From The Times:
“The assumption is that men find the recession worse, but women are worried not only about their own job but about the family’s finances, they are worried about whether their kids are going to get jobs.”
Ah yes, us blokes, wouldn't dream of spending a penny of our wages on family expenditure like mortgages or utilities or giving the wife housekeeping money or anything like that; and we don't give a toss whether our other halves lose their jobs or our kids never get one.
Also from that edition:
Two women who work part-time for the same company have been told that they cannot care for each other’s child unless they register as childminders and undergo Ofsted inspections.
The women, who wish to remain anonymous, gave birth to girls at similar times. They set up a job share, with both working half a week in the same post. They are also close friends, so when one was at work the other cared for both children.
Ofsted, however, has put an end to the arrangement. It said that, according to legislation, caring for another person’s child “for reward” was classed as childminding. This means that both mothers will have to register with Ofsted and follow the same regulations as normal childminders. The financial “reward” they receive is free care for their daughters.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
The Wit & Wisdom of Harriet Harman
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12 comments:
I'd love Mad Hattie to comment on part two of your post, from her stance in part one.
Joined up thinking? Ha!
New Labour, New Britain, New Lunacies!!!!!
Actually, they can but the key is to go to each other's house and be a day-nanny, not a child-minder.
Nannies are private employees and fall outside most of the childminder definitions. As an employer you do, of course, have to check things like - cough cough - immigration status, but this isn't going to matter much where there is no payment.
See Ofsted's own advice:
Voluntary part
You can choose to register if you want to provide care that does not fall into the categories set out above. This includes:
* home-based care in the home of the child (nannies)
Basically, nannies are the problem of the hiring family, not Ofstead. Some will register because it is of professional use to them, but it's not required. Interestingly, successive governments have been invited to interfere in this private contract but have declined to do so.
The other immediately apparent exemption is care provided by relatives. So the women should check if they are distantly related. I absolutely guarantee that Ofsted won't be arguing with Carribean families about who's great aunt is whose.
The story doesn't say if the women are married at all. If not, perhaps they should consider a civil partnership with each other.
There's no reason they have to mix their money or their homes, but it might affect their benefits (if any). It's worth considering simply for the pleasure of telling Ofsted to go take a running jump.
Dick Puddlecote has just blogged about the two mothers and he didn't hold back on the profanities about OFSTED, the 'grass' or the Labour Party in his writting. What the hell is this country coming to?
To be strictly fair, the legislation governing childminding was on the books at the active request of parents, who wanted "them" to take the responsibility for vetting individuals offering childcare.
The government may have dashed in to do this - but it was invited in the first place, it didn't have to push its way in. Childminders also embraced it because it provided a barrier to entry allowing them to raise their prices above babysitting but below nursery costs. You would still find great support from the public for the idea of an independent vetting agency for making sure that a childminder had a suitable house and no previous reason why they should be prevented from offering this service in the market.
The kink arose when the government - Labour this time - realized that once they had the register, they could wade in and start dictating what childminders could and could not do e.g. smack a child if given permission as loco in parentis, refuse to serve some children on a race basis, transmit opinions with which the parents might agree but the government does not. Childminders therefore became an instrument of state propaganda rather than offering a regulated service to parents.
F, the underlying contrast between the two appealed to me as well!
WOAR, good digging. So we must assume that the two women were somehow "child minding" and not "nannying"?
Good point about 'barriers to entry', the same point applies to nurseries as well of course. you have to register with, and be approved by, at least a dozen different authorities to get one of those up and running. And all your staff have to be CRB'd even before you open doors to the public, i.e. you have to incur one or two months' payroll costs before you can start making money.
So we must assume that the two women were somehow "child minding" and not "nannying"?
Exactly. The definitions are all in the link, but the biggie is where the care is offered. If it's in the child's own home, it's nannying. They won't have thought to read the definitions and go "OK, I'll come round your house and you can come round mine".
Ofsted won't have told them.
WOAR: "They won't have thought to read the definitions and go "OK, I'll come round your house and you can come round mine".
Ofsted won't have told them."
Nevertheless the law and any related regulations are an outrage.
How so, Anon? The public wanted this, and there is at least some justification for minimal regulation where a service provider is offering services to the public on the providers's premises.
We can argue about where the regulatory line should be drawn, but the existence of such a line is within the earliest purposes of public law. No individual was able to verify the myriad of contracts of personal life in even a Saxon society; they stand no chance in a modern post-industrial one; hence the clamour for aggregated public validation, otherwise how do you tell the difference between a doctor and a charlatan (and sometimes even then you can't).
I guarantee that those two women, when they take the children to the local swimming pool, will expect the staff, premises and water hygiene to be covered by regulation. They won't interview the staff or use their own bacteria testing kits before making a decision about going in.
What has happened here is exceptional; the two women are not the "the public" in each other's eyes, but that is only because they happen to know each other very well. However, they are the public to each other legally because of the absence of any of the relationships which change it from public law to private contract. They aren't related, they aren't partners, and they aren't each other's private nanny/au pair.
If there is an outrage, it is that individuals, whether the Attorney General or two women doing a job share, have a tendency to yell for law and regulation then get all sniffy when it turns out to apply to them. What did they expect?
WOAR, it's a fair point about public/private distinction, but there is a more liberal world view that says every doctor or swimming bath or whatever is perfectly entitled to exhibit certificates saying where he qualified or that there's no bacteria in the water or that all staff have been CRB'd. If people value these things, they will be prepared to go extra to use those services.
You'd then only need two pre-existing laws, one on Trades Misdescription and the other on general negligence and those would cover just about everything.
I suspect that 75% of the cost of child care is satisfying government regualtions. To be fair 50% of the cost of everything is satisfying government regulations.
I hope these women tell Ofsted to sit on it & that they will choose a jury trial. My guess is that no jury would convict.
Mark - you will have noticed the delicious irony this morning that the two women involved are police officers.
According to Ofsted it is not safe or legal to leave your child with a police officer unless they've had separate registration and validation.
The women are complaining that they thought that as they knew each other, they could just disregard the Childcare Act 2006 and the 2008 amendments.
I may wet myself laughing. Police complaining that the rules apply to them. Outrageous.
I have revised my "who dobbed them in" plan to include narked members of the public who may have come in to professional contact with them.
On the plus side, Ofsted have admitted that so long as childcare takes place in the child's own home, the whole issue goes away.
Are the women really so thick that they didn't read the act and amendments, which means that the arrangement has only been within the definition of 'reward' since September 2008?
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