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The Rt. Hon. Patricia HewittDaycare Trust Conference |
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It's a great pleasure to be here this morning and to have the opportunity of discussing with you an issue that is very dear to all of our hearts. When I was a child my mother was one of only two mothers in that entire class who also had a paid job. Now of course nearly six out of ten mothers even of children under the age of five, more with older children, also have paid employment. And that's just one indication of the enormous changes in family life that have taken place over the last 30 or 40 years. And those changes in family life mean that we in Government, we as policymakers, but also we as employers have to rethink our whole approach to the way in which families balance their two responsibilities - their responsibility to earn a living and their responsibility to bring up their children, and also increasingly to care for elderly and other relatives as well. And the model that I was familiar with when I was growing up was one where the men worked full-time to earn a living, and by and large the women, after they married and had children, stayed home to do the caring. And of course our whole national insurance system, our pension system, the whole organisation of working life and working time was based on the assumption that every worker had a wife at home. That's no longer true and of course that's not only because of the shift in two parent families from a two parent one job family to a two parent two job family - now the norm for two parent families - but it's also of course the huge increase in the number of loan parent families, including loan parent separated or divorced families. Now as we move out of this old model, this old world, into a new one, I don't think we will see one standardised model replacing that old standardised model. I think instead that what Government has to do, and increasingly what employers have to do, is to enable different people to make different choices about how they balance work and family, work and the rest of their lives, at different stages in their increasingly long lives. For families with children that means Government mustn't in any way dictate to families about how they balance earning and caring, paid and unpaid work. Government instead has to create the supportive environment, the provision of public services, the right employment regulatory framework to ensure that parents can make choices about how they balance earning a living and caring for their children in the ways that will suit them and their families best. And of course that commitment to greater choice, real choice for more and more parents, is entirely in line with the most fundamental values of our Government. Our commitment to opportunity so that mothers as well as fathers can find and fulfil their potential, can make a full contribution in employment and share in the fruits of economic success and wealth creation, but also our commitment to responsibility and ensuring that fathers as well as mothers can fulfil their responsibility to embrace the practical and emotional care and upbringing of their children. So for me, for us in Government, a modern family policy has to be about both childcare provision for our children and time for parents to spend with their children. Now let me say a little bit more about childcare. And of course, as Anna has already indicated, the provision of good quality childcare from the earliest age at which parents want it, and then right through as children move into their school years, is hugely important for children and helps to shape and improve their later life chances. My colleague Cathy Ashton will say much more about this later on today, and I think Cathy Ashton's new role in Government reflects the fact that we not only take this issue extremely seriously and realise we haven't got it all right in our first five years, but that we recognise it's an issue that cuts across many departments. So Cathy is now Minister for Sure Start, Early Years and childcare in both the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions. But let me just say a little bit about childcare's economic importance as well as its social importance because childcare increasingly is a central part of our entire economy. It's certainly an important business sector in its own right. It employs over a quarter of a million people. Indeed that's up by 50,000 in just the last three years so that we now live in an economy where there are more childcare workers than there are car workers and that's a change that perhaps not everyone's comfortable with and certainly not everybody's noticed. And that childcare sector of course embraces the public sector, the private sector and increasingly the not for profit and social enterprise sector. And it's a sector which, if we get it right, can provide a growing number of fulfilling jobs - good jobs for men as well as for women. But of course good childcare is also essential if parents are to have the choices that I was talking about and are to participate in the economy in ways that enable them to balance work and family satisfactorily and of course that is hugely difficult for people to do at the moment. I think any of us who have the good fortune to be in jobs that we love and find enormously satisfying find it difficult enough, but the women, the parents whom we need to be most concerned about are those like the woman in my constituency whom I was discussing this with recently. She's got a child at school and younger children as well. She's working nights as a cleaner because that's when her husband is at home to look after the children. She comes home first thing in the morning. She doesn't go to bed then - she's getting breakfast for the husband, getting the children up, getting lunch sorted out for the kid who's going off to school and then spending the rest of the day looking after her younger children. So for most of the week not only is she not seeing her husband, she's getting almost no sleep at all. And that directly reflects the fact that because she cannot get affordable childcare that she is happy with to enable her to take a job at the hours she would prefer, she's having to take a second or indeed third best choice of hours that do not suit either her or her family. Childcare as a business sector, childcare as a central part of our economic infrastructure, is just as important really as the transport system in enabling women in particular, for whom this choice is always the sharpest, to participate in the economy for their own benefit but also of course the benefit of the economy as a whole. And I think most employers these days are increasingly conscious of the need to recruit the best people and that means recruiting from an increasingly diverse pool of talent. I was in a car factory the other day and the chief executive there was saying "If you look around the factory floor, at least until recently 90% of our workforce were white men. But you look outside to the workforce as a whole, you look outside to the consumers and they're not 90% white men. And if we're going to be the best, then we have got to be able to appeal to people as workers and as consumers right across the whole community." So getting childcare provision right is part of ensuring that all our employers, both public and private and the social enterprise sector, have available to them the skilled people they need. Take one small example. At the moment about a third of the mothers who take paid maternity leave from their jobs don't return to work after having a baby. Many of them want to but they can't get the hours that they want or they feel they're being pushed back into work too quickly. Now next April we'll bring into effect a new package of maternity rights with longer maternity leave. And if that package encourages just one in ten of those women who now don't return to work to do so in future then we reckon employers will save up to £39m a year in reduced recruitment and training costs. And it is worth just dwelling