Your views on the government's plans to extend childcare support, please!

[HelenMumsnet]

Morning all. We need your help - and your opinions please!

You may have seen/heard today's news that the government has just announced an extra £300m to help with childcare costs when the universal credit starts in 2013.

According to the reports, parents on low incomes who are working less than 16 hours a week will be eligible for this childcare support - which, it's thought, is going to be worth up to £175 a week for one child and £300 for two or more, and will benefit 80,000 families receiving universal credit.

You can read more about it all here and here.

We have been asked what Mumsnet thinks about these new plans - so we'd love to know. Do please tell...

Thanks, MNHQ

[globalmouse]

Sorry, posting based on op, not read the whole thread

So did I read it right that people working under 16 hours a week will get some childcare paid for?

About bloody time. I am a lone parent, if I work 16 hours a week I get help with childcare, but 1 hour less a week and I don't. I can see people in the same situation would have to turn down jobs as the childcare bill would be such a large proportion of their wages. Always struck me as a system that just keeps single parents in poverty as they can't afford to take

[Solopower]

As I have posted before on another thread, it's also a problem for older kids (12 - 15s), as it's not a good idea to leave them at that age on their own all day every day for a whole week (half term) or several weeks in the summer. No matter how trustworthy they are, it can be boring and depressing for them. I had no-one I could send my son to for more than a couple of days, and he didn't want to go to any holiday clubs at that age. I was lucky because I was able to take several weeks off, unpaid, but not many people can do that.

A suggestion for dealing with that situation included putting two weeks' work experience into the summer hols instead of term time - but there are loads of families that relish the six weeks and really enjoy it and need it, and it would be a shame for them not to have it. You could make it optional, but then it wouldn't be cool ...

Anyway, this is a bit off the point. However, if the government do want to make it possible for women and men to have equal access to work, they need to think about the whole of a child's life, not just the early years.

[dreamingofsun]

no wouldn't benefit now as my children are older and don't need it. i would just end up paying for everyone else's. agree it is difficult and more stressful than my job which can be pretty stressful at times. its not just the cost, its finding decent quality that can be relied upon

[Solopower]

Dreamingofsun, you would probably benefit from childcare that is subsidised as much as anyone else.

Organising and affording childcare is really difficult for most of us, married, single, whatever.

[LaWeasel]

I'm a bit that my experience of being on a low income is suddenly not relevant because it doesn't fit in with your perception of how life works boffinmum. Amongst my friends it was certainly a representative experience of how it works to be poor in a rural area. I couldn't comment on how easy it is to get a low-skill 9-5 job and corresponding job in a city (but tbh, I doubt it is much easier given how high inner city unemployment is.)

I'm also still interested in your maths.

[dreamingofsun]

solopower - my husband has to work away all week so is of no help with childcare at all. at times my hours are unpredictable and i have to work away too - so actually we are in a worse situation for childcare than a single parent doing local set work hours. presumably there's a father somewhere anyway so in theory they could play their part

[WidowWadman]

Not trying to play who's-got-it-hardest top trumps at all, just saying that there's nothing wrong with parents of young children working, whatever their marital status, and the government working towards a situation were going out to work not means a net loss in income for either single parent or parts of a couple is a positive step.

[Solopower]

I'm sure you're right, WidowWadman, but presumably at least one can go to parents' night in December and the other can go to the one in March, or whatever. But if you are saying that in general single parents are facing the same sorts of problems as double parents, I would disagree!

However, arguing about who finds it most difficult probably isn't a very relevant road to go down, IMO, as there is a huge variety of work patterns, not just between families but in each family, as the situation changes when children get older. Any government who wants to enable women to work has to recognise that.

[WidowWadman]

Solopower Not every career lends itself to "taking turns" so if both parents in a couple have a daytime office job they're in no better situation than a single parent when it comes to childcare.

[Solopower]

Dreamingofsun if there are two parents, there are two people to help with childcare, and you can take it in turns.

I think someone said that the state should provide each family with a certain number of hours of free childcare for each child, like schools do. If the government is serious about women working on an equal footing to men, that is. Presumably this would fund itself when those women started paying taxes. But I don't think parents should be pressurised to work. Parenting is one of the most important full-time jobs, IMO, and anyone who can afford to stay at home for a few years is releasing a nursery place for someone else.

I believe that the government have only brought this in because they are losing support from low-paid women (their core voters) and I hate the way things like childcare are used to buy votes.

[dreamingofsun]

meglet - married parents have to work, why should lone parents be any different?

[Meglet]

It's probably a good thing. Although I hope it's not another way to get lone parents to work while their kids are young.

[BoffinMum]

True enough, and possibly rooted in the fact that the UK seems perpetually baffled as to what children are actually for, which also explains some of the 'well if you want children it's your problem' viewpoints expressed on here, as if you order children out of a catalogue to adorn your home as a kind of pet.

[WidowWadman]

Boffinmum - I agree with you, although I think it doesn't only affect people with a working uterus, but any person of any gender who choses to have children. Traditionally it is the woman who reduces the hours/earns less and therefore is railroaded into sacrificing her career on the altar of fertility - but it doesn't have to be - there are occasionally fathers who go for the SAHP or reduced hours route as it makes more sense financially or because they're pushed out of work because they're earning the lower income)

The described problems affect families, and single parents of any gender equally.

