The UK’s opposition Labour Party wants to overhaul England’s child care system, warning ahead of next week’s budget statement that the current funding model leaves parents increasingly exposed to rising costs.
(Bloomberg) — The UK’s opposition Labour Party wants to overhaul England’s child care system, warning ahead of next week’s budget statement that the current funding model leaves parents increasingly exposed to rising costs.
Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s education spokesperson, will say on Thursday that government failure to properly fund care for children up to four years old is increasing prices for nurseries and childminders.
Currently, all three and four-year-olds in England are entitled to 15 funded hours of child care per week during term time, rising to 30 for those with working parents. But many parents pay a large amount of extra fees each month to nurseries and childminders, particularly as costs have risen for providers.
With child care costs rising up the agenda ahead of the March 15 budget, and a general election expected next year, Keir Starmer’s Labour sees an opportunity. The party wants to set up a “modern child care system,” it said in an emailed statement ahead of a speech by Phillipson at Onward, a center-right think tank.
UK’s Exorbitant Child-Care Costs Emerge as a Top Political Issue
The party will pledge support for families from the end of parental leave right through until children finish primary school. It has already promised to offer breakfast clubs to every primary school in England and allow more local authorities to open new nurseries.
Separately, new data from children’s charity Coram released Thursday shows that parents in England are facing a chronic shortage of childcare availability — with only half of local areas reporting sufficient places for children under two.
Cost of ‘Free Hours’
The annual Coram survey found that the cost of child care across Britain has risen steadily since 2001 and that 43% of local authorities in Britain say providers in their area have reduced the number of “free hours” places they can provide. In outer London, just 28% of authorities report having enough child care for under-twos.
Almost half (48%) of local authorities said providers had been forced to cut staff numbers, Coram said. The charity urged the government to create a “simpler and more efficient system.”
In her speech to Onward, Phillipson will say that the average cost of an hour of child care for a two-year-old is now 14% higher than in 2018.
That proves the system isn’t working, Phillipson will say, because 30 hours of care for under-twos now costs parents £800 ($947) more than in 2017.
“The child care model the Conservatives have built fails everyone, denying parents the ability to work the jobs they’d like, to give their children the opportunities they’d like, and is not of the quality that staff want to provide,” she will say.
A Department for Education spokesperson said the government has spent more than £20 billion over the past five years on setting up the current system. “We recognize that families and early years providers across the country are facing financial pressures,” they said.
In a briefing released Wednesday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that even though the government had increased funding for the free child care entitlement, inflation meant these increases have “lagged behind the rise in providers’ costs.”
The IFS also said the “complexity” of the child care support available made it both difficult for parents to work out what they were entitled to, and harder for policy makers to introduce coherent reforms.
No Big Childcare Moves Expected in UK Budget, KPMG Says
Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is under pressure — including from some of his own MPs — to address the high costs in his budget on March 15. But he has warned that he needs to restrain spending in order to get inflation down.
Suggested reforms could include an overhaul of the ratio of carers to children, and ensuring easier access to a subsidy for working families — so-called “tax-free child care” support.
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