At the start of the week BBC Two documented in ‘Babies in the Office’ how Addison Lee, London’s biggest cab hire firm, became the first company in the UK to allow staff to care for their babies while working in the office.
With childcare costs at an all time high such schemes appear to promise salvation for hard-pressed parents.
Just think; you could continue to come into work and keep earning, without having to spend any of that hard earned cash on paying for someone else to look after Junior. After all, they’d be parked in the buggy next to your desk. Sure, with the crying and feeding and burping your productivity might suffer, and your BlackBerry probably isn’t going to survive dousing in baby sick. But your work-life balance is going to be in perfect harmony.
Except it isn’t. Childcare in Britain is in crisis, and the solution isn’t compelling people to cart their babies into the office.
According to the Daycare Trust, only 21% of councils in Scotland provide enough state-funded childcare to enable parents to work full-time – the figures are 46% in England and 17% in Wales. The average cost of part-time childcare for a toddler now exceeds £100 per week – £5,000 per year – in many parts of Britain, meaning parents spend an average of a third of their income on private childcare, in comparison to 10% of income in Denmark.
Parents have the primary responsibility for meeting the needs of their children, but that doesn’t mean they hold the sole responsibility. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is a good proverb for good reason: children’s care, welfare and education is a public good, conferring externalities beyond the direct beneficiaries of toddlers and parents.
I don’t have children, but I know I benefit from the population being healthy, literate and good citizens, and that’s a process that starts from the earliest years. It’s therefore a process I’m happy to pay for through taxation.
People should be able to enjoy becoming and being parents, without the pressure of returning to work too soon. That needs extended parental leave for both parents, shared equally or divided in favour of whoever wishes to be the primary caregiver. People should also be able to return to work, instead of being compelled through economics to stay at home to care for their children, or to give up most of their earnings to pay for someone else to care for them. That means flexible, family-friendly working and decent state funded childcare beyond the hours of 9 to 5.
None of these things are beyond grasp. Many employers offer flexible parental leave and working hours and there is an infrastructure for council-delivered daycare. There’s more scope for companies to get involved too, in offering crèches to help reduce costs for staff.
Addison Lee and the 170 firms in the United States (where there is no statutory right to maternity pay) that allow staff to bring their babies to work might think they are being family-friendly. But properly enabling parents to separate work and life, through flexibility on the part of the employer and funding on the part of government would be even family-friendlier.
#1 by Don Francisco on July 18, 2012 - 7:49 pm
Much like elderly care – no party has the balls to put a really strong policy on the table and be prepared to argue for it. It would involve raised taxes or something else significant being cut back. I can’t remember the last time a party was able to get support for increasing taxes to cover something we would all benefit from, and given the total lack of traction on elderly care, neither do our political leaders.
#2 by Indy on July 18, 2012 - 8:43 pm
I don’t actually see why people shouldn’t be able to take kids into work with them if they want. People manage perfectly well to keep their blackberries and computers free of baby sick at home so why wouldn’t they manage it at work as well?
This is not an argument against extended childcare, it is an argument to say that maybe people should be a bit more relaxed about little people in the workplace.
You should maybe get Councillor Alison Thewliss to comment on this, she takes her wee boy around with her at work all the time, she does surgeries with him, she has taken him into the Council chamber at Full Council. Just because people aren’t used to something it doesn’t mean it can’t work.
#3 by Kirsty on July 18, 2012 - 8:52 pm
I’m not saying people shouldn’t bring their kids into work – I quite enjoy when my colleagues do! I just don’t think it’s a viable solution to balancing work with childcare for most people. What if you want to keep your work and home life separate?
#4 by Iain Menzies on July 18, 2012 - 8:59 pm
Then dont take your kid to work maybe?
#5 by Alec on July 19, 2012 - 10:50 am
What about those who don’t want their work environments to include young children, but – unless separate areas are provided for those who do – would be required to accept other people’s children?
~alec
#6 by Indy on July 18, 2012 - 9:06 pm
Yes – like I say I am not arguing against extending free childcare, and some people do want to keep their home and work life separate.
But one of the things I am quite disappointed in about the SNP Government is that in 2007 they had stuff in their manifesto about doing more to promote flexi working and home working which would provide an environmental benefit as well as making life easier for many working parents – cut down on the commute etc. And as far as I can see they have done diddly squat.
But that is maybe another issue.
