The fact that four in five Labour voters agree with the Osborne policy doesn’t tell us it is right. It tells us that Labour hasn’t been doing its job for years. It hasn’t been making the case for universality and explaining why it is central to social justice. I also notice no mention of a central advantage of child benefit – it is paid to the mother. Childcare subsidies wouldn’t do that – though of course they would create a whole new industry, which is manna as far as the neoliberals now dominating the public forum are concerned. Especially those who think that it would improve the economic efficiency of parents now able to work without having to take time off to be – parents.

A very good article.

This is the kind of thinking needed. Between now and the next election – whenever that is – the Left desperately needs a clear message:
1. The deficit needs to be cut in a sensible, fair and economically literate manner. (i.e. Focusing on maintaining employment and growth).
2. Clear priorities – like childcare or whatever else.

In think that probably childcare is the right thing to put top of the list, because morally and socially in makes sense and because economically it makes sense.

AFZ

“The fact that four in five Labour voters agree with the Osborne policy doesn’t tell us it is right.”

The last time you lot told your voters they were wrong, you spent 18 years in opposition.

It’s called public service for a reason – you have to serve the public, not lecture them.

But how on earth are we supposed to persuade people than we can afford and should provide free childcare for the better-off (costing maybe £350 a week) if we’ve conceded that we can’t afford and shouldn’t provide them with Child Benefit (costing maybe £35)?

If we let the Tories win the argument on CB for the rich, haven’t they already won the argument on free childcare for the rich ten times over? Won’t *more* Labour voters disapprove of a £350-a-week (say) subsidy to the rich than disapprove of a £35-a-week subsidy, and won’t they disapprove around ten times as strongly?

It just seems hugely unlikely to me that this could be a way to ‘build support for universal benefits’.

“But how on earth are we supposed to persuade people than we can afford and should provide free childcare for the better-off (costing maybe £350 a week) if we’ve conceded that we can’t afford and shouldn’t provide them with Child Benefit (costing maybe £35)?”

This is one of the services where universal access is preferable. For a start universal provision will get economies of scale and thus reduce the cost from 350*, and secondly there are massive benefits to it. It will be a service that essentially allows single parents to work, and thus can be sold as a removal of barriers to work, with potential savings to welfare. Furthermore there are obvious sociological benefits of having poor kids mixing with rich kids – although the service will need to be designed to be providing good quality childcare rather than warehousing if rich parents are to be persuaded to use it. Finally spending the money on this at least garentees benefits to the children, – child benefit isn’t necessarily going to be spent on children when there is booze or dinner parties to pay for.

*obviously how this service is planned and delivered is crucial. I’d say a voucher system and leave it to the market is probably the most appropiate system here – unlike schools.

@ Planeshift

I’d say a voucher system and leave it to the market is probably the most appropiate system here – unlike schools.

I agreed with everything you said here except the final two words.

“we’d make child care costs properly tax deductible. ”

Yes, agreed. How excellent in fact. I’ve always thought it entirely criminal that nannies are not tax deductible. One of the things that contributes to the entirely ruinous costs of getting decent servants these days.

BTW….universal childcare. Are you really sure you want to take on those families where one parent actually desires to stay at home and raise their own children?

Really?

“Are you really sure you want to take on those families where one parent actually desires to stay at home and raise their own children?”

Universal in the sense that it is available to all. Not compulsory.

“Universal in the sense that it is available to all.”

Sure, so everyone gets the £350 voucher. And those who decide to stay at home and raise their own kids (out of, well, who the heck knows, love for them perhaps?) don’t get the £350 but still have to pay taxes to give them to everyone else?

And just a bit of basic maths here. £350 a week (no idea where that number came from but it’s there above) for 12 million kids is, umm, £214 billion or something. How many pence is that on the minimum rate of income tax?

“for 12 million kids is”

Tim, there are not 12 million kids under 5 in the UK. For those over 5 the solution is extension of primary school hours with provision of after school clubs etc. Over 11 the solution is to give your kid responsibility to look after themselves and stop being frightened over protective daily mail readers.

And yes, if you don’t want to use the voucher fair enough. You still pay taxes. Just as people choose not to use state schools and educate children at home.

A child is someone under 18….now you tell me of all these caveats!

OK, 3 million under 5. £54 billion.

More than the entire current education system. 18 pence on the basic income tax rate anyone?

“And just a bit of basic maths here. £350 a week (no idea where that number came from but it’s there above) for 12 million kids is, umm, £214 billion or something. How many pence is that on the minimum rate of income tax?”

Tim, do you think that parents currently spend £214 billion per year on childcare?

“A child is someone under 18….now you tell me of all these caveats!

OK, 3 million under 5. £54 billion.”

Tim, do you think parents currently spend £54 billion on childcare?

” 3 million under 5″

£350 a week is an unrealistic figure. It can probably be done for £50 a week. Thats 7.8 billion a year. Pay for it by abolishing child benefit alltogether and that’s a saving of over 4 billion. That is assuming full take up. In reality we’ll probably not even spend as much as that, so there is also room for paying for the extension of school opening hours (somebody go and calculate a realistic figure for that).

