I awoke this morning with an unfamiliar feeling: a desperate, sickening yearning for the glorious few weeks of Liz Truss’s premiership. Before she was summarily removed, Truss had floated a plan to give parents money to spend on childcare as they wished. The policy was one of those rare instances when a libertarian brainwave actually promises to make people more free.
Now, however, the Tories are clamping down. According to the morning headlines, Jeremy Hunt’s Budget will guarantee thirty hours a week of free childcare for one- and two-year-olds, “part of a government drive to encourage more people back to work”, reports the BBC. Work, we learn, is the natural condition for human beings, like making honey is for bees. Family is an eccentric hobby, to be properly reined in.
The move will be presented as a populist reform, to help parents struggling with their responsibilities. But the model Hunt is expected to offer, unlike the Truss proposal, is a one-size-fits-all model in which parents are expected to work full-time and entrust their children to registered providers. Is that, in fact, what the public wants? The British Social Attitudes Survey has found that only 6% of British people think the best childcare arrangement is for both mum and dad to work full-time.
Only a minority are attached to a 1950s male-breadwinner model; there are, of course, any number of ways — part-time work, flexible work, career breaks — in which both men and women can share responsibilities. What very few people really want is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to shepherd the country’s toddlers en masse through the gates of the kindergarten. But that is where this is heading: with free childcare on the table, choosing to look after your own progeny makes you either rich or a mug.
The CBI, which successfully led the lobbying for this reform, has published a blackly funny press release on the subject which assumes that taking your little one to Wriggle and Rhyme at the public library is an unutterable burden, whereas stacking shelves or updating spreadsheets is a liberation of the human spirit. Literally “thousands” of people, they lament, “are prevented from taking on more hours of paid employment due to childcare issues.” As the CBI notes, employers have made extra efforts in recent years to accommodate parents. On the Hunt reforms, companies can relax: once the baby turns one, it’s not an employer’s responsibility to accommodate a worker’s needs.
Of course, as Hunt will argue, the present situation is unworkable. Rent is so high and pay is so low that parents can’t afford childcare, and can’t afford to work less and stay home. That is why a responsible government would be fretting night and day about how to return some reality to our fantasy-land housing market, and would be nerving itself for a contest with the interest groups who stand to lose from a higher-pay economy.
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