From The Metro:
Parents spend almost a third of their incomes on childcare – more than anywhere else in the world, say the Save the Children and Daycare Trust charities... Fiona Weir, of the charity Gingerbread, said government plans for childcare are a ‘ticking time-bomb for welfare reform’...
Ho hum.
Save the Children, total income £203 million, of which half was from various governments, primarily UK government, the EU, the US government and the United Nations (2009 accounts).
Daycare Trust, total income £1,115,450. They received £349,352 from the Dept of for Education; £120,000 from London Councils and £16,907 from the Equality and Human Rights Commission for "Policy, research and other projects" (2010 accounts).
Gingerbread, total income £3,125,643, of which £1,576,203 was payments from DWP for "back to work" type stuff (including income for training people to run "back to work" schemes) and £891,361 was grants (almost certainly from the government) (2010 accounts).
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As to the substantive issue, they are all missing a right old trick here. From the point of view of an individual, it is only worth working if
[wages minus income tax/benefit withdrawal] > [costs of travel, childcare minus subsidies].
So hiking the subsidy is much the same as reducing income tax on lower earners.
Further, from the point of view of society as a whole or the taxpayer in particular, the calculation is different. Is it better, for example, for three mothers to stay at home with their young children (not paying a penny in income tax) or for one of them to work in a nursery looking after all of the kids and the other two mothers to go out to work?
Assuming the latter (which is up to personal choice, of course), then up to a certain level of subsidy for childcare, there is no net cost to the taxpayer, as long as the income tax etc. paid/generated by the three working women is equal to or greater than the amount of the subsidy, it's just a sort of clumsy tax refund.
I'm not sure what that optimum level of subsidy (or personal allowance) is, but it's almost certainly higher than what it is presently.
About That Closet
2 hours ago
24 comments:
......and it's almost certainly the case that many of those working mothers are working because "we can't afford a nice house if I don't" / "need to help pay the mortgage", so another reason for doing something to sort out the ridiculous price of property.
Or remove regulation of childcare?
Scenario 1: x and y both stay at home.
Scenario 2: x goes out to work and hands over all her wages to y, who looks after both children.
Damn, you're right.
Right level of Subsidy?
ZERO.
AC1
"Parents spend almost a third of their incomes on childcare – more than anywhere else in the world"
Why? Could it be anything to do with ridiculous H&S and anti-paedophile legislation and the claims culture fostered by ambuance-chasing lawyers, by any chance?
FT "Or remove regulation of childcare?"
No chance, what about all them evil paedophiles?
Anon, y better not be caught accepting money, unless she's got an album full of childcare qualifications and has been CRB checked.
FT: "remove regulation of childcare" yes of course, the barriers to entry are about as high as [something that's very high].
There is an ill-founded conspiracy theory that They invented feminism so that women would go out to work so we'd end up paying more for our houses, which is fine in principle but falls apart on closer inspection because the number of women working has barely changed for decades.
AC1, I knew you'd say that. It takes a village to raise a child. Nursery or education vouchers are just a low-interest soft loan from the government to parents which ends up being repaid in full.
B, it's not the occasional inspection that does the harm (UK nurseries have a very good record, overall) but the barriers to entry.
My wife and I did once seriously look into this nursery business, it is completely nuts. You have to get your premises all set up with H&S stuff and already have people on the payroll with their cert's and CRB doolally BEFORE you can invited council, ILEA, fire service etc etc round to inspect, then it takes months to get your certificate saying you can open up for business.
That's the point about subsidies. They are only any good to the recipients (i.e. nursery providers in this case) if they can raise barriers to entry, or else the subsidy gets competed away.
As Dearime says, subsidies accue to the least elastic factor of production.
the number of women working has barely changed for decades
That's as may be, but of course back in the day (dreadful expression, but handy) it was Mrs Brown down the street looking after your kids and maybe a few others for a few hours for pin money. And of course it kept her kids occupied too. She could boot them all out to play in the street / field / local woodland.
Contemporary Mrs Browns are working to pay the mortgage and the child care bills.
Loking at what i assume is the orihinal for this report http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/52/11/42004407.pdf page 3
it is clear that we are indeed the most expensive at 33% with about half the countries at 4-10%. Children being pretty much the same worldwide I can only assume that this means at least 80% of childcare costs are state parasitism. (I once previously suggested they might be as high as the 75% of housing costs that are pruvablyh state parasitism but was clearly overly kind about our masters)
There does seem to be a more sensible answer to this problem than more government subsidy to make up for the unnecessary government costs.
Is there ever a point at which it would make economic sense for the state to pay a low-income parent (either one) to stay at home and care for pre-school children, particularly in areas of high unemployment?
FT, true.
NC, the tables on page 3 are rather alarming.
I'd have thought the basic cost is pretty much the same in any country.