Now consider we’ve also solved one of the major barriers to employment faced by single parents and the resulting savings to benefits that could result.

“It can probably be done for £50 a week.”

Doubt it. There are limits on how many children any one person can take care of at any one time. I think it’s four although open to correction.

That means whoever does it is on less than min wage…..

“There are limits on how many children any one person can take care of at any one time. I think it’s four although open to correction.”

That’s obviously capable of being reviewed. De-regulation and all that

Sorry, that £350 I plucked from the air has caused all sorts of trouble! I was just trying to illustrate that it would be pretty easy for a family to spend on childcare ten times what it receives in Child Benefit. Five pounds per hour per child x 2 kids x a 35-hour week = £350, compared to £35ish a week in CB for 2 kids.

Lets try and figure out what the cost actually is then. Any parents of under 5s here willing to tell us the cost of full time childcare?

(I suspect it differs considerably by region)

A quick google for costs of childcare uk seemed to throw up numbers from £120 to £400 a week.

Didn’t pay any attention to hours or to whether subsidies (of which there currently are some) were included or not.

Any parents of under 5s here willing to tell us the cost of full time childcare?

More than I had ever imagined possible. More than I was earning as a trainee solicitor.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers think that the annual cost would be £2.7 billion to the Exchequer in the short term, falling over time, and that in the long term universal childcare provision with the state covering 75% of costs would add 3.7% to our GDP (though plenty of uncertainties in the forecasting) :

http://is.gd/fRrVi

PWC analysis also suggests universal childcare would boost employment by up to 1 million and reduce child poverty (wish I’d read their analysis before writing the OP!)

I’ll go with this. Subsidizing childcare is a very good idea, and the middle-class squeals of indignation I’ve seen this week indicate that the child benefit among those people fortunate enough to be earning >40K seems to often go on childcare, anyway.

We could learn a lot from Sweden on this issue – they’ve had it for ages.

http://www.skolverket.se/content/1/c4/09/44/00-531.pdf ?

A childcare provider speaks:

Re: cost of delivery (as opposed to price charged) the current Nursery Education Grant provided by LAs to providers is around £9 per 2.5 hour session, so if that was expanded to 40 hours it’d be £144 a week a FT place. Might be higher rates in London – I don’t know.

Providers will of course tell you that this is insufficient for a quality, well staffed service, and they are right if childcare is to be developed as it should be – as a child development service rather than looking out for the kids till their parents come and get them. This is of course a gross generalisation, but while I back the principles that Dan P sets out about GDP being raised by more than enough to pay for the input over time, it is important to recognise that the provision itself needs to go through a professionalisation step change, so that a childcare/devt career is seen as something to be aspired to (with the best current comparator being nursing). Such an aspiration was in fact at the heart of the 2004 10 year childcare strategy, but it’s a very long way from being fulfilled.

That is not to say there have been no successes, and the establishment of the Child Workforce Devt Council, the equivalement for this sector of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, has been a good Labour govt thing, as has the Early Years Foundation Stage degree programme (which three of our staff are undertaking at Edge Hill University – but we are pretty conscientious employers in this regard).

This home educating family live on less than 15k a year and would be most unimpressed if child benefit was stopped in favour of state childcare vouchers. This idea is wrongheaded – more parents want to stay home with their kids (when the kids are pre school age) than want to put them into state childcare. They complain of being forced back to work earlier than they’d like because of financial reasons.

If you’re prepared to give families £350 a week to pay to a nursery/childcarer to act in loco parentis, then why not just give it to the families so one parent can choose to stay at home full time in actual parentis.

Oh right, because parenting your own kids has no value (is not ‘work’), only parenting other people’s. Same as how schooling someone elses kid for seven hours a day/5 days a week/36 weeks a year is worth thousands of pounds out of taxes, but educating your own kid 24/7/365 is not worth even considering for a discount on books, the lazy (probably freakish) shirkers.

Your priorities should be in taking less money off those who dont have much; in making sure wages pay enough to support a family without taxes having to subsidise employers ; in supporting parents to raise and educate their own children well when they wish to and in providing affordable support elsewhere (such as in schools or nurseries) when they don’t or can’t.

Keep running around whinging about the (comparably to the majority of us) wealthy losing so much that they might have to (gosh) downgrade their Sky package, and you’ll sink even further into the mud.

This group should not be your priority. They bitch about missing out on child benefits like they arent getting their fair share out of society. Bullshit. Their kids are more likely to access universities, with all the privilege that brings (subsidised education and extra curriculur activities far in excess of what most of our kids get). They get cheaper holidays and services because the service providers are allowed to pay cheaper wages to everyone else. They have more cooler and newer junk in their homes because the companies that produce and supply such things pay people in foreign countries fuck all to gather/make it. They get a ton of benefits that they never acknowledge – ‘oh poor us, we work so hard to earn more than the plebs, we in the wealth creating/spending class are so much more valuable to society than those at the shit end, and now youre going to take away our only benefits!’ Pull the other one.