[BoffinMum]

Laweasel, in which case your employer was breaking the law and you would have been in a position to demand the remaining hours were also paid at £5.63 an hour (or whatever it was then). I think yours isn't a typical example, therefore.

A lot of us, on the other hand, have to sign working hours directive opt hours and so on and end up working 55+ hours a week. Fine, you might say, if you don't like it, get another job. Only that's not as simple as it sounds. If all the female professionals of childbearing age went off to become workers on the minimum wage, economic growth would be plummeting even faster (there's stats out there to support this argument, but too lengthy to go into here). So I think what we are all arguing is that this is about more than individual households, but rather a bigger societal problem where a developed economy is somewhat out of step with post 1960s social change. And the knock on effect it has on anyone with a working uterus is increasingly worrying.

[LaWeasel]

Um yes. Funnily enough in all my minimum wage jobs if the work wasn't finished I was also expected to stay until it was done. In some of those jobs you weren't paid for the overtime either.

[Want2bSupermum]

laWeasel Rather simple, I might earn more than 50k a year but to earn this I start work at 8am and continue until I am finished. If a client gives me information at 6pm the work has to be done before the start of the next day. My employer and client are expecting me to deliver and travel at very short notice. If I don't deliver then they will find someone else who will. To enable me to work like this I need more flexible childcare than most. This costs a lot. DH is working just as hard as I do so can't pick up the slack. Hiring someone to come in and look after the children (childminder won't work as children need to go to bed before I come home from work) costs an awful lot. The cost is 300 per week as a minimum, more like 500 by the time you pay the taxes and overtime for staying with the kids while DH and I work.

So after paying 26k+ in childcare from after tax income of 35k a year one is left with 'earning' around 9k a year. With this salary I get zero help in the form of credits or other benefits that someone who is earning minimum wage would qualify for.

I will also say that in most cases involving childcare a large portion of the income of the high earner is being taxed twice which is hardly 'fair'. It does hold women back from being more equal in the workplace when society doesn't support both parents being able to work whichever job they are trained to do.

[LaWeasel]

Sorry, I meant to say we were better off unemployed with a baby than both working with no DC at minimum wage!!

We are still brassic now, though DH's wage is really very good compared to both those years. Money/benefits and all it's ins and outs are madly complicated, and I would welcome a simpler system which basically said this is the minimum we feel each person/family of each size should be able to live on and topped your earnings up to that regardless of circumstance, plus some extra on top for various special circumstances eg disabilities. + Maybe a "in work bonus" for everyone to try and avoid the people at the 'top-up' cut-off point feeling resentful.

Or maybe our wages could be more in proportion to actual living costs. That would be nice

[LaWeasel]

No - I didn't think she was, it's just that it looked like she was saying a person on minimum wage ends up with more disposable cash monthly (due to benefit top-ups) than someone paying higher-rate tax and I don't see how that could be possible, so am interested in the details of how that is worked out.

I mean, when DH and I were both unemployed we had more disposable income than when we were both earning on a low wage and didn't have kids - so I know that there is certainly a disparity in how things are arranged in some cases... interested to see how far it spreads!

[WidowWadman]

Laweasel I don't think she was arguing that those on low wages should get less help. Only pointing out that if your gross income is high enough you can end up with less disposable income than on a minimum wage job after the costs which enable you to work are taken into account.

[LaWeasel]

There are so many additional costs to being on a low income too. Rental costs are often higher than mortgages, cash meters for gas and electric are cripplingly expensive in comparison to being able to pay by direct debit. We are charged at least an extra 30% for our car insurance because we can't afford to pay it in one lump sum.

[LaWeasel]

I've been trying to work out your maths, but you didn't give enough detail so it's impossible boffinmum but it's daft to think that only high wages come with high working costs:

Equally nobody has all their childcare costs covered, even those on the lowest wages only get 70% of however much it is, so they still have to find several hundred pounds a month to cover the gap.

None of the minimum wage jobs I have worked were 9-5 to start with, most were shift based. The one I had when DD was born involved a 4 hour daily commute with large amounts of the time I needed childcare for being out of hours (I got on my first bus at 6.30am, and got home for the evening after 7 every day - split shifts so there was time off in the middle but that's no use in childcare terms). And when I had to decline to go back to work as I couldn't afford the childcare, I couldn't get anything else at all except club work in the middle of the night which meant no commute but I couldn't get childcare for that either!

[NormanTebbit]

times are tough for all of us. At least you have some money left over once all is paid for.

[NormanTebbit]

"Last year?s spending review cut the amount families could claim in credits from up to 80 per cent of their weekly childcare costs, to a max of 70 per cent. The move will save the government £385m by 2014/15.

Save the Children estimates that the cut has added an average of £500 per year onto the childcare bill for half a million families. Of those in severe poverty, the cut has pushed a quarter to give up working entirely ? and of those working, 80 per cent agreed that once they?d paid for childcare, their earnings barely covered costs."