Families are under enormous pressure in Britain. Real incomes are falling while the cost of essentials rises. Family time is increasingly squeezed between work and caring for children or elderly relatives. In the past, the centre-left has often relied on financial transactions and central state power to solve these kinds of problems. Not only do these approaches look implausible in the current fiscal context, but they can also rob people and places of their capacity to solve their own problems.
For IPPR’s Condition of Britain programme, I’ve been talking to people from across the country about the pressures and problems they face in their everyday lives. Family life has invariably been a big part of the conversation. In Manchester, I met a group of young mums who were regular visitors to the local children’s centre. They loved the chance to catch up with other parents – ‘I don’t have a family nearby, so this place is like my family’, said one. But they worried about money and struggled to find a job nearby that would fit around childcare.
A major expansion of affordable, good quality childcare and early education should be a priority for the next government – more so than increasing the value of family benefits like tax credits. This would make it easier for parents, especially mums, to work, raising family incomes in a sustainable way. Cheaper childcare for parents would help to bring down the rising cost of living. And investing in good quality early education would help make sure that more young children are ready for school.
But how we expand childcare and early education matters a lot. The last Labour government invested heavily in sure start and free childcare places but also relied on tax credits and vouchers to cut the cost of childcare to parents. The coalition plans to expand the voucher system into a comprehensive offer of ‘tax-free childcare’. Vouchers, tax credits and tax relief turn childcare into an individualised service to be purchased on the market. They can push prices up while neglecting the importance of institutions that bring people together. Their lack of institutional roots makes them easier to erode – with tax credits for childcare being an early and largely unnoticed victim of the coalition’s cuts.
Advancing affordable, good quality childcare through local institutions rooted in neighbourhoods would help parents tap into local support networks as well as enabling them to work. This is what happens in the best children’s centres – trusted places where parents meet up for mutual support, and get advice about wider public and voluntary services. These centres can help overcome the isolation experienced by some new parents, and help tackle segregation if they can appeal to parents from different backgrounds. And they can provide intensive support for parents who are really struggling. Vouchers and tax relief by themselves achieve none of these extra benefits.
IPPR’s Condition of Britain interim report, published today, argues that building up community childcare institutions in every neighbourhood requires direct investment in nurseries and children’s centres – not subsidies paid directly to parents.
But this doesn’t have to mean a new chain of state-run nurseries delivering a uniform service. The children’s centre we visited in Manchester was run by Barnardo’s on behalf of the council, pioneering innovative new approaches to supporting families. More stable investment in early years services opens up the prospect of more provision by locally rooted community organisations, including charities and cooperatives – tapping into the energies and resources of local people and organisations. And a greater role for local councils and parents in the governance of community childcare organisations would help push up standards without excessive targets and bureaucracy imposed from the centre.
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Kayte Lawton is leading IPPR’s Condition of Britain programme. She tweets as @IPPR_KayteL