What is childcare policy actually for?
by Ellen Pasternack, CapX:
The childcare system in the UK seems to be beset with problems. Barely a day goes by without a news story about the high costs of pre-school care, or its ridiculously long waiting lists. Similarly, nurseries all over the country are going out of business, or being bought up by private equity.
But as I and my colleagues at Civitas argue in a new report published this week, government policy on childcare suffers from another major problem, one which underpins all of the others. That problem is that nobody is clear what childcare policy is actually for.
For some years, the UK’s approach to childcare has been heavy subsidies of formal childcare (that is, childcare from a registered provider, rather than ‘informal’ care by nannies, babysitters, or other family members like grandparents). Beginning in 1998 with a small amount of free formal care for 4-year-olds, both the amount of care available and the pool of eligible children have steadily expanded ever since. Last year, the Conservatives promised that by September 2025, all children of working parents will be entitled to 30 hours of care per week from the age of nine months. The other major political parties have all promised more than that: Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that her reforms to childcare would resemble ‘the birth of the NHS’.
Politicians and policymakers often talk as though this policy is a labour market intervention, designed to boost the employment rate of mothers; or an educational one, designed to support children’s development. More recently, we occasionally see childcare subsidies discussed as a tool to address the cost-of-living crisis, alleviating financial pressure on young families.
However, there is no explicit consensus on which of these is the primary goal of government policy on childcare, and rarely is it acknowledged that these distinct objectives might be at odds with each other.
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