PM should reject plans to force stay at home mums back to work, says Alistair Thompson

In yesterday’s papers it was reported that Downing Street had drawn up plans to slash another £25 billion from Britain’s bloated welfare budget.

The proposals, drawn up by departing policy guru Steve Hilton, suggest that further cuts to the £200 billion benefits bill can be achieved.

This proposal has been floated because Downing Street believe and with considerable evidence that this is one area that the Coalition has been both popular and successful.

Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms, which are designed to ensure that work always pays, are support by a majority of voters (74 per cent) and even by a majority of Labour voters (59 per cent).

One area that the documents suggests should become a focus of future cuts is getting mothers back to work earlier, by cutting benefit payments. This in itself is certainly achievable, but will not be popular and will not lead to the sorts of savings that the Government hope for.

So I hope that the PM does not accept this particular proposal, not least because it seems to penalise stay at home mums, or should I say in these politically correct times, stay at home parents, many of whom would love to go back to work, but can’t because the elephant in the room that the Government has failed to notice, or address is the horrendous cost of childcare.

It is a sad fact that Child Care costs in the UK are the most expensive in the world. They are out of kilter with the rest of Europe and providing 15 hours a week to children aged over 3, while helpful still limits most parents on lower and middle incomes to part time work.

A study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, published in 2010 found that a staggering 33 per cent of a British family’s net income goes towards the cost of childcare.

This is higher than every other country in Europe and the rest of the Western world. German parents pay just 8 per cent of their net income towards childcare, while in France the figure is 11 per cent. Costs tend to be higher in English-speaking countries: 19 per cent in the U.S, 22 per cent in Canada, 28 per cent in New Zealand and 29 per cent in Ireland.

On average child care costs around £177 per week, more in cities like London where is can reach £400 per week.

So even at the UK average the cost is over £700 a month.

Add to this problem, nursery care runs from 9am until 5pm, meaning additional costs for any time you want either side of this. Then factor in holiday cover, six weeks in the summer, at least two weeks at Easter, half terms, inset days, the list goes on.

So for relatively basic child care outside of expensive areas like London, without any state support, costs approach £850 per month for the first child.

I will not even start to talk about nannies, as according to the Baby Centre, they cost even more between £250-£380 per week. So this form of child care is even more prohibitively expensive.

When you set these costs against the average income, which according to the recent Payscale.co.uk survey are £24K pa for women and £14K pa for part time workers, it quickly becomes apparent that cutting benefits to stay at home mums simply to ‘nudge’ them to go back into employment won’t work and will be counter-productive in political terms.

Why won’t it work, because in simple financial terms for those on average and low incomes it costs more to go to work than not to. And in political terms it is vital if David Cameron wants to win the next election that he boosts his popularity amongst women voters. The key to this will be mums.

Just look at the impact that the ‘mumsnet’ website had during the last election, certainly in media terms this website was huge, or the backlash faced by Coalition MPs over child benefits cuts, forcing a sensible and intelligent U-turn by Chancellor George Osborne in the last budget.

As Harold Macmillan famously remarked, “There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers”. To bring this up to date I would replace the latter with mums.   

It is for all of these reasons that I hope that before embarking on another mad cap policy number 10 does the maths as they would say in America and reject this plan.