The childcare industry in Britain is practically imperfect in every way. Years of government underfunding has helped create a situation that simply isn’t workable for parents or providers. Britain spends less than 0.1% of GDP on childcare, which is the second lowest of all OECD countries. Consequently, it is not surprising that a report by UNICEF found that out of 41 high-income countries, Britain was ranked 35th when it came to delivering childcare. The three main metrics for assessing the childcare sector are affordability, availability, and the quality of care provided. Currently, the average cost for a nursery place in England is an eye-watering £936 per month, which constitutes just under a quarter of the monthly income for the average couple. According to a survey of 25,000 parents carried out by the UK charity Pregnant Then Screwed, 62% claimed that childcare costs were the same or higher than their rent or mortgage. A further 40% were forced to work fewer hours and 43% have either left or are considering leaving their jobs completely. You don’t need to have studied maths up to the age of eighteen to establish that preventing new parents, predominately mothers, from returning to work will be detrimental to Britain’s productivity and economic growth. Regarding availability, in England it is commonplace for parents to join waiting lists of up to six months or more to get their child a nursery place. This situation has been exasperated by the closure of 40,000 nurseries since 2021, most succumbing to the two-pronged assault of the pandemic and cost-of-living-crisis.
When it comes to the quality of childcare, Britain falls behind many other OECD nations, which is the result of rampant privatisation. In stark contrast to most other European countries, the childcare industry in the UK has been shaped to benefit the for-profit sector, which caters for a staggering 84% of the market share, compared to just 3% in Germany and 4% in France. Recent reports by the Institute of Public Policy Research and UCL have convincingly shown that not-for-profit childcare is often of a higher quality as there is more investment in the professional development and training needs of staff. Britain’s market-led approach has also left the government enfeebled when it comes to controlling fees and the location of services, which hits low-income families the hardest. For example, the two largest childcare providers in Britain, Busy Bees and Bright Horizons, seek to establish themselves in the most affluent areas and have a combined debt of £1.26 billion. Indebted multinational organisations seeking profit are simply not going to deliver affordable, accessible, and good quality childcare.
How then can the situation be improved? Government policy should aim to reduce the reliance on the private sector and integrate childcare into the state education system. They can start by subsisting the supply side as well as the demand, as the current offering of thirty free hours a week for three- to four-year-olds is well intended, yet insufficient. Small well-run nurseries should be rewarded with high investment and Britain should strive to replicate the Nordic model, where high-quality state-led childcare is affordable and accessible. For example, in Sweden parents are charged 3% of their combined gross salary to send one child to nursery and uptake is near universal. In addition to this, care-workers are well respected, well educated, and well paid, which is a far cry from the marginalised minimum wage earners that exist in Britain. Funding higher education courses and increasing their pay would attract and retain the most competent staff helping to transform caregiving into a more desirable profession. It will not be cheap to remodel the industry, as Canada demonstrated last year when they unveiled their $30 billion childcare reform package. However, it is a necessary investment that will benefit to the whole nation, which should be enough of a sweetener to help the medicine go down.