Children: Affordable Childcare

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate enormously and pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for initiating it. I agree with what has been said so far, that this is a core undertaking for our society at this time.

I pay tribute to the previous speakers for their detailed knowledge of the complexity and sheer bureaucracy involved in trying to acquire childcare at all. However, I thought that I would take a longer view and look at how we got into this mess in the first place—of patchy, expensive and unsatisfactory provision, which must be addressed. I go back a long way. For the generation before mine there was no childcare. My mother left school at 13 to help look after her seven siblings. The women of my generation who went to university and certainly wanted to have jobs made do with au pairs—untrained, unchecked young students from abroad who had to be given time to study and who “babyminded” for a few hours each day. They were not always satisfactory. One of them filled the wastepaper baskets in my home with syringes, another started to wear my clothes when I was not there and a third set the house on fire. This form of childcare is not recommended.

However, in the 1960s, John Bowlby developed his attachment theory, which was an extremely important part of the research into childcare. He wrote Separation: Anxiety—what a phrase. This enormously important research seeded a sense of guilt across the whole female population about their responsibilities to their children. Before then we had not realised how guilty we should feel about the way we treated our children.

From another direction came Dr Spock and Penelope Leach, who told us how important it was for children to be at the centre of family life. They became the focus of attention and concern to a far greater extent than they had ever been in the past—indeed, that was certainly not the case in Victorian times—so we have a collision course between child-focused families and guilty parents.

Women will rush into the workplace more and more; there is no going back on that social trend, which is the most important one for women that has occurred in my lifetime, but public policy is slow in catching up with that trend. Eventually, flexible parental leave and maternity leave were introduced, so progress has been made. We now have job sharing, LA funding and the provision of childcare places. Progress is slow and, for historical reasons, is patchy. No one has really taken on board the fact that this is a large-scale, ongoing social change that cannot be defied. We have to go forward. However, in some regards we appear to be going backwards. It is amazing that that could happen after a history of some 50 or 60 years of progress.

I am glad to see that a plaque has been unveiled to Mrs Pankhurst and acknowledge her achievements in the area of childcare, but that occurred a long time ago. There are now 575 fewer Sure Start establishments than was the case previously. That serious and important loss will increase the anxiety and guilt felt by mothers looking after children. We are seeing the costs go up all the time. That, again, creates anxiety for women. I hope that it also creates anxiety for fathers. It is interesting to note that this debate is dominated by women recounting their experiences, anxieties and guilt. Can we make this a social issue which needs to be resolved for everyone?

We have heard about the importance of this issue in terms of social mobility and its value to the economy. There is no doubt that the direction of travel must be sustained. I simply ask the Government to endorse the fact that this major social change has to go forward. Will they please resume the progress that has been made so far, take on board the status of this issue, pledge resources and planning to it and remove the bureaucracy and problems that have stood in the way of women and which continue to make them feel anxious and guilty? They should not feel that way.