Rishi Sunak’s opponents see a chance to help working parents — and outflank the prime minister.
(Bloomberg) —
Rishi Sunak’s political opponents think they’ve found his weak spot — the family. With an election edging closer, Keir Starmer’s Labour is making a move onto traditional Tory territory, accusing the prime minister of abandoning working parents.
Sensing victory after 13 years in the wilderness, Labour wants to make an overhaul of Britain’s hugely expensive child care system a key part of its pitch to voters. The party is talking up its aspirations despite currently being unable to give detail, costings and timescales.
It’s a bold move from a party often cautious about the concept. “People talk about their lives in terms of family and yet somehow from the left we don’t do that,” Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said in an interview. “But that’s how people will view their lives and that’s the prism through which they view the world.”
In 2008, then-Conservative leader David Cameron made family a cornerstone of his agenda shortly before wrestling back power from Labour. Now Labour hopes to do the same. With an election expected in autumn 2024, and by January 2025 at the latest, Starmer is eager to win over disillusioned Conservative voters.
Most polls put his party more than 20 points ahead and on course for victory. But he faces a balancing act to retain Labour’s core vote. He has already branded Labour the “party of business” — taking on the traditional Conservative mantle. Now Phillipson is declaring Labour the “party of the family.”
Phillipson’s own background makes her an authentic voice on the issue. Raised in the 1980s and 90s by a single mother in the town of Washington, in northeast England, Phillipson said she felt a “lot of judgment” about her own family. “I think it demonstrated to me it was important for governments to recognize that families come in different shapes and sizes.”
Phillipson’s mother founded a domestic abuse charity but had to give up paid work when her daughter was born because of a lack of affordable child care. She only returned to the workplace when Phillipson started school.
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“She told me that she would have gone back into paid work much sooner but it just wasn’t possible, particularly when you’re a single parent — how on Earth can you do that with no child care?” Phillipson said at a mother and baby group in Feltham, West London. The Confederation of British Industry estimates that in total, the UK misses out on more than £28 billion of economic output from women being unable to work.
Labour has criticized the current child care system, under which most three- and four-year-olds are in theory entitled to 30 “free hours” of care a week. In reality, many parents pay huge amounts in extra fees each month to nurseries and childminders as government funding has failed to keep pace with inflation.
UK parents with a child under two years old pay an average of £13,695 ($16,418) a year for a full-time nursery place, according to children’s charity Coram. It’s also more difficult to find a place: only half of local areas report they have enough provision.
Labour has vowed a complete overhaul of the system. Yet so far, plans are vague. It’s promised free breakfast clubs for all primary school pupils in England, funded by scrapping the so-called “non-dom” status that allows wealthy foreigners to live in Britain without paying UK taxes on overseas earnings. But it has not set out how early years provision would fundamentally change — and, crucially, how such a radical move would be funded.
Children’s Minister Claire Coutinho called Labour’s child care plans “totally uncosted” and the “same old Labour ideas of more spending and borrowing.”
Phillipson said she couldn’t yet provide more detail. “I want us to move away from that current system we have around the so-called ‘free hours’ that just isn’t delivering and move to a different model altogether,” she said. “We’ll be looking in the months ahead at what that model should involve.”
There would be a limit on what Labour could achieve during any first term in office, she said, “not least because the Conservatives crashed the economy and that will lead to some pretty tough choices.” Phillipson said she was “confident” parents would “see the difference that Labour makes in their lives” at the end of any first term in office, which would be around 2029.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is under pressure to help struggling parents in his March 15 budget statement. But Hunt’s priority is fighting inflation. “If they add in some free hours here or there or just marginally expand a system that’s already on its knees, I think they risk crashing the child care system,” Phillipson said. “Because it is no good doing that unless you have a wider plan for reform.”
Phillipson — an MP since 2010 with two children, aged seven and 11 — said the Tories had presided over a “broken system that holds back parents, holds back mothers in particular, and is having a real impact not just on families but on our economy too.”
Reform would boost productivity by getting more mothers and grandparents back to work, helping Britain plug its chronic shortage of workers, Phillipson said, including by enticing more over-50s to work in early years settings. “I know there are lots of grandparents, particularly in their 50s and 60s, who would actually love the opportunity to take on new skills at that point in their life — including in working with children in early years and schools,” she said.
–With assistance from Lucy White.
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