Miriam Cates: Childcare policy should deliver for parents, not GDP figures or the political establishment | Conservative Home

Miriam Cates is MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

What is childcare policy for?

That is the important and timely question posed by think tank Civitas in a new report. Over recent years, childcare has become something of a political arms race in the UK, with all parties competing to offer more ‘free hours’ of daycare to parents.

Last year, the Chancellor announced a massive expansion to the current scheme, extending eligibility for 30 hours a week of funded childcare to babies of working parents from just nine months old. State spending on the Early Years is now scheduled to reach £9 billion per year, yet there is a lack of clarity around what childcare policy is trying to achieve.

In Back to Basics: What is childcare policy for?, a new report, authors Ellen Pasternack and George Cook propose three possible ‘purposes’ for subsidised childcare and assess the effectiveness of current policy against each one.

Firstly, they ask, is the aim of state-funded childcare to increase maternal employment? The number of mothers in paid work has certainly grown since subsidised childcare was introduced. But it seems unlikely that this shift has been caused by improved access to childcare. Maternal employment had been increasing well before the introduction of state-funded daycare, and there has been no change in the proportion of mothers who are not working but say they want to work. 

The Report concludes that the rise in maternal employment over the last few decades has not been driven by childcare policy but largely by “cultural and socioeconomic changes, in particular rising house prices driving an increased need for families to have two earners rather than one.”

So is the aim of subsidised childcare to benefit the children themselves? Here again, the evidence does not support the claim. In a review of the existing research, Maria Lyons found that “the claims that universal childcare will enhance cognitive and social-emotional development for children from all backgrounds is not supported by available evidence”. 

Perhaps then, childcare policy aims to make life easier for parents. Subsidies have certainly reduced costs for those who already use formal childcare. But a sizeable proportion (30 per cent) of eligible parents do not use institutional childcare at all, and half of parents of 0-4s say they would prefer to look after children themselves if they could afford to do so.

Those who do want to use formal childcare find the conditions of access prohibitively inflexible and struggle to find suitable places because funding constraints mean nurseries are closing in their droves. If you wanted to make life easier for parents, you would not choose a rigid system of inadequate subsidies that many parents can’t or don’t want to use. 

On many levels, the current policy is a costly failure. Yet despite this, politicians and policymakers from left, right, and centre are pushing for more of the same. 

Expensive taxpayer-funded failures carry a significant opportunity cost. Remember HS2?) There is a genuine problem, which is that most families cannot afford to live on one income before children go to school. Yet while large sums of money are being spent on subsidised institutional childcare that is neither benefitting children, increasing maternal employment nor making life easier for parents, it cannot be used to tackle this very significant cost-of-living issue.

But the current childcare consensus is concerning not just because it is ineffective or wasteful. Universal state-funded childcare devalues the role of mothers and may have a detrimental effect on children.

A policy that offers financial support to a mother only when she leaves her nine-month-old baby in the care of strangers sends a very clear signal: a mother’s primary value to society is measured by her direct contribution to GDP. Just like the fiscal nudges that encourage us to buy electric cars or stop smoking, the adoption of this policy delivers the message that society believes it is a good thing to put your child in full-time formal childcare from the age of none months.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Erica Komisar, an American physiotherapist, has explained that the attachment between biological mother and infant is crucial to a baby’s developing brain, and that an infant experiences grief when separated from her mother for extended periods.

In the first two years of life, the mother or main carer acts as a buffer against the outside world, stabilising a child’s emotions and allowing her to develop from a place of security rather than a threat. Disrupted attachment can lead to life-long difficulties with physical, mental, and emotional health. For a baby, the nurture of a mother is not a fungible commodity.

 There is evidence that group childcare from the age of three can have cognitive benefits, and the long-standing ‘15 hours’ childcare entitlement for three and four-year-olds has very high take-up rates.  However there is no evidence of positive outcomes for infants in long hours of group daycare before the age of two, and plenty of evidence of negative consequences.

The Government insists that “high-quality early education is good for all children”. Yet, for the youngest children, this is not supported by the research: international studies show that, for very young children, longer hours in group care are associated with worse socio-emotional outcomes, with greater incidences of internalising problems, behavioural issues, and a decline in life satisfaction that persists into adulthood.

The emerging consensus – to begin full-time institutional care from nine months old – ignores much of what we know about healthy child-development.

 I have often wondered why there is such a visceral reaction within SW1 to anyone who suggests that maternal care might be preferable for babies. Politicians speak of the ‘economic emancipation of work’ for women and the escape it provides from the ‘drudgery’ of motherhood.

But many – most – women have jobs not careers, and stacking shelves at Tesco is not especially emancipating. In the high-status, highly-paid, elite world of Westminster, some cannot imagine why women might want to delay – or even sacrifice – status, money, or personal autonomy to spend more time caring for their own infants.

Yet, according to the polling, this is actually what the majority of mothers do want, with two-thirds of mothers saying that a child should spend time primarily with their parents until they turn two. Given that mammalian females are highly evolved to bond with their babies – a vital survival mechanism –  it would be odd if many women did not find caring for infants fulfilling. It should hardly be seen as an affront to feminism to state this very obvious biological fact.

 With falling birthrates and rising child mental health problems, doing what is best for children and parents in the early years is in the long-term best interests of the economy. If we believe in choice, we should redistribute the whole Early Years budget – and more – into a package of tax cuts, generous benefits, and housing subsidies for families that help to ameliorate the loss of income during preschool years so that parents have genuine choice about how to care for their infants.

Mothers who want to work while their children are small should be free – and be supported – to do so. But equally, no mother should be forced to put her infant in daycare out of financial necessity.

The first three years are a short but crucial time in life. The purpose of childcare policy should not be to buff-up GDP spreadsheets or to deliver only for the political establishment’s view of what women want. Rather we should build an evidence-based early years policy that puts cash back in parents’ pockets so they can choose how best to care for their children.