On childcare, if the market doesn’t deliver, the state should step in

This year International Women’s Day (IWD) went how it always does. Companies flocked to Instagram to give out discounts to their consumers. Employers posted on LinkedIn to shout about great women. People tweeted about amazing women who broke down barriers.

Who can blame them? It’s much easier to say the right thing than it is to tackle the structural causes of inequality. But IWD grew out of movements for radical action on workers’ rights and suffrage, reminding us that it’s the structures holding all women back that we need to address, not the stories of exception. Policy changes aiming to support women should address the barriers that prevent women from having the same opportunities as men rather than being grounded in the experience of individuals.

Top of the depressing statistics for women this week is childcare – more and more expert analysis shows just how broken the system is. Only 50 percent of local authorities in England have sufficient childcare places for children under two. Fewer than one in five local authorities in England have places for disabled children – down a huge 21 percent on last year.

Is it any surprise that the UK is slipping down the international league table for women in work? We are now 14^th out of 38 rich countries. The gender pay gap is widening four times faster in the UK than the average for the OECD (2021 data), primarily due a motherhood financial penalty. No one who followed the Gender Pay Gap Bot on Wednesday will be surprised.

One statistic sticks out among the rest. 98.4 percent of nurseries say their funding rates do not cover delivery costs. That’s wages and we need to talk about workforce. Like founders of IWD knew, it is not possible to solve the issues women face without a fundamental change to our labour market.

The government may be trying to promote its new strategy on technology and science but robots are not likely to be looking after our children any time soon. Without the workforce, no childcare would exist in the first place and with childcare workers leaving the sector for retail and warehousing jobs due to better pay, it’s time to value the skills of our childcare workforce (predominantly women) more equally.

With Pregnant Then Screwed revealing last week that 75 percent of mothers who pay for childcare say it no longer makes financial sense for them to work, it’s clear this is not a functioning market. And if the market doesn’t deliver, the state should step in. Real-terms investment is the only answer.

This cannot be about fixing one sector to help one set of life circumstances. Ultimately the option to send your child to nursery at all is a privilege in the current set up. Too often it’s assumed families start with two relatively high earners working regular hours. Citizens’ Advice point out that inflation means subsidies for lower-income parents are worth less and less. The Resolution Foundation highlight the Universal Credit system requires low-income parents to find a month’s worth of upfront childcare costs. The Conservatives want to persuade more over-50s back to work with a ‘mid-life MOT’, assuming many chose early retirement before the cost-of-living crisis hit. Suggesting they may now reconsider ignores the fact that a growing number of the over 50s who left the labour market did so at least in part to provide free care for their grandchildren.

So, fixing the childcare sector for its workforce and its customers is about the core motivations of any Labour government and our movement – social mobility and addressing poverty. As the Director of Education & Skills at the OECD pointed out this week, intervention in early years is the way policymakers can really fix inequality.

Our Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is right that there can be no more tinkering of a structure that is not designed for women, low-income families, or the workforce. Your choice to have a child (or not), your choice to leave a job you love (or not), should be one you can make because it is the right decision for you – not because a broken childcare system has priced your family out of a service you need to progress your future, whatever that may be.

For those of us engaged in politics, we know that IWD isn’t about the 10 percent discount off a dress or some prize giving gala. It is about remembering those who built the path to power for women to walk down and know our responsibility is to change the economic fortunes for all women and their families.

You can sign up to the Labour Campaign for Childcare Reform here.