The Cummings debate. Let’s talk about childcare

Dominic Cummings told us about what he clearly felt was an exceptional set of circumstances when he delivered a statement on Monday. He found that if all the adults at home were unwell, there would have been nobody to provide childcare. For mums of young children around the country, this sounds like pretty standard stuff. And as a man who has at least six children, you might expect Boris Johnson to know a bit about childcare and the normality of this situation – but he referred to his advisor as having “no alternative” and said that he followed the “instincts of every father and every parent”.

Any person who thinks being ill and parenting are incompatible clearly doesn’t live in the real world, and certainly not the world the rest of us have inhabited for the last ten weeks. We all know that, ill or not, we can only rely on ourselves. But maybe this lack of understanding that juggling childcare, work, homework and a thousand other things is the reality for most families shows just how out of touch the government’s inner circle are. I also think it shows what happens when you have such a limited array of lived experiences among decision-makers.

The government’s ‘war cabinet’ to deal with the pandemic is headed up by men: Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab. The only female member of the government who has taken any of the daily briefings that have occurred since March 16th is Priti Patel, and she has only led three Covid press conferences. This gives some indication as to why a childcare crisis seems to be viewed by them as ‘unprecedented’, and why they seemed genuinely surprised that his tale of woe has not generated much sympathy with the public.

Perhaps this ignorance around the realities of family life is one reason for which childcare is never getting much of a look in when it comes to their policies. It has long been a complaint of mine that childcare and family issues have been pushed to the back of the agenda time and time again – with the one exception of the introduction of Sure Start by Tony Blair’s government in 1999. It is no coincidence that this marvellous, society-changing development occurred when a party with 101 female MPs took power and with Tessa Jowell – a woman who understood the issues – at the helm. At this time, one fifth of the cabinet were women and this later became a third.

This stood in direct contrast to Margaret Thatcher, who promoted just one women – Janet Young as leader of the House of Lords – to her cabinet. John Major promoted two women to his cabinet, and Theresa May managed six. Most notably, Johnson reduced the number of women in his cabinet in the February reshuffle, so that now only eight of the 26 ministers attending cabinet are women. Despite having 163 more MPs than Labour, the Conservatives have only 87 female MPs compared to Labour’s 104. And it seems fair to say that the lived experiences of women are not a priority for them in policy-making. Their common line is that the Tory Party is a meritocracy. But the ways in which women are held back – such as by childcare – mean a meritocracy is far from reality.

We can see the lack of female influence throughout the Conservatives’ policies, including in their plan to stop virtual voting when many female MPs will still have children at home at present, or in their totally contemptuous response towards care workers – most of whom are women. Or in the long-term policies they have pursued, which have caused women to be disproportionately affected by tax, benefit and public spending cuts.

Whilst gendered roles in the home have massively decreased, studies consistently show that women still take on most of the childcare responsibilities and most of the responsibility for all unpaid care activities. Moreover, single-parent households are predominantly headed by women. The unpredictability of child illness – as well as the need to manage the long school holidays – leaves many women trapped in the casual labour market, which is synonymous with low pay. Research by the Fawcett Society also indicated that working women are likely to cut down pension contributions to pay for childcare – causing a gender pensions gap in retirement. I used to think the Tory approach to these matters was driven from callousness but now, after this weekend, I genuinely wonder if it is a mark of their ignorance about ordinary life.

Childcare provision, meanwhile, is under serious threat. The government made a ridiculous U-turn last month when it decided that daycare providers would be unable to fully access the job retention scheme while still receiving early entitlement funding. This news came after some nurseries had already closed and furloughed staff in the belief that the government would cover 80% of their employees’ salaries. Councils are allowed to direct the early entitlement funding to those settings that have remained open. As a result, there is a real fear that as many as 10,000 nurseries will be economically unviable when the crisis ends. There appears to be no plan as to how working parents are expected to manage with the potential loss of 150,000 childcare places.

And as well as being a means of allowing parents – mostly women – to access the workplace, good quality early years provision is recognised as important in breaking intergenerational disadvantage. This is particularly relevant in a country where one quarter of four- and five-year olds lack the basic communication skills that they are expected to have by the end of their reception year at school.

It would be nice to think that these events may cause the cabinet – most of whom have all tweeted their support for Cummings’ actions in what Matt Hancock called “difficult circumstances” – to think about the difficulties that childcare and the lack of it causes for parents around the country, and how it often contributes to the continuation of our unequal society. But somehow I doubt it.