What ideas and suggestions would you like us to pass on to the new government?

[Carriemumsnet]

We are meeting with government in the next few weeks and we'd like to pick your brains. Obviously times are tight and most government departments will be anxious to find ways to increase efficiency. Do you have any thoughts about how things could be made simpler and easier, perhaps by using Mumsnet to implement services or offer support currently offered in other ways? Are there particular services that you think warrant special protection and should be ring-fenced? Or any particular ones that you feel are badly implemented/ wasteful? How could Mumsnet work with government to make life easier for parents? For example should Mumsnet be promoted by Midwives and Health Visitors to parents when they leave hospital or have their final visit? Could Mumsnet be used as a job-share hub? We know you'll have lots of ideas and suggestions, so please post them here and we'll try and pass on as many of them as we can.

Thanks, MNHQ

Encourage more homebirths - this saves the NHS money and is a nicer experience for the mother!

I've been pleasantly surprised by the b/feeding support with dc4 - things seem to have improved a lot in our area!

Please DON'T target all the cuts at a particular income bracket (30-60k), because there's only so many 'extra' things we can pay for ourselves before we run out of money! And also please remember that a household that has one person earning 50k, with 2 adults and 4 children to support is much less able to cope with cuts than a household with 1 adult earning 50k to support just themselves, or also 2 adults but no children earning 25k each (because of tax structure). It's not as simple as means testing a household, unless you take into account dependents/disposable income.

Make CRB checks simpler and transferable.

Scrap Trident. If you're not sure why, watch the Yes Prime Minister episode about it - you'd never use it, and the whole world KNOWS you'd never use it, so don't waste billions on renewing it when times are this tough.

Withdraw the application to host the 2018 World Cup. That seems a crass waste of money, as are the Olympics.

Don't put up tuition fees - the people that will affect are the middle income families, and lots of children who academically SHOULD be able to go to university will not be able to. Instead introduce a graduate tax, to be paid from a specified income level until the specified amount is paid off.

Child benefit should not be means tested, but could be given for up to a certain number of children only (3?)

Women make up over half the voting population. No one party has the confidence of over half of the electorate.

Every time the government comes up with anti women legislation (proposed changes to rape laws) or conspiciously fails to give women cabinet seats or positions of power they are severely pissing off more people than voted for them in the first place.

They will do well to bear this in mind.

Minimum wage needs to be increased, so that the taxpayer isn't subsidising businesses through WFTC. 'Efficiency savings' always translates as screwing the pay and conditions of the lowest earners; they need protecting. And if it sounds ridiculous to suggest increasing pay in 'austerity Britain', remember that the equal pay act was passed in 1970.

I'm also getting increasingly angry that tax increases are apparently an impossibility, while slashing away at the public sector is taken as a given.

Hello all,
Thanks for your input so far. To be clear this isn't really about policy - it's more about delivery and mechanics. How could the way you interact with government on a local and national level be made simpler/ easier - perhaps by utilising Mumsnet, perhaps in other ways?

Are there things that make you tear your hair out because they seem so bureaucratic/ outmoded? I remember trying to claim maternity allowance (was self-employed) and after many fruitless hours just giving up in tears because it was so complicated. (Was some time ago so it might have improved). Registering the birth of my children always seemed like an unnecessary palava - could it not be done online? In short do you have any bright ideas about how parents' lives could be made easier in the way we interact with government services?

Or register children in the hospital? The records come from there anyway, and resolve any issues there. For instance, DD was born on the 10th, but somehow the hospital listed it as the 11th... .

I am curious as to why Mumsnet wants to become a government agency......

We don't want to become a government agency amothersplaceisinthewrong - we want to make parents' lives easier (it's our raison d'etre). The government has said they'd like to do that too and we'd thought we'd take that at face value and offer some feedback, you never know we might change something for the better .

I think the beauty of Mumsnet is that it is an independent non-political (unless that's the topic) mums talking to other mums and sharing experience. If you were to feature 'interaction with government' I would suggest you re-structure your site so that there were links to the appropriate area but not contained within the body of MN itself.

The only thing I've ever really found bureaucratic and illogical has been the way I'm asked to submit all my earnings information for my tax return and then declare it all over again for my child tax credit claim. They both contain the same information so why can't it be shared across departments?

BTW I don't agree with you about registering births being a 'palava'. I liked the formality and sense of occasion....

In Bristol you can register births in one of the hospitals.

A rule that you can't work for a bank within 10 years of working in government and vice verse.

To make jobs over 100k compulsory job-share so that more people are employed. (a bit like a 2.5 day week)

Stop pretending we have an aging population. There is a cohort who were born between the wars, that those immediately after them are pretty much all dead!

And special needs special needs special needs.

Other children may or may not make it, but they have a chance and a choice. Without good intervention, children with special are at serious of risk of having infinately, yet preventable poorer quality of life. These are vulnerable children, and will become vulnerable adults. It's not THEIR recession so make the right choices in their name.

Why not change the rules on marriage as well so you can nip down Tesco and get married before your weekly shop? How can anyone think registering something as important as the birth of a child is an unnecessary palava?!

