitt’s assertion
that parents who do not return to the workplace are “a real problem”) is
that parents who stay at home are not valued. This sits strangely with plans
to extend paternity/maternity leave. While recent government legislation
against antisocial behaviour indicates a wish to have better communities,
this does not seem to connect with support for committed parenting, which
provides the bedrock for communities.
We see a society that is desperate for the glue, the social cohesion, which a
mother at home can provide. Time spent nurturing children ought not to be
seen as an embarrassing gap in a woman’s CV, especially during the first two
years of life when the government has implicitly acknowledged that kids are
best cared for at home. I think paying women to stay at home to look after
their own is the way forward.
Many other women, who used to do the caring and volunteering in society, are
out in the workplace making financial, not human capital. Is that the
correct investment of those energies? Now that the dust is settling on the
equality question, isn’t it time to ask some hard questions? If parenting
and nurturing of children were clearly understood to be the key to a better,
happier and more harmonious society, would wrapround care be prioritised? I
think not.
Is it not obvious that mothers should feel encouraged to see their mothering
as a hugely valued element of our “social capital”? Of course, this doesn’t
mean they shouldn’t work if they wish; but it also doesn’t mean they should
be penalised for giving themselves to their children. The old stay-at-home
mother model doesn’t fit any more, but let’s not swap it for a rigid
working-mum model either. The point about women’s liberation was choice.