Shove that state childcare voucher back up your idea spout, I highly doubt its what most people-with-jobs as opposed to people-with-careers want at all.

@5: the service will need to be designed to be providing good quality childcare rather than warehousing

If the service costs more than the added value of the work done by parents who’re now freed up to work, it rather defeats the point. So, while high quality is good, high price isn’t.

@25: If you’re prepared to give families £350 a week to pay to a nursery/childcarer to act in loco parentis, then why not just give it to the families so one parent can choose to stay at home full time in actual parentis.

Good point. if there is subsidised child care, those parents who don’t want/need it should be given a cash equivalent.

My point was more in the ‘think about the roots of this idea’ vein than in ‘gimme money’.

If you’re prepared to pay people crappy wages to look after the children of parents paid too little to stay at home and look after their own, then you’re getting it wrong.

And it can be guaranteed that most of the suggested £350 a week would end up in useless initiatives, unused equipment, damaging quangos and overregulation, and private nursery profits, rather than in reasonable wages for childcarers and nursery workers. Just like most of the money spent by the government in schools does absolutely fuck all to educate or enrich the lives of most of the children in them.

And while Im having a whinge of my own – all this bollocks across the internet about child benefit not going to children anyway reminds me of the Fathers 4 Justice type arguments that men shouldnt have to pay ‘child maintenance’ without full access to the spending planning and records of their exes.

Here’s how it works. I spend £100 this week on feeding, clothing, and housing a child, and taxi-ing them to wherever it is they want or need to get to – not to mention the rest! Then I spend the same next week, and the week after, etc. Then I get the child benefit, and I pay to get my hair cut (this is an example – as a very low income parent, I never pay to get my hair cut). So am I an evil parent who spent the money intended for the child on myself!!!!!!11!

Or – is life a little bit more complicated than that? Yes, if child benefit is withdrawn I might go without my (fictional, impossible) haircut. But my kids are still paid for because I go without so that they dont have to. What child benefit does is reimburse me a tiny amount of what I spend raising children that will pay taxes so that you can all keep enjoying public services when you’re too old to work anymore, so that I can free up that bit of cash to do something else.

Parents who say they will go without something for themselves rather than have the loss of child benefit impact their children are being good parents, not admitting that theyve been misspending their children’s savings up til this point.

But people on £40k+ per year are not likely to be giving up much, relatively to everyone else suffering benefits cuts. They should get some perspective.

Personally, I think its about time that full time parents and their kids started organising for some serious public disobedience. You pay nurseries and schools cos you acknowledge that raising and educating children is work. So where are my wages??

Bit old now, but …

Child Benefit is NOT paid to women.

It is paid to the nominated parent. If the nominated parent is the mother, then it is paid to a woman; if the nominated parent is the father (as it is in my household) then it is paid to the man. The biggest bonus to the stay at home parent of Child Benefit is the accrual of state pension entitlement. THAT is the salary of raising your own children.

“There are limits on how many children any one person can take care of at any one time. I think it’s four although open to correction.”

“That’s obviously capable of being reviewed. De-regulation and all that ”

Have you ever tried looking after under 5 year olds? Trust me, four per person is a lot. The reason childcare is expensive is that it does not scale.

“The biggest bonus to the stay at home parent of Child Benefit is the accrual of state pension entitlement. THAT is the salary of raising your own children.”

This is true.

Don, OP: “The Beveridge settlement was based on women staying at home and looking after children. A 21st century welfare state can’t be based on the prejudices of last century liberals.”

I think that your history is a little askew. The Beveridge settlement was delivered after six years of war during which women who formerly stayed at home went to work. I note that there was an expectation that many women would retire from work after the war ended, in order to make way for male soldiers returning to the UK, but that was not always the case. Working women increased the labour force which could grow because the UK economy was converted from war production to one based on “Export or die” in order to pay off war debt.

I further think you’ll find that mothers working outside the home have been around for ever. I don’t need to give you examples because you are smart enough to work them out.

“Child care” is something that is provided for children before they are eligible to enter state funded schools. Child care may be provided by a parent, grandparent, friend or by a paid worker.

“Education” is provided by the state for children between the ages of roughly 5 and 18 years, and parents can opt out so long as children are educated to the age of 16.

For the early years of childhood, child care is about changing nappies, feeding, sleep and play. After that, child care progresses into soft education: speech and socialisation.

The entrance age to formal education is arbitrary. In the UK it is about 5 years and in Germany it is about 6 years. I would take that to mean that formal education in the UK for 5 year olds is essentially child care; some children may start to read and write at that age (if they have not been taught at home) but they are not necessarily harmed by starting later.

Given that there is such a fuzzy boundary between “child care” and “education”, why do we create artificial divisions? Why is child care one function of national government and education another? And if it is economically beneficial for the state to provide a service (to create future social contributors), what is the appropriate age of recipients?