Childcare has rarely been a major political battleground. But that is changing. On 11 November, both Tony Blair and Michael Howard delivered key note speeches on the subject. On 2 December, alongside the pre-budget report, Gordon Brown and Charles Clarke launched the government’s ten-year childcare strategy. Both parties seem set to make major policy commitments on the subject in their 2005 manifestos. Childcare is shaping up to be a major election issue.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the flurry of bipartisan interest in childcare marks the emergence of a new consensus. Quite the opposite. The different approaches set out by the two main parties illustrate fundamental differences between their beliefs about the role of government.
On the one hand, Labour’s childcare agenda is aimed at creating opportunity, harnessing the power of government to reshape society to the benefit of the most disadvantaged. Tory policy, in contrast, sees no such role for government. Rather, the Conservatives’ approach to childcare is just the latest manifestation of the traditionalist Conservative view of family life.
Since coming to power, Labour’s approach to childcare has evolved and grown in ambition. Initially, the priority for childcare policy was an economic one. By making it easier to juggle work and home commitments, the government hoped to increase mothers’ engagement in the labour market. Hence the introduction of the childcare element of the working tax credit, which aimed to ease the financial burden of childcare on low income parents.
This objective is still evident in government childcare policy. But alongside it, there is now another priority: harnessing the transformative power of childcare on life chances.
The evidence is increasingly clear that social inequality is entrenched before children even reach school. Pre-school children from lower socio-economic groups miss out on the kind of intellectual development from which other children benefit, and this puts them at a severe disadvantage throughout their education and beyond into adulthood. This perpetuates inequality. By investing early, the state can break the cycle and ensure that all children get the same head start. This is increasingly the objective of government childcare policy.
The centrepiece of the government’s ten-year childcare strategy is therefore a promise of 15 hours a week of free high quality care for 38 weeks for all three and four year-olds by 2010, with the aim of extending that to 20 hours. The strategy also enables parents to spend more time with their children by promising an extension of paid maternity leave to nine months from April 2007 and to twelve months by the end of the next parliament, with the right to transfer a proportion of that paid leave entitlement to the child’s father. In addition, all families will have access to integrated services through a local children’s centre, with 2,500 such centres in place by 2008 and 3,500 by 2010.
As well as improvements to early years provision, the strategy promises an out of school childcare place for all children aged three to fourteen between the hours of 8am to 6pm each weekday by 2010. It also pledges further support via the child element of the working tax credit to push down the cost of childcare for working families.
All of this adds up to a concerted drive to extend the availability of childcare, with a particular emphasis on supporting the parents of younger children and ensuring they get the best start in life.
The Tories, by contrast, have no such coherent approach. At the moment, their policies are purely consultative and it is not certain that all of the policies they have proposed will make it into their manifesto. But unless the proposals change significantly, they would do nothing to tackle inequality and would rely entirely on the private sector to ensure adequate provision of childcare. They would subsidise those who already enjoy adequate provision, but would do little to improve the situation of those who do not.
The main Tory proposal is to consult on making childcare tax-deductible. This is a policy that would primarily benefit those on higher incomes and those able to spend more on childcare – in contrast to Labour’s policy of directing help at those who need it. The effect would be to give a tax break to those who are already able to find good childcare. It would do little to widen opportunity for others.
In addition to this, the Tories propose to pay the childcare element of the working tax credit directly to parents, which they claim would enable parents to spend the money on private or voluntary childcare – or even on an au pair! This ties in with Tory aims to rely on the private sector for new provision – indeed, the Tories even propose to bring the private sector into the running of children’s centres, something that would make it very much harder to fulfil the kind of social objectives that the government hopes the centres will achieve. And whereas the extension of school opening times is a major plank of the government’s childcare strategy, it is something mentioned only fleetingly by the Tories.
The Tories are also looking at their own policy on maternity leave, and have floated the possibility of allowing mothers to concentrate maternity pay on the first six months after the birth to make it easier for them to stay at home. The important thing about this is not so much the detail of the policy as the message the Conservatives hope it will send to party traditionalists – that they are still in favour of stay-at-home mothers and disapprove of those who pursue successful careers. Some things never change.
What is most strikingly lacking from the Tory childcare proposals is a clear sense of mission. The government’s childcare strategy is aimed at the long-term elimination of social inequality – a bold and contentious attempt at social engineering. By contrast, it is far from clear what the Tories want to achieve. Stung by criticism that the one-time party of the family now has nothing to say on the topic, they have cobbled together a package of measures in an attempt to appear serious about the childcare agenda. But their costly proposals have no clear objectives by which to justify the investment. All they have done is to expose the shortcomings in their thinking.