The move is one of several emergency measures needed to alleviate the ‘care crisis’ caused by nursery and school closures and save children from becoming the pandemic’s ‘unseen victims’, the Institute for Public Policy Research has warned.
With an estimated 3.9 million parents having to stop or reduce work to care for children, the thinktank is calling for parents to be given access to paid childcare leave as part of the Government’s Coronavirus Jobs Retention scheme, in which 80% of a furloughed worker’s wages are paid by the Government.
Parents can legally ask for unpaid leave to care for children, but ‘this is unlikely to be feasible or sustainable for the majority of working parents’, especially for lone-parent households, the IPPR warns.
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