by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Last week the Government called in the competition watchdog over its own childcare, asking the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the hidden fees families are charged on top of their ‘free’ hours. You do not summon the regulator to a system that is working. However, there are more fundamental questions here about the approach to childcare itself.
The scale of funding is extraordinary: a record £9.5 billion this year, which – in the Government’s own words – is there to “boost growth by supporting parents back into work”. The funded thirty hours now begin at nine months old. For each of these children, the taxpayer hands providers almost £14,000 a year – £12.04 an hour, across the 1,140 hours it funds. That £14,000 is spent not to raise a child, but to return its mother to work. It is aimed at GDP growth, not at the family that raises its own. Marriage, the lifelong union of one man and one woman, is the most stable home a child can have, but the taxman will not see it.
Yet the country leans on the very families it overlooks. Every state pension and every NHS hospital depends on a working generation – one that parents bear and raise at their own cost, for everyone else’s gain. George Beglan recently called this a “hidden free-rider problem”: the parent “bears the full expense”, he writes, while the return “accrues to society at large”. It is the logic of a state that sees a child first as a future taxpayer, and only second as a child. But children are not an economic input to be farmed for future tax; they are persons, loved for their own sake.