The big plan in the spending review to help the unemployed back to work was to stop them from claiming benefits for seven days after losing their job, and compelling claimants, including lone parents, to attend their local job centre more frequently.
The reality is that the biggest barrier to employment for many is the cost of childcare; and it starts hitting home as soon as babies are born.
Polling we commissioned from the Bounty parenting club with Lloyds Banking Group’s Money for Life Programme First Baby in Breadline Britain, showed that the high cost of childcare turned out to be the biggest shock of the lot for new parents’ budgets, with nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of first-time mums nationwide saying it was the expenditure they were least prepared for.
It’s not just poorer families who struggle. Even better-off households are taken aback by the cost of childcare. This unexpected challenge has meant some who might have tried to go back to work have decided they cannot afford to.
A survey by the Daycare Trust and the Family and Parenting Institute has shown the costs of nursery, childminders and after-school clubs all rising by more than six per cent in the past year – more than double the rate of inflation, against a backdrop of stagnant wages. The report found the average cost of a nursery place for a child under two was £4.26 per hour across Britain, which meant a parent buying 50 hours of childcare per week would face an average annual bill of around £11,000.
One mum we spoke to told us: ‘I don’t work, it’s just my partner that works. For me to go out and work, it’s just not possible. Because we couldn’t afford the nursery costs for them both so I need to stay at home.’
The government has increased the three- and four-year-old childcare offer to 15 hours a week, and by September 2013 it plans to have extended the 15-hour weekly entitlement to the 260,000 most disadvantaged two-year-olds. These steps are welcome – but insufficient.
At a recent Resolution Foundation seminar, shadow secretary of state for work and pensions Liam Byrne MP talked about looking at all the pieces of the jigsaw in ensuring a return to full employment. For example, while welcoming the 15-hour childcare offer, he noted that if childcare does not also cover commuting time it may not suffice to make workforce participation a reality.
Overall childcare is probably the biggest part of the jigsaw but our report suggests that policy and decision-makers across the political spectrum should be looking at tackling not only childcare provision but a range of pressures on new parents to help with the ambition of a return to full employment.
Around one in six pregnant mothers are affected by mental distress. The failure to respond to this can affect the relationship between mother and child and children’s development. Inevitably it can also impact on partner relationships, the sustainability of couple-led households and the prospects of a return to work and/or training.
Services to support the mental health of new parents such as Family Action’s Perinatal Support Project can help give new parents befriending and practical support when they need it most. Parenting and relationship programmes and support with the return to work and training also need to be available whenever they are needed.
We need more imaginative and integrated service commissioning built around the needs of families. The silos between health and children’s services need to be broken down, and children’s centres, an important point of service integration in communities, need to be prioritised for investment. In particular, modernising the approach to perinatal mental health and affordable childcare for babies is vital to ensuring new mothers are able to return to work when they want to return to work. If we want to maximise childcare flexibility and earning power within families, we need to engage more fathers as well as mothers in services.
More frequent job centre reporting may only be an incentive to employment for some. We must keep a focus on joined-up and imaginative policies that take a whole-family approach and that recognise for some the road to full employment starts with baby.
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David Holmes is chief executive of Family Action
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