#7 by mav on July 18, 2012 - 9:16 pm
As someone whose youngest starts school in less than a month, meaning that this particular escalator will slow down, sorry but.
You keep using the word flexible, and that’s the key. Yet your solution seems to be fairly fixed – raise taxes, get more state nursery places. It’s not that simple.
For every parent, or family, the ideal solution is different. Which is why the solutions have to be flexible also.
First, we, like almost every parent I know, sought to minimise the hours our children spent in child care. Don’t get me wrong, the hours spent interacting with other children is good for them. But every day, 9-5 is not ideal. Nor is it practical – on days when you are you are both working, you need that nursery open 8-6. And thats with us both working ‘normal’ hours.
Second, there are far more solutions that state-run nursery, and my experience is that they are often better. After school clubs, child minders, private nurseries all deliver big time.
The solution is flexibility. Here’s simple ways in which we can help, and do more, without the need for any big shift:
First. The biggest single help to anyh parent who can access them are the child care vouchers Gordon Brown brought in (and I’m not Labour). They allow you set aside your salary to buy the child care you need, tax free. It’s capped at £243 a month. Not enough. It should go up. And it should be easier to get. Currently, if you don’t work for a big firm, you can only get this by filling in a annual tax return. In other words, there are barriers prevent it reaching those who need it most.
Second. Not every parent wants to work. Lets make it easier for those that don’t, so that the strain on our over-run nurseries is eased. Recognise not marriage, but family units in the tax system. Allow couples to transfer tax allowances to one another and so avoid tax, if they have children.
Third. Currently you get 2 1/2 hours per day of state provided nursery care, once your child is old enough. Expecting employers to give you an 2 1/2 hour shift is unrealistic, especially when you realise that its only available, where I live anyway, between 9 & 11.30 and 1.00 and 3.30. Make it a weekly allowance rather than a day rate, expand when its available and then you’re getting somewhere.
Four. Do everything we can to encourage flexible working. Because an understanding boss is essential.
Five. Allow those child care vouchers to be used to pay the grans, grandads aunts and uncles who step into the breach up and down the country. Or find a way of rewarding them.
There is no single way of delivering child care that will suit all parents. Child care is personal, you as a parent have to be happy with it, and it has to fit round your work, and lifestyle, be it shifts, 9-5, full time, part time, family, separated or single parent . Its sometimes suggested by economically right wing politicians that the solution to health care or education is simply to give out vouchers and let the market provide. You know what? Child care may be one area where this really is the simplest way.
#8 by Iain Menzies on July 19, 2012 - 8:07 am
The only thing that you have said here that i would take issue with is your fifth point.
I dont have kids…but well i was one not THAT long ago… 😉
My parents seperated when i was just starting Primary School….with my mother working full time it was my grandparents that did alot of the child care for me and my older brother.
When i say alot i mean most of it during the week, my gran would come to the house in the morning to get us ready for school…we would go to my grans for lunch, and we went home from school to my grans.
Now i think that i dodged allot of the dissadvantages of being from a broken home because i had that near constant presence of my grandparents. But i dont think they should have been, effectivly, paid for by the state to do it.
Thats not to say that they were out of pocket, my mother did cover the costs of looking after us, providing money for the food for our dinners and the like.
So the problem i have with your fifth point in that in the situation i was in, we didnt need extra funds to cover it and i dont like the idea that a family that does need extra support wouldnt get it because a family that doesnt, like mine, was getting something.
#9 by April on July 18, 2012 - 9:52 pm
Admittedly there may be some workplaces where it could be feasible to bring a young child in while the parent carries out their duties – but is that really in the best interests of the child?
All of the Scottish Councils who provide day care provision charge for this service for all under 3’s and for over 3′ who attend for any additional hours beyond their funded 12.5 hours per week during term time. Many local authority extended day/year nurseries see a marked drop in the number of children aged 3 to 5 attending during the summer holidays as their parents cannot afford the charges.
The Scottish Governements early Years Framework and the proposed Childrens Rights and Services Bill is a brave attempt to improve on this situation however they freely admit that they do not have all the necessary fiscal levers to fuly realise their vision. Some of the detail in the consultation document indicates a somewhat muddled and naive understanding of what a high quality early years service delivering early learning and childcare should look like. A lack of detail on how SNP will fulfill their commitment of all children age 3 to 5 having a GTC teacher to support their learning as part of the nursery staff group is concerning to say the least.
