We would win if we introduced universal childcare. It would transform the lives of many families, and it would be the finest legacy of New Labour.' Not the anonymous musings of a Government minister or despairing Labour MP, but a rank-and-file view expressed recently on a Labour-supporting website.
With the Brown Government weighed down by depressingly low opinion poll ratings and morale within the Labour Party at an all-time low, the Observer suggested a few weeks ago that the search for a 'big idea' may involve an extension of subsidised childcare. The paper quoted an unnamed Cabinet source as saying, 'I think it has to be universal childcare'.
So, the aspirations of serried ranks of Labour supporters may well be chiming with those of ministers and MPs who are dreading the next election and the prospect of losing their seats. But given that public sector net borrowing for the first quarter of the financial year was £24.4bn, the biggest quarterly figure since records began in 1946, there is little doubt that the Treasury is less keen on the idea.
As all the childcare charities agree, the Government has committed unprecedented levels of investment to the sector since it came to power in 1997. Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, says, 'We have now got to the stage where it would be a noticeable gap if any of the political parties went into the next election without really very positive commitments around childcare.
'4Children has always argued that there needs to be universal childcare and that needs to be from age 0 to 14. What we would like to see is a very clear contract with parents about what that means," she adds, urging the Government to provide parents with a Scandinavian-style childcare guarantee.
Issues to resolve
But the last 11 years have also shown the Government's ability to throw money at new initiatives without always thinking through all the consequences for childcare providers.
The Observer report suggested that one option being considered is 'providing free nursery places from birth to school age for poor families. But requiring the better-off to pay for some services'.
After a recent seminar with John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the Daycare Trust argued for an extension of free early years places for three- and four-year-olds to at least 20 hours a week for 48 weeks in the year, and for places to be available too for two-year-olds.
Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, cautions against a rush to an increase in universal childcare until key issues are resolved.
She points out that extending the free entitlement for three- and four-year-olds 'could be a real threat to providers who are effectively subsidising the current offer'. While many NDNA members are supportive of the concept of an extended entitlement, she adds that any new offer 'would need to be very carefully thought out and adequately funded at rates that reflect changing costs - otherwise, many providers could find it unsustainable to continue'.
Supply-side funding
Steve Alexander, chief executive of the Pre-School Learning Alliance, shares these concerns and believes the reluctance to provide supply-side funding means that moves to extend the free entitlement do not 'reflect increasing costs faced by providers'.
He wants to see more supply-side funding going straight to providers, while recognising that this 'can't happen without a tax hike'. He also argues for more central and regional market management to 'counteract' variable local authority commissioning and instances where a council takes on the role of both commissioner and provider of childcare.
However, Kate Lawton, a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research, believes that supply-side funding runs against the grain of current Government thinking. This, as is seen in social care, is to give money to individuals rather than organisations so they can have greater control over the type of services they want.
'I can't see the Government being that keen to go to a system where money just goes to providers, because that is not where policy is going generally,' she says.
Mr Alexander also queries the extent of demand for full daycare from parents aiming to get back to work. He said the PLA's own experience of running full daycare settings showed that 'only around half those attending are using places full-time, with the remainder preferring to take some part-time sessions'.
He adds that this refocuses attention on the issue of parental choice and 'the need to support sessional pre-schools for those parents who wish to stay at home with their children and balance this with using sessional care'.
Payment imbalance
Purnima Tanuku is adamant that before the Government announces further big policy changes, it needs to resolve a number of outstanding issues, including tax credits, pay for the workforce and the affordability and sustainability of childcare.
'Without spending to solve these issues, it is unlikely that the sector will be ready to deliver on promises of more free childcare or increased support,' she says.
Anne Longfield agrees that there is a need to increase spending on childcare, but she believes striving for 'that progressive universalism that we want' should not entail 'quadrupling' the budget.
More immediately, she wants to see a rebalancing of the way childcare is paid for, with parents having to pay less and the Government making a larger contribution. It is a demand echoed by the Daycare Trust, whose campaigns officer Joe Caluori says, 'We have consistently said we believe that the childcare element of the working tax credit should allow parents on low incomes to claim up to 100 per cent of the costs of their childcare, rather than the current maximum claim of 80 per cent.'
Among policy proposals it published after its meeting with Mr Hutton, the Trust called for the childcare element either to be attached to child tax credit rather than working tax credit or removed to a separate scheme, possibly administered locally, as in New Zealand.
Pressures all round
While the Government is currently reviewing its tax credits regime, it appears to have little economic room to make concessions or to meet the other justifiable demands from childcare charities. But it is not alone in facing huge debts. Personal indebtness in the UK is now higher than the income generated by the country as a whole, for the second year running.
The total amount consumers owed through mortgages, loans and credit cards rose by 7.7 per cent during the year to the end of June to stand at a whopping £1.444 trillion, according to accountants Grant Thornton. During the same period, gross domestic product rose by only 5.1 per cent to £1.41 trillion.
These statistics were put into grim perspective with a warning that a fifth of the population face fuel poverty as they will be spending more than 10 per cent of their earnings on gas and electricity bills and must choose between 'heating and eating'. And it's official, as it came from Derek Lickorish, the new chairman of the Government's own fuel poverty advisory group.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is said to be planning a £150 one-off payment through child benefit to help 7 million families with fuel bills - a move which the Child Poverty Action Group says 'shows the strengths of child benefit as a simple, swift and direct route for getting money to families'.
So the pressures are immense, both on the public purse and household budgets. Ken McArthur, who runs Polly Anna's day nursery in York, says that he knows some parents face 'a choice between eating and paying for childcare'.
He wants more help towards childcare and simpler forms for accessing it from the Government. 'Because of the debacle over tax credits, a lot of parents are very frightened of even looking at it, as they don't want to get themselves in a situation where they are given a load of money and have to pay it back,' he says.
Whatever the current economic difficulties, there is also a consensus in the childcare sector that the major advances in provision and funding over the last 11 years should not be reversed but built on.
As Anne Longfield says, emphasising that it is part of the fight against poverty, 'Childcare needs to be seen as a gateway to greater economic prosperity and greater financial independence for parents, and if we close it down we will be in a severe downward spiral.'
