Rachel Moore

I met a woman this week so desperate to be a grandmother it was the top of her life’s wish list.

She would do anything for at least one of her two daughters, now in their 30s, to have children. She would be there, childcare ready, to look after them, day or night.

What a gem. She would be one of the army of grandparents looking after their grandchildren from tots to teenagers for love unaware, not just of the solid gold service they are performing for the work force, but that they are propping up the economy.

A broken childcare system is yet another symptom of Broken Britain.

This lovely woman’s grandchild-less plight is a fate likely to face more of us than we’d have dreamed of a decade ago, when you look at the world around us today, our economy, the pressures on the childbearing generation in their 20s and 30s, and then, the crippling cost of decent childcare.

It’s coming to a point when people simply cannot afford to bring up children.

The UK has the third most expensive childcare in the world, according to the OECD. The proportion of wages spent by British parents compared to French parents is more than double. 

Full-time fees for a child under two at nursery was an average £269 a week last year - just under £14,000 annually.

An 8% rise would take that to more than £15,000.

On top of spiralling other costs, the childcare system has become a crucial part of our economic infrastructure. It needs reform.

When two salaries are needed more than ever, and women cutting hours at work increasingly turns their career into an irrelevance at best, a disaster at worst, after childcare costs, women are working for £15 ‘profit’ a week.

Without a solution, childcare costs will become the reddest hot political potato and a vote loser/winner.

This week, parents received the much-feared nursery fee increase. Parents were warned to expect a £1,000 increase as government funding falls in real terms while staffing and energy bill costs are rising.

On woman reacted on Twitter to her “dreaded nursery fee increase email”, pushing her costs to £126 a day for her two children, aged two and eight months. 

After paying nursery fees from her public sector salary, she is £20 a day “better off”. 

Her energy bills are 13.4% up, she had had to opt out of her pension payments as well as cutting her hours.  

Her tweet prompted an avalanche of others (very noticeably) by mothers.

“I’m on £72.59 a day for one child who’s nearly two. I work in HE so the pay is dire – I currently only make £15 a day profit.”

Another paid £156 a day for her two children. She had reduced to part time hours when she could access free childcare and taken a second job working nights in a warehouse part time to boost income loss. She worked 7pm to 5am and then looked after a two-year-old and eight-month-old. 

Childminders are at capacity in many areas and because families don’t live so close today, grandparents aren’t at hand. Many are still working anyway with retirement a long way off.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is looking at measures to reduce childcare costs.

Providers are demanding action on increasing state help, improving care standards and creating a simpler system of assistance for new parents.

The message is loud and clear that childcare costs are keeping some people out of the labour market. 

An option of extending 30 hours of free childcare to one and two-year-olds in England at the spring budget has been rejected because it would cost about £6bn, roughly equivalent to a 1p increase in the income tax rate.

But other countries get it right, why can’t we?

When we ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day next week, let’s focus on just how much we really value women in the workplace. 

 

Pregnancy magic lost on fathers

Child-rearing might well become the preserve of the rich in the future, and the feckless.

Wealthy Rio Ferdinand is expecting his fifth child and the second with his second wife, Kate, who he met after the mother of his three older children died of cancer. 

Kate has felt what second and subsequent wives often feel when having their first baby – their partner doesn’t share the magic of the pregnant because they’ve seen it all before.

She was so excited but felt that he did not care, she said.

I hate to break it to her, but first or fifth, the ‘magic’ of pregnancy is lost on most fathers-to-be. She’s no harder done by than anyone else.

 

Parental love is unconditional

Harry and Megan should be grateful it was 2022 when King Charles read Spare’s hand grenades and all he did was kick them out of Frogmore Cottage.

In another time, it would have been “off with their heads.”

A decision made from a place of pain is rarely the right one.

A spiteful act of revenge by a parent to a child, however grown up that child, is always difficult to comprehend, especially when a son had lost his mother and watched his father marry the woman the world came to know he had preferred all along.

The King’s spite is not a good look ahead of his coronation. A parent’s love should be unconditional, forgiving and hopeful.