on those costs, because according to the figures for 2001 from CIPD it's costing the average employer nearly £3,500 to replace a member of staff. And if it's a management level of staff then it's up to nearly £6,000. And at the same time we're seeing staff turnover increasing, partly of course because we've got very low unemployment, a very tight labour market. So staff turnover is up from 18% in 1999 to 26% in 2001 and each of those vacancies is taking on average ten weeks to fill. Now these are huge costs to business, not only the direct costs of recruitment and retraining but the costs of lost output and productivity while you've got that vacancy. So if we can help with better childcare provision, with better maternity leave and so on to bring more women, more parents, into the labour market and if employers understand as so many of them do that the way they can reach out to that untapped pool of parents is by offering support for childcare and for the hours that families need, then that is to the good of parents, of children and of businesses and the economy alike. I recently attended a series of seminars that Fathers Direct, the Fawcett Society and the EOC were running, which looked not just at women, who are particularly held back in employment by their responsibilities as mothers, but looked also at the role of fathers and how we break what is often within families a very difficult viscous circle, that because women are still lower paid on average than men, with the pay gap still stubbornly persisting at 19%, when they have children it seems to be the economically rational thing to do for the woman to stay home, the man to stay in work and if anything to increase his hours, and then that of course increases the economic gap between them, reinforces the gender pay gap in employment, reinforces that division of responsibilities within the home. So it is essential as a Government through childcare and through other policies that we support fathers as well as mothers in their dual role. We've recently published the new cross-Government strategy for childcare which DTI will be involved in just as much as the other departments that I've mentioned in order to turn it into reality. But in supporting childcare provision, we need to look at some of the barriers that are holding back childcare providers. As I've indicated it's a huge business sector in its own right and one with enormous potential for growth. We're seeing Leapfrog, for instance, a private day care provider that's grown since opening its first nursery only four years ago to now employing nearly 1300 people which makes it part of a very, very small number of larger employers in our country. You look at what's happening in the co-operative sector in Oxford, Swindon and in Gloucester the Co-operative Society is using the mutual model to develop nurseries for parents and carers, for community partners, for employers and for employees. I look at the franchise scheme time for childcare that's operating in both Leicester my own city and in Gloucester and which is supported by our Small Business Service and what we're trying to do there is to support childcare providers in some of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods to move from informal child minding, which of course is huge and scarcely included in our figures, to creating a small and perhaps a growing childcare enterprise as part of a local network. And then in Manchester, again supported by the Small Business Service, we've got Chamber Business Enterprises providing business support to people with disabilities, to people within the minority ethnic communities who wish to set up childcare businesses as part of a regeneration area. So we've got a number of different models here from the private sector through mutuals and social enterprises right through to traditional public sector provision of childcare and what we're going to do within my own department is to bring together a range of different providers so that we can understand better what the barriers are both to start up and to growth. The Daycare Trust has provided us with some extremely useful research which identifies the enormous variability of childcare provision across the country. We will use that research not only to inform central government policy but perhaps even more importantly to ensure that our regional development agencies right across England and their counterparts in the devolved administrations understand the importance of childcare, not only as a business sector but as part of the economic infrastructure. They need to build childcare provision into the development of their economic strategies and I've therefore asked all the chairs of the regional development agencies to work together to share best practice and to report to me on what they are now doing. The final point I want to mention is what we need to do to ensure that, as well as childcare provision, as well as nurseries for children, there is time for parents, because many parents perfectly reasonably would like to provide much or indeed all of the childcare themselves and really they can only do that if they're enabled to balance work and family in ways that are still nowhere near common enough. I referred to the improved maternity rights we're introducing next April, but that of course is part of a much, much bigger package of changes - in fact the largest package of changes ever introduced to give parents more choice and more support in how they balance work and family responsibilities. So we are bringing in extended maternity leave, improved maternity pay, and also much simpler maternity leave rules to make it easier for employers to implement. Paid paternity leave for the first time ever recognising the crucial role that fathers have in their children's lives. Paid adoption leave, again for the first time ever. And then alongside all of that and the new child tax credits, we're introducing new legal standards on family friendly working, the right for an employee with young children, or indeed if the child has disabilities a child up to the age of 18, to request family friendly working arrangements, and even more important, a statutory duty on employers to consider that request seriously with sanctions if they don't. Now we think that at the moment about 19,000 of the vacancies that I was talking about earlier which are undoubtedly holding back business are caused by parents changing their jobs in order to get the hours that they need, and if, by introducing this new legal package, we can get employers to realise that it's in their interests just as much as it's in their employees' interests to offer more flexible working hours, then we can save those businesses something like £64m a year. And in a survey that we conducted two years ago nine out of ten of the mothers who are not currently working said that flexible working arrangements would be either important or indeed essential if they were to go back into work. So we're very confident not only that most employers will actually be pleasantly surprised when they focus on this issue by how possible it is to adapt a job design or workplace organisation to the needs of different people with family, or indeed other responsibilities, but we're confident also that it will deliver real benefits to businesses and to the economy alike. We've got plenty of good examples out there of companies doing it. Very large ones like the Royal Bank of Scotland. Much smaller ones as well, and we've been trying to highlight some of those examples in the publicity as we move towards the launch of the whole package in April. Let me end by saying that we cannot in Government do all of this ourselves. We need to create the right framework for childcare provision. We need to make far more investment in childcare provision and we're doing that directly, but also of course through the childcare tax credit. We need to put in place the right package of legal rights and responsibilities for employers to make it much easier for parents to get the working time and the leave from work that they need. But if we're to deliver the childcