The National Assembly for Wales was designed from the outset to be family-friendly with no late-night sittings and constituency-based work on most Mondays and Fridays. With an elderly mother and two much-loved grandchildren, I certainly welcome the flexibility to have a family life in the midst of my busy schedule of meetings, visits and research. Having family-friendly work ourselves has always placed a special obligation on AMs to be mindful of the needs of parents and carers and I think we have generally succeeded in this. Sensible working practices have also benefited the quality of our work – helping us to achieve a calmer, more practical approach to both scrutiny and legislation. I believe that the same is true of work in general – employers who recognise that their workers are also human beings with other responsibilities will generally have a more focused and better-motivated workforce.
Our Labour Welsh government is making a difference for parents and carers:
• Ensuring that all three and four year olds – and two year olds in our poorest communities – have access to nursery places;
• Providing free childcare and health visiting to young children in disadvantaged areas through the Flying Start programme – and an extra £55 million committed between now and 2015 to allow an extra 36,000 children to benefit;
• Investing £2.3m a year to support local authorities in making wraparound childcare available as a an option;
• Rolling out Families First, its programme to improve family support, especially for disadvantaged families, across the whole of Wales this year.
• Developing cooperation between public service providers to develop seamless support for vulnerable people and their families;
• Requiring local authorities to provide information to carers on their rights and the services available to them in their local areas;
• Creating a duty for Local Health Boards and local authority social services to produce local information and consultation strategies for carers
Unfortunately we cannot protect Welsh families from all the effects of the UK government’s policies. Usdaw is absolutely right to identify the dual threat to parents and carers. The coalition pretends to support the family but their actions seem calculated to undermine family finances. Child benefit has been frozen until 2013, the number of families eligible for child tax credit has been reduced and a promised rate increase stopped, and benefits for the poorest families are being capped. Meanwhile support for pensioners and people with disabilities is also under attack. Simultaneously rights in the workplace have come under pressure as recession and fear of unemployment make it harder for workers with parental and other caring responsibilities to resist changes to their working hours. I welcome the work Usdaw and others in the trade union movement are doing to highlight these dangers.
We need to insist that parents and carers are doing a job for the whole of society. Today’s children will play a crucial role in supporting us all in old age and the better their education, the greater the wealth they will be able to create, the better their experience of childhood, the more likely they will be to grow into adults who will care about others. If carers walked away from their relatives, the state would face a huge bill for paid workers to replace them. We should not, as a society, take advantage of their commitment to family members. Helping them is a duty not a favour.
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Janice Gregory is Labour Welsh assembly member for Ogmore and a member of Usdaw
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Find out more about Supporting Parents and Carers Spotlight Day here
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Writing in support of Spotlight Day today are Usdaw general secretay John Hannett, Usdaw MPs Hazel Blears and Yvonne Fovargue, Welsh AM and Janice Gregory and Islington councillor Kate Groucutt. Read them all here