As everyone has clearly got carried away with talking about policy - none of which will be taken on board in any way, shape or form - wouldn't it have been useful for someone from MNHQ to come back on this thread before now?

Build more council and low income houses. And I'm talking here of family homes with gardens that cost £100,000 or less.

There's a whole generation of middle to low income families who are unable to invest in their future because they have to rent their family homes at great cost, unable to afford a suitable house in their price range.

The instability of renting is very difficult for young families in particular, hence the need for more council housing which will at least allow young families stability and lower than market rents so they can (gasp) save some money towards owning their own place one day.

Of course, there's no danger of this government doing this because every government seems to be falling over themselves to support buy to let property owners depite them being the bloody problem in the first place. Probably because lots of MP's make money through property.

When DD was 18 months old we were made homeless when our landlord decided to sell our house and we simply couldn't afford 1 months rent + deposit + agency fees + credit check + admin fees etc that every bloody landlord in town was charging. We are too poor to save money, particularly then.

So we went to the council and got temporary housing. Our council has bugger all council housing and housing association houses are spread thinly amongst the very needy.

The council have an ingenious plan for the increasing numbers of homeless like us. A private sector partnership. They pay an agency twice market rent for rental housing for "undesirable tenants" like us poorer families. We were told that we would have the security of this house for 3-5 years providing we don't increase our income. Because then we'd be eligible to pay the full rent. Our chances of getting council or HA house was very low and this was presented as our only option unless we wanted to live in temporary accomodation for up to 2 years. It's a benefits trap we cannot escape from. How can we save for another house without increasing our income and then losing housing benefit?

Incidentally, I spoke to the property owner of this house, not the agency. Owner is responsible for all repairs and I was arranging some with them. Owner receives less than half the rent paid by housing benefit, well below market rent, for this property. So our agency is getting an extraordinary sum for some light administration.

Surely it would be cheaper just to build some bloody houses?

Try and seema bit more positive; already, everything seems to be very negative about this gov - withdrawing,cutting,stopping. Even if these things do have to happen, cant you balance it out with positive improvements too?

Ok, life has been hard under the last gov, esp as we have had 2 small kids and only one income. But I never felt scared, like I do now. I really feel, for the first time, like our family is in danger of going under, financially

Oh, and a bit of help for people who want to return to work, but dont claim benefits? I went to the jobcentre naively expecting there to be at least some kind of guidance and help (have reasonable intelligence and potential, but dont want to return to the career I had prekids 7yrs ago), only to be told that I get nothing, but if I claimed benefits I'd get all kinds of help and courses and retraining.

And dont cut the free swims, we cant afford to take 1 ad 2 kids all the time, its so bloody expensive.

Stop paying peoiple benefits for children they have since starting to claim benefits - really really annoys me that people who are not working can effectively afford to have as many kids as they want whilst people with a social conscience only have as many kids as they can actually afford to bring up themselves. Birth control is free and you don't need a degree in rocket science to use it now do you.

I would also make tennants aware when they move into a house or flat funded by the government that they will not be moved out if they have more kids as they are making a choice to become overcrowded. More kids should not equal a bigger house.

Stop NHS staff going on stupid courses and stop them having so many bloody days off sick - since moving from private to public sector I am appalled by the amount of days lost by consultants and nurses because they are sick again!!!

Make the traffic light system on food compulsory, then add a tax on foods that have 3 or more in the orange and red category, that is on a par with tax on fags and booze.

gaelicsheep for me registering the birth was a palava because I had twins (who were v prem). I had to take them out of special care, go go to a central London location with no parking and lug two babies up 3 flights of stairs, wait around for a bit. I would have loved to have done it at the hospital or on line or even at my GP.

Chil1234 we are not planning on giving up our independent, non-political stance. But there's little point imho in Government spending large amounts of (our) cash on new websites to deliver government services/ admin etc when those websites already exist.

"Stop paying peoiple benefits for children they have since starting to claim benefits - really really annoys me that people who are not working can effectively afford to have as many kids as they want whilst people with a social conscience only have as many kids as they can actually afford to bring up themselves. Birth control is free and you don't need a degree in rocket science to use it now do you."

the only people who would suffer as a result of this is the children.

Why are maternity/paternity legal rights so unbalanced? I can claim up to a year off, partner can only claim two weeks. If leave was assigned per child rather than per mother/father, parents could have the option of dividing it between them in a more balanced and fair way.

I think it is positive that the govt is interested in parents views and mn is a great forum for gathering them.

I would like to add the issue of education. the previous govt put too much emphasis on the management of education rather than the delivery and hence money is moving out of the classroom and into Quangos and management strategies. This needs to be reversed - and teachers are much cheaper than quangos and managers and are much better for our kids.

Please ask them why they persist in the belief that faith schools are a good thing when all the evidence points to the contrary. Please, Please!! I asked Michael Gove that one and his answer "Yes, faith schools are good.." PAH!!!

i don't think free bus/ rail transport for over 60's is necessary - would raising the age to 70 be better. My mum, a healthy 63, who travels round Europe regularly, has a free train pass and to me it doesn't seem necessary.