---

Children and Families

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for keeping the question of the welfare of families and children always at the forefront. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for mentioning that the business of working, as well as the business of raising children, is affected by gender, and that the way in which policies are introduced often does not take into account the gender nature of work. I shall refer to my own experience. When I had my first child, it coincided with the time when nurseries were closed, parental leave was curtailed and so on, and I ended up having to pay for the care of my child while I was in full-time employment. After paying for domestic help—I must admit that I had no training in domesticity, so I would have been very bad at it—and all the childcare provision, as a full-time lecturer at a university I earned £5 a week. It shows the triumph of hope over experience that I had a second child and continued working, but then we all suffer from various kinds of madness. I was enormously grateful to this Government for recognising the importance of childcare and for introducing measures to help with it. However, I was saddened to see that, when my daughter had her first child, she decided to give up working as the head of a faculty to go part-time in a primary school because she found out that to carry on would cost her more than she would earn. Her view was: why should she work so hard in order for someone else to enjoy her children? She decided to go part-time not least because she discovered that, because she had taken maternity leave for one year, her income was reduced every month. Had she as a teacher chosen to take leave for a year because of stress, she would have been paid full-time. Motherhood does not seem to be recognised, valued or rewarded; it is certainly not remunerated. Recent research at the University of York’s mother and babies unit says that middle-class women can afford at most the costs of childcare for one child and that childcare for two children becomes unaffordable. If professional women in full-time employment cannot afford good childcare, what happens to working-class women who have very few options? I am worried about the proposed link between welfare and work. What kind of work, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, asked, can these mothers do when they are constrained by school hours? That is particularly a problem given that there is nothing so deskilling as motherhood; when you have been out of the workplace, you cannot get any work. Women who try to do flexible, part-time work experience difficulties. I have had quite a few e-mails from nurses whom I know telling me that it is all very well for us in the House of Lords to talk about the glass ceiling; they talk about the bedpan ceiling. If you happen to want to combine part-time, flexible work with childcare, you stay at the bottom rank. There is no movement anywhere for such mothers. Good children are raised in good families where there is support but also a bit of money. Of course, low incomes do not necessarily mean a poor childhood, but they have a connection. I ask the Minister whether it would be possible to give women on benefit, who stay at home, the funds that would otherwise be spent on supporting their children. This would also valorise the work that women do. If this is not an alternative, we need to go much further down the route of providing good, high-quality childcare locally. I applaud the support that is offered by grandparents and by family, but there is a worry that that kind of support is not open to any kind of analysis or evaluation. Many grandparents are wonderful, but there is no way of weeding out those who are not or who do not have the expertise. We need to work on those fronts and I wonder whether any of these ideas will go any further.