Children: Maternal Care

Earl of Dundee Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Grand Committee

Asked by

[The Earl of Dundee]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to promote ongoing maternal care for children.

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, I look forward to the comments and guidance of colleagues speaking today and thank them very much for their interest in this debate. In my remarks I would like to touch on three aspects: first, the obvious connection between an early solid quality of childcare and a later stability of adulthood; secondly, a distinction between the effect of childcare within the home on the one hand and that in day centres on the other; following from this and, thirdly, the case for giving better financial incentives to mothers to stay at home with their children if that is what they might prefer to do in the first place.

On how it may have induced quality or otherwise, childcare policy should of course be judged on several fronts, not least, when the child is a bit older, through early education itself and the extent to which that may have reached all income groups. Here the Government deserve credit for their commitment to a package of schemes. This includes 15 hours of free early education for all three year-olds and for around 40% of the most disadvantaged two year-olds, administered by local authorities; and 30 hours of free childcare a week, worth around £5,000 a year per child, to working parents of three and four-year olds. In a written government paper, replying to the Affordable Childcare report’s recommendations, my noble friend the Minister announced these and other measures; that government response also followed our debate last year on that report, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland.

All political parties agree the priority of giving the child from the start the best possible deal of security, confidence and education. Each political party seeks to raise such standards, acknowledging the connection between an early quality of childcare and a later stability of adulthood, while also recognising the enormous contribution that success in this way can make to reducing the problems of society, such as the current huge increase in mental health ailments.

The next point is the distinction between the effect of childcare within the home and that outside it in day centres. All of us are grateful for the availability and national distribution of day centres. Many of these are very good, as well as essential to working mothers. Daycare can also assist academic performance from low-income homes and, along with parent-infant therapy, even improve children’s emotional well-being. Yet it is misleading to assert that babies or toddlers need stimulation, education or friends. The truth is that at that age they develop best as a result of close supervision by and affection from a familiar responsive adult in the home. Every study reveals that the child’s emotional security develops in a far more assured way through maternal bonding than it can ever hope to do in day centres, however good these may be.

This leads to the choices of mothers themselves. Recent opinion polls show that 80% of them believe that one parent should be able to stay at home, while 88% of mothers with very young children have said that the main reason for returning to work is financial pressure. My noble friend the Minister may concur that if mothers and families express such views, they should be offered wider choices than those at present. The objective would not be to discourage mothers who want to work from so doing. Instead, the aim would be to enable those mothers who prefer to stay at home to do that rather than working simply because they consider that the family cannot otherwise afford for them not to do so.

Of course, there is also the distinction between maternal and family home care of children who are under three years old and that for older children. Does my noble friend the Minister therefore consider that if in better corresponding to family wishes much wider choices should be offered in general, the Government should also analyse much more sharply in particular how these preferences may differ in regard to home care for children under three years old and that for older children?

Most countries operate either a joint taxation system or an individual tax system which allows families the option of being taxed jointly, either by transferable allowances or credits. Will my noble friend the Minister agree to review the merits of certain expedients, including: a system of transferable personal allowances where a non-earning spouse would be able to transfer the whole or part of the basic income tax personal allowance to their earning spouse; income-splitting, under which for tax purposes families would be able to split family income in two and allocate half to each partner, as well as keeping both personal tax allowances; and child allowances, already practised by some countries, which allow an extra tax allowance per child? In fact, a recent OECD assessment notes that, apart from Mexico, the UK is the only developed country with a population of more than 10 million to apply tax based on individual income with no allowances for spouses or transferable allowances.

Perhaps inevitably, there are trade-offs inherent in any government policy that seeks on the one hand to promote child development and on the other to facilitate parental employment. For example, cheap low-quality childcare might help parents to work but would not meet the Government’s child development objectives. Yet, through adoption of some of these financial and fiscal adjustments as proposed, that anomaly reflected by trade-offs could be quite considerably redressed. Such steps would assist ongoing maternal care for children. As a result, to a greater extent children would become more secure, society more stable and, through choice rather than necessity, family employment much fairer.