Before Christmas, I wrote for Progress about embarking on my tour of 25 constituencies across the country to promote Labour’s exciting and transformative policy of offering 25 hours of free childcare each week for working parents of 3 and 4 year olds. This week, I have passed a major milestone with a trip to the fantastic Melrose Pre-School Playgroup in Milton Keynes, marking the tenth visit I have made on this tour. It has been great to travel around the country, from Colne Valley to Croydon and from Boston Spa to Burnley, seeing inspiring work being done in childrens’ centres, Sure Start centres, nurseries and pre-schools, as well as meeting Labour’s superb parliamentary candidates in these key seats.

There is plenty of travelling still to do over the next few months as we continue to get the message out about Labour’s childcare offer. But two things have stood out for me so far from the ten visits to date.

Firstly, is just how essential a major expansion of free childcare is. It is easy enough to sit in Westminster and reel off the damning statistics: childcare bills up 47 per cent since the last election in parts of the country, one in five parents considering cutting back on work or giving it up entirely because childcare costs mean it simply does not pay. But it is when you are out meeting parents and childcare staff that the reality of those figures really hit home. Meeting parents who are really struggling to make ends meet, doing the sums every month to try to work out whether they are better off quitting their job, or the childcare workers who know the sacrifices that parents are making to ensure their young children get the high-quality, flexible care they want them to have. The poorest families are being hit hard by soaring childcare costs – but by no stretch of the imagination is this a crisis which affects them alone, across the low and middle income brackets, parents have told me about the impact of rising prices. They just want to have the freedom to make their own decision about balancing work and childcare, without the risk that going out to work will leave them worse off. Labour’s policy has the potential to make a real difference to their lives, ease the strain on family finances and help to tackle gaps in educational attainment.

Secondly, and this has perhaps hit me hardest, was discovering the scale of the hidden battle that those working in the childcare sector are fighting against child poverty. With progress on child poverty stalled under this government, following years of decreases under Labour, and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission pronouncing the target of halving child poverty by 2020 as good as dead, the dedicated and hard-working staff at childcare providers have found themselves on the frontline of a renewed fight on this front. I have been simultaneously impressed by the commitment shown by frontline childcare staff to attempting to reduce the impact of growing poverty, while shocked and, indeed, furious that as a nation we are once again in this situation. Staff have told me about children turning up hungry, or having not got enough sleep because they have to share rooms with older siblings.

I have heard about young children becoming ill because of homes their parents cannot afford to heat or living in damp conditions, or being left in the care of brothers and sisters barely older than them because parents have had to take a second job to make ends meet. None of this is happening because of bad or neglectful parents – it is happening because in the second decade of the twenty-first century, child poverty in England is growing on David Cameron’s watch. And we are seeing childcare workers, often on very low wages themselves, showing compassion, love, care and commitment to tackle the health, nutrition and educational problems poverty is causing. We owe them a debt of thanks – and a Labour government will work with the sector to make childcare a better-paid profession, with incentives for training and professional development.

But hearing about these issues at first hand has made it clear to me why we so urgently need a Labour government. Not just because we will provide 25 hours of free childcare for tens of thousands of families, but because Labour would recommit the British government to reducing child poverty – the great promise of the Blair and Brown years, undone by this government, would end measures like the bedroom tax that drive families into poverty, raise the minimum wage and tackle high rents. That is the sort of government the parents and childcare workers I have met over the past few weeks need and deserve.

———————————-

Alison McGovern MP is shadow minister for children and families. She tweets @Alison_McGovern

———————————-

Photo: DDA604