How do we make childcare more affordable? Work less.

Shockingly absent from the headlines during the last twelve months is the emerging consensus among political parties over an enormous planned intrusion into the lives of millions of British citizens. It’s not GCHQ this time – your emails are safe (or no less safe than they were). Rather, the British political class is collectively offering to raise your children for you (a worrying thought, on several levels) and they are increasingly in agreement that the best way to do this is to keep schools open all day and all year.

The thinking behind this seems straightforward: Childcare is very expensive. For many, it’s genuinely not worth working once they’ve had children because childcare is so costly .And this disproportionately affects women, skewing the job market still more against them. Realising these challenges facing many people across Britain is important, however, neither keeping schools open nor finding other ways of funding universal childcare through general taxation is a good solution.

Labour have already suggested that paying a living wage will help people meet childcare costs, which is true, but as yet we don’t know how successful they’ll be at persuading businesses to raise wages. But even if they are able to do this, Labour acknowledge the ‘need’ for greater state provision or funding of childcare alongside the living wage.

Despite all of this, the politicians have not realised that there’s two sides to the issue of childcare. Oddly, for a group that is largely pro free-market, they’ve only remembered one half of the rule governing the economy: Supply, yes. What about demand?

Childcare is too expensive because there’s not enough of it and because there’s too much demand for it. And the drive to get ever more people into work, backed by the lie that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, will only continue to push up demand, increasing costs for whoever is footing the bill.

How do we solve the issue of demand? The answer is easy: we work less. We could start by actually enforcing the Working Time Directive so that workers can no longer be made to sign away their right to work no more than forty-eight hours a week. But why stop there? Workers in the UK work more hours than the EU average and rank around the middle in terms of rights to annual paid leave (although we have so few bank holidays that combining the two causes us to drop in the rankings quite a bit). Working shorter hours and taking more holidays, especially during the summer, would decrease demand for childcare, thus making it more affordable when we do need it.

This hardly seems likely to lose votes either. After four years of austerity and the promise of more to come, Labour could easily spin a package of more holidays and fewer hours as a reward for hard-pressed British workers (we’d have more time for beer and bingo, never mind the kids!). And not opening schools all year round has the added benefit of not overworking teachers who, at around sixty hours a week, already work many more hours than the OECD average.