Which is more important: affordable childcare or decent pay for child carers?

[Youdoyoubabe]

It seems that we cannot have both.... without tax bills going up massively.

Not necessarily

Childcare can be publicly funded without being publicly delivered. For example Sweden has public funding of childcare which limits the cost to 3% or £120 per month for full time childcare. Each child has a set amount of childcare funding as a voucher that can be used for the childcare of the parents' choice. Nurseries are a mixture of local authority, private or parental cooperative and there are also childminders although these are local authority employees - but it is a condition of accepting the voucher that the setting cannot charge any top up fees.

The funding kicks in at around 12 months so there is virtually no childcare for children under that age - parents are expected to use their 16 months of parental leave.

Universal childcare also means that there is a strong expectation that parents work - although there is a legal right to work 6 hours a day while your children are preschool age (1.7)

And if lack of childcare drives down the birthrate as it has in other countries, you then don't have population replacement and there aren't enough workers coming up behind you paying their taxes so that you get access to health care and public services. Unless you are super-rich and literally fund all elements of your lifestyle yourself. It's an economic system and not a linear one.

Don't have kids you can't afford 🤷‍♀️ to be fair I think it would be better to ban those who give up work from claiming benefits for say a year after having kids to stop them ending up giving up work and claiming benefits. It's fun in effect working for nothing but it's worth it in the long run.

You could also shorten maternity leave to say 4 months and use that money to fund childcare. We need more crèche type childcare that is purely focused on keeping kids safe vs being a teaching space like nursery is at the moment which should be cheaper to run. Private nurseries could still exist to run the education type setting.

It won't effect us as DS is 9 and we would look to go half with him when he has kids as we won't be at an age we can retire to have the grandkids

I'm not aware of needing a voucher. I just get a bill from the council each month for DS.

Also some areas where demand for places is high now pay parents to be SAHPs instead. Sadly I don't live in one of those.

It's a huge problem with so many issues at play.

To those few posters who say that they don't have children, why should their taxes be used.. I say 'fuck off!!!'
Who's going to change your incontinence pads, when you're old, if it's not by someone else's child ?

Anyway... other countries charge higher tax in order to provide support to the working population. The trouble with the UK is that it won't tolerate higher taxes.

There needs to be a societal change with regards to what it wants, what it needs and what it's prepared to pay for.

The UK is so insular , both geographically and sociologically.

The childcare issue isn't going to go away and childcare providers need to earn a decent wage... they're effectively bringing up our babies as we're not there! So they should be highly skilled and earning a decent salary.
The trouble is, most of us earn an average salary and we want to skimp on childcare as it costs so much , but it should actually cost a lot more.
Armies of grandparents have been roped in and MN is awash with people complaining that elderly parents aren't wanting to look after their grandchildren.

It's a total mess, given that the government is also targeting the elderly for being economically inactive.

The whole “second hand clothes and cheap meals” thing is just like the “stop buying avocados and you’ll be able to afford to buy a house” thing. Everybody’s already doing that you out-of-touch numpty

Just to be clear, you want to cut stat maternity leave, not subsidise childcare, reduce the quality of childcare, and prevent parents of young children from claiming benefits?

My taxes go towards a load of things I will never see/use or be able to claim for that's pretty much the nature of taxes!

I think childcare needs to be re-examined so that there is both. The Scandinavian countries do it very well with longer paid parental leave (including for dad).
The cost is astronomical though and a complete barrier we are over 14k a year and that's with 30hrs for eldest and the 20% govt scheme for 2 (that's not even full time). We can't use the school nursery for my eldest as they are half days and the childminders around us have huge waiting lists.

But it is an unreasonable expense to be able to afford.

I'm a teacher. I bring home about 2k a month. In September I will have one baby in nursery and one child at school. The sum of the childcare will be £1800.

We should subsidise childcare through general taxation. People grumping about it have missed the point of tax, which is not only to pay for things you personally benefit from but the things society as a whole benefits from. Otherwise why do taxes pay for state education?