Another area of concern is how are the proposeed additional hours for 3 to 5 year olds to be funded. It is unlikely that many councils have the necessary infrastructure, space and staff to provide the additional flexible, extended hours that the Government aspires to. How will the required expansionbe funded?
Councillor Thewliss is of course famed for the many places that she has taken her young son with her to work, fine when he was a small baby but as she has mentioned on her facebook page he does now attend a nursery.
#10 by Alison on July 18, 2012 - 10:09 pm
I started out taking my son to work with me from a slightly odd starting point: Councillors aren’t employees, and as such don’t get maternity leave. We are obliged to attend one meeting of the Council every six months, but there’s nothing on mat leave, support, anything of that nature. Staff aren’t allowed to cover our surgeries. I didn’t feel I could just stop being a Councillor, so decided the best way to proceed was just to take Alexander along and chance my arm. Two years later, I’m still doing it. No one told me not to (some frowned, but they didn’t tell me not to!).
It was my personal decision, and it’s certainly not for everyone. I’m the only one in our group who currently brings a wee one in despite three male colleagues having children about the same age, and a female colleague just having had a baby quite recently. That’s their choice. I admit it’s pretty stressful at times and I worry that people see me as being distracted and unprofessional. If it weren’t so unusual, I think I’d be a bit more relaxed about that. Some folk are surprised, some say they quite like it. Only very few have passed comment negatively.
There’s a bit of a guilt thing too – I don’t like handing my son over to people, he’s my responsibility. During the programme last night, one woman said that she dropped her child off at nursery early in the morning, picked her up at night, and only saw her for a few hours a day. A father felt the same thing. That’s pretty sad, and it can’t be good for us. Even being able to see your child during the day, perhaps to have lunch together, would be nice. If the nursery was in the same building as your workplace, it would make that a lot easier.
Alexander goes to nursery two days a week. I think it’s good for him to be around other children, and get stimulation and fun. I take him with me the other three days unless it’s going to be a really busy day – the nursery can sometimes offer an extra day. Even for those two days a week, nursery costs are our biggest household bill.
The proposal the company came up with in in the programme – children up to a year old can stay by the desk, and over that age they get a nursery place on site – is quite good. I take the point about separation of work and home life, but it’s actually really nice to have Alexander around; I don’t feel I’m missing him growing up.
My job’s different every day and I’m out of the office meeting people a lot of the time, so that makes things more interesting for him. I do make a lot of use of the time when Alexander naps! There are plenty of folk for him to say hello to in the office, and he’s not too disruptive most of the time (I hope my colleagues would agree). We have quite a good ‘village’ between my Councillor colleagues and Council staff (and more widely in the SNP, where I’ve taken him campaigning and to conferences!). In an ideal world, some kind of creche would be good, for the times where I’m in a meeting that requires more of my attention than he’ll allow.
I’ve been quite lucky to have circumstances flexible enough to take my son to work – it is do-able, but people need the support of their employer and colleagues to make it happen.
Happy to discuss this in more detail – thanks for the opportunity!
#11 by Doug Daniel on July 19, 2012 - 4:58 pm
“I take the point about separation of work and home life, but it’s actually really nice to have Alexander around; I don’t feel I’m missing him growing up.”
More importantly, he’s not missing having his mum around while he’s growing up!
I often think the biggest benefit I had in my childhood was that my mum didn’t go back to work until I had been back at school several years, and even then she got a job that meant she was back home in time for me coming home from school. I think anything that can be done to ensure a child is spending as much time with a parent as possible should be encouraged – whether that’s allowing them to take the child to work, or just allowing them to hold off going back to work until the child is school-age. Obviously the second one is tougher as not all couples can survive off one wage, but where possible, it would be good for people to be able to take their children to work.
This would probably be made easier if the housing market (among other things) hadn’t inflated to adjust for two wages being the norm…
#12 by April on July 19, 2012 - 9:07 am
I would be interesting to know Alison if your male colleagues use nursery provision, local authority or private. Do we know of any men who take or want to take their child to work as a regular childcare arrangement? Seems to me that the move to bring your child to work is directed more at women than at men. So much for gender equality.
#13 by Alison on July 20, 2012 - 10:16 am
I’d generally agree – although the documentary did feature two men at the company bringing in their children.
Of my colleagues, I think two have childminders and the other has his wife at home. As I said, that’s their choice. One of the new Labour Councillors brought her daughter to the last full Council meeting and has her in the office.