EXCERPTS
When my son was just a few weeks old my wife Kate and her mum were sitting with him on a park bench in east London. A severely agitated lady came and plonked herself down next to them, pulled a pen from her jacket, and started peppering them with questions about the baby.
Kate and my mother-in-law thought this was a bit odd, and were worried that the woman might even try to hurt the child, so they decided — not unreasonably — to get up and move to another bench.
Later that day a midwife from Homerton Hospital came to our house for a post-natal visit. When asked how she was feeling, Kate told her about the encounter in the park, as an example of how she was feeling protective about the baby.
A little while later the phone rang. It was the midwife, who told Kate — who was absolutely fine in every way — that her reaction to the woman on the bench meant she might be developing post-natal psychosis, and she would have to go to hospital right away. Kate and I quickly looked on the NHS website and responded that she didn’t have any of the symptoms. The midwife replied: “Well, that’s exactly what someone with psychosis would say.”
That was a scary moment — we realised that there was nothing we could say to the midwife that would persuade her that she had got things totally wrong.
After a few stressful hours we ended up winning the argument — but only by going to see our GP, who immediately pointed out the obvious: Kate and the baby were fine. As we were leaving the surgery, our GP told us what had caused the midwife to get things so wrong. The midwife had passed Kate’s story on to her manager — a man — who jumped to a conclusion about my wife’s wellbeing without having ever spoken to her, and with seemingly no sense of the natural protective instincts that kick in after giving birth.
But what was particularly awful was that this was just the latest negative experience we’d had with the health authorities in the days since becoming parents. To take just two examples among many, Kate was turned away from University College Hospital twice during labour, leading to a protracted and exhausting birth, and once we got home it took repeated calls to the hospital simply to start getting the usual check-ups from a midwife.
So rather than helping, the authorities wound up making things more difficult — which is the last thing you need as a new parent, and precisely the opposite of what the public sector should be doing.
Unfortunately, things don’t change all that much when your child gets a little older and you start thinking about childcare. Everywhere you look, wrong-headed Government policies are making childcare more expensive, scarce and complicated — causing unnecessary stress for families and making it that much harder for parents to work and earn money as they would like.
The statistics speak for themselves. Fewer than half of London boroughs have enough childcare spots for parents who work full-time. And if, like me, you don’t work typical office hours, there’s not a single district in the capital with enough of this type of provision.
If that’s not bad enough, just consider the cost of childcare. On average, parents with two children spend almost half of their household income on childcare — which is the highest percentage in the developed world. In fact, insurance company Royal London recently calculated that many families in the capital are now paying more for childcare than on rent or mortgage payments.
The knock-on consequences are profound. Women with children are 10 percent more likely to be unemployed in London than the rest of the country, and maternal employment is 27 percent lower here than in other developed economies.
The Coram Family and Childcare charity puts it bluntly: “High costs, inadequate financial support and patchy availability of childcare act as a toxic combination for working parents.” But here’s the bonkers part. Even though the Government’s terrible childcare policies are such a major problem for families — and for the UK economy as a whole — fixing things doesn’t seem to be a priority for our national politicians.
There hasn’t been a single day in the Tory leadership contest when childcare has been debated. We’ve had policy proposals on defence spending, rural broadband and more — but absolutely nothing on childcare.
At least here in London, our Mayor understands what a big issue this is. Just last week Sadiq Khan came to open my company Second Home’s new building in Hackney, which features a nursery inside the workspace to make life a little easier for working parents. As the Mayor said during his visit, our flawed childcare system is a major obstacle stopping people from starting their own businesses, so if we can deal with that we’ll see more jobs across our city.
He’s absolutely right, but ultimately this is one of those areas where entrepreneurs and local leaders can only do so much — it’s up to central government to fix the broken system. That means scrapping the pointlessly complex web of vouchers and other incentives and investing the money necessary to make childcare free for everyone who needs it.
According to one recent study, if childcare in the UK was as accessible as it is in Scandinavia, 1.5 million more women would be in full-time employment today.
That shows just how bad things are but also how massive the economic opportunity could be, if only our national politicians were willing to take action. Here’s hoping the next prime minister — whoever it may be — does precisely that.