I think you need one adult for four kids, and nursery work pays a bit less than (say 80% of) average salary, so labour costs per child must be about one-fifth of an average salary. The tables are for two kids, so we'd expect a base line of about 50% of an average salary (because the nursery has overheads as well).
So it's not so much that the UK gross cost is particularly high, it's that other countries are stupendously low. Either nursery workers are paid peanuts in other countries or they have a on-adult-to-ten-children ratio of something.
McH, yes, that's called a Citizen's Income and is a much better way of doing it.
"You have to get your premises all set up with H&S stuff and already have people on the payroll with their cert's and CRB doolally BEFORE you can invited council, ILEA, fire service etc etc round to inspect"
Were you also faced with taking out ridiculously high levels of liability insurance?
Thanks for backing up my suspicion about H&S etc. I'd forgotten the need for a bloody certificate and all the council bureacracy that goes with it.
Then I expect you to ask permission from the village before you create a child, or get married even...
There's a word for that sort of society...
There's only one value of costs that should be forced upon others. That's zero.
AC1
B, I can't remember the details because it was nearly ten years ago, but you had to traipse round all the authorities, once you had your fire safety cert, you could ask for an H&S inspection, and once you had their approval you could pay to do an approved course on running a nursery and then you got your employees to do CRB and TB checks, and once you had those, the LEA would come round to certify the whole package and then finally you applied to the council to be come an Authorised Provider which they submitted to Dept of Somethingorother for approval and so on.
AC1, nobody's forcing anything on anybody. We take LVT receipts and dish them out as CI payments, some of which are earmarked for merit goods such as healthcare or education/child care.
1-4 may well be the officially enforced rule here but I doubt if there is evidence that anything less is dangerous. I am 1 of a family of four but the trauma of always being on that regulatory edge was not too traumatic. Some mother even had more children than that.
With technological progress from not having open fires, through TV to bleeper wristbands it should be possible to safely look after more children, not less, than in the Victorian age.
The whole point of the Citizens dividend is it's upto Citizens to decide whether they want to earmark them out, not for them to be steered into pet projects.
LVT should be boring and simple.
It's also the case that a lot more married women with children work in the UK than in say, France.
I don't think this is just about property values. It's also that women in certain cultures have had this Superwoman crap sold to them. The idea of being a fantastic mother, wife, career woman and whatever else, and it's a huge myth. The shining examples that were touted like Nicola Horlick and Anita Roddick didn't do it all. They had nannies and cleaners.
And yes, it means the French don't have £30K Moben kitchens*, but because they're at home cooking, they're far better cooks.
(I'm actually starting to think that the Amish have it all worked out).
*I've observed that the amount people spend on their kitchens is inverse to the quality of their cooking.
Anyone reading this post would assume that only one third of household income is spent on child care.
Yeah that's right the only money spent on my children was child care, didn't buy them clothes, food, shoes, never went on holiday,
Sorry, but the whole of household expenditure, even down to the mortgage can be listed in the column as "for the family". To earn more money people must be prepared to take more than one job, not working is not an option.
JT, you have to add the cult of home improvement to the cult of the Superwoman. I consider that my parents were better off than I am, but my mother was perfectly happy cooking in a kitchen that my father built in his spare time (and he was a farmer, not a kitchen fitter). More to the point, all her contemporaries had similar kitchens.
Bayard,
That's because these are no longer just kitchens, but status symbols.
What I don't understand is how much money people spend on things that neither count as useful or pleasurable. My dad changed his car in the 70s every few years because cars didn't last very long, but today they last for a decade.
NC, I don't know if it is 4-to-1, or if the ratio is different in other countries. You have to remember that while one teacher can happily look after twenty or thirty kids in a class room, little toddlers are a bit more labour intensive, they need a lot of attention. Neither do I know what the optimum figure is, I was making assumptions.
Anon (presumably AC1), LVT is public money. Health and education are merit goods (spending benefits society as a whole as well as the individual child or patient), so as long as they only cover the minimum and most parents or patients end up topping them up with their own money, then no harm done. There is a small minority of parents who'd spend the money on fags, booze and lottery tickets otherwise.
Anon, yes, good point, but 'child care' in this narrow sense means nursery or baby sitter costs.
B, JT, how on earth did you get onto kitchens? I love a well designed kitchen (but not ostentatious), and I'm happy with an old car. Each to his own, eh?
Isn't this why God made grannies?
RLJ, in olden times, when people could afford to buy a house near either set of parents, yes, but nowadays less so.
RLJ/MW, a large proportion of grannies these days are out at work themselves - and that's not going to change under the new pension conditions.
Ho hum
Mums spend so much on child care so they can go to slavery each day to pay ever increasing mortgage debt(rent) which rises faster than wages anyway.
These charities are protecting their jobs as per normal. They want the need for charity to persist.
Remedy is the same as usual. No need to fanny around with side issues.
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