Perhaps more companies should have and fund childcare onsite. The bigger ones anyway. That would be a good incentive.

Need both, have neither...

Need to have no gap between maternity/paternity protections/pay and subsidised childcare. I'd add an extra 6 months statutory leave per child and where there are 2 parents at least 6 months has to be used by each with the rest shared. Then the "risk" of time off for having a child applies to all employees and is less limiting of employment prospects for women...

I'm in Scotland so we have universal 30 term time hours and it made a massive difference to getting a job and already having the childcare mostly in place rather than getting a job then scrabbling around to find care!

It would raise more money than it cost, so you'd end up paying less.

If women who wanted to be in the workplace were able to work the hours they wanted & the infrastructure and affordability in place to enable this, UK GDP would increase by 10%.

Hugely significant.

Nice, my child is too old for nursery now and I've benefitted from maternity leave and more affordable childcare so fuck everyone else. When he has children (if he does) you don't know if you'll still be around, nor what state childcare will be in so I wouldn't be so dismissive of the fight for fairer access to childcare.

The issue is a huge section of society, many in decent jobs even are struggling with childcare costs, do you really find it as inspirational stance that only those who have generational wealth or are on well above average wages have children? Nursery fees here are the same as a band 5 nurses take home pay, that's wild.

The rest is just ridiculous and although we can't troll hunt, I refuse to believe anyone with an ounce of empathy thinks cutting maternity leave by two thirds, reducing the quality of early years provision and blocking benefits which will also affect the children is reasonable.

The UK has the tightest childcare ratios in Europe and have done for years (e.g. for under 2yo the ratio in the UK is 1:3, in the Netherlands is 1:4 and in France is 1:5). Several countries in Europe, included some of the Scandinavian countries and Germany don't have national standards at all for childcare ratios. Wages is a massive reason why our costs are so high.

@Starflecked me and DH are insured to the extent its motive for murder and he is the sole beneficiary. I had 4 months maternity as at the time it was what we could afford, it was fine. Yes we believe in being self sufficient and don't want to pay more.

It simple maths say a childminder costs £5000 a year for 4 years that's £20000 (after the 20%off) if you stick say 1% on tax for the average family that's around £800 per year (off a combined income) over a 50 year working life that's 40k extra in tax so 20k more expensive than just paying the bill.

If you have to add 2% extra to cover the costs that's 80k extra in tax or 40k saved just paying it for four years.

Wow thank you for the data. I haven’t been on mumsnet for long and i love how informed everyone is here. At my dutch mummy-forum i was always the one collecting the data😉

The Dutch child ratio is still rather strict , and there is discussion about this, not because of the costs but because of the staff shortage.

🤣🤣

Sweden don't have national standards but nurseries operate a 1:5 or 1:6 ration. Which sounds high but in my experience there's never that many children there. My DS's nursery for example, had 16 places in each of the 3 rooms. So they had 16 children on their books. But the places can only be used if the parent is actually at work. So you can't send them on your day off or leave them there all day if you only work a few hours in the morning. So they are rarely all there.

Nursery workers around here get paid around £3,000 per month and they have the same status as teachers as they are also university level, professionally trained.

Decent pay, obviously.

Both could be achieved though, were the political will there.

I get £9.50 an hour to comfort, educate, feed, change, entertain, clean, supervise, nurse, do observational reports for 12 toddlers a day (and so much more).

I am fully qualified, fully trained in first aid, safeguarding, food hygiene, and about 100 other courses I've done over the years.

I am living in the wrong country 😞

In countries with no enforced minimum wage middle class women often have one or even two housekeeper nannies. Imagine the luxury for the working Mum just being able to walk out the door and pay only a fraction of their salary to have their children looked after and their house cleaned every day. Not fair though of course, like so much else in many countries.

You could be doing it in a country where you live in and do all that for $50 a month though. So much staggering difference in the world. We have so much good stuff here in the UK and yet.... it just doesn't seem to work.

So I should just be grateful that I'm being paid buttons to care for people's precious babies because someone in another country may have it worse?