You can’t put a price on a child’s happiness – unless you’re a Tory councillor

By Conor Pope / @conorpope

You can’t put a price on a child’s happiness. Seeing a youthful face creased into milk-teeth grin, baring healthy pink gums and eyes shimmering with bliss is one of life’s most wonderful sights. It warms the cockles of my heart.

Except it would appear that you can put a price on an innocent child’s smile: Conservative-run Wandsworth Council reckon that the gaiety of a bairn having a nice afternoon is exactly £2.50.

Consider my cockles cold.

I always find that one of the worst things about political blogs is how quickly writers will resort to using quotations, removing them from their original context, and using them in a spurious manner to back up whatever point they’d like to make. In this case, it would be very easy to drop in the Oscar Wilde quote that a cynic is one “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. But I won’t do that, because it would be too easy. However, I do want you to know that I am deliberately avoiding saying that the Tories have decided on the price of a child’s happiness and yet don’t seem to understand the value of it. Even though that definitely is the case. It really, really is.

But how did they come to the price of £2.50? The laughter of children cannot be measured, so the fee is entirely arbitrary. Once you’ve taken the nasty and illogical step to actually charge parents to take their children to the park, you have to take the step to choose how much they need to pay. Usually, when deciding things like this you can look at what other councils or businesses charge for a similar experience to work out a ballpark figure, then establish whether your product is worth more or less. Sadly, Wandsworth Council had absolutely no other council play parks to use as a benchmark because it is the first to have dreamt such a nasty and illogical scheme.

So, they must have had to put the price of a child’s happiness in context to work out a reasonable entrance fee. Is a child’s happiness worth more than, say, a Twix? Yes, they evidently concluded. But by how much? Well, roughly five Twixes. You would have to give a child roughly five Twixes to makes them as happy as a bit of time in a park.

But then, once you’ve worked out what a child’s happiness is worth more than, you’d have to wonder what a child’s happiness is worth less than. While a child’s happiness is evidently worth exactly 21p more than a can of Oust odour eliminator, it is clearly less satisfying than a pint. Give a child some time playing with a can of Oust odour eliminator and they would have fun, but would feel something was missing, even if they couldn’t explain it. Give them a pint of Guinness and they would have more fun than they deserve.

Obviously, in a time when council budgets are being slashed, it would be wrong and irresponsible for us to point the finger at those filling the gaps in innovative ways. If you were so inclined you could mention that Wandsworth has the lowest council tax in the UK. You could contrast that with how Labour-run Southwark Council is also managing to deliver free-school meals to all primary school children, despite having to make the same amount of cuts in half the timescale. But I won’t do that, because we really shouldn’t play the blame game here. They’ve been forced to make this hard decision. Let’s not play politics with a child’s happiness.

It is, after all, priceless.

On a more serious note, I’d like to say how sorry I am to hear about the death of David Cairns MP this week. I never met him, but his refusal to stand by things he didn’t believe in for the sake of concenice was an admirable trait, and one that is too rare within politics.

Also, he was a massive David Bowie fan, which means he was definitely a good person.

This post by Tom Harris on the passing of his friend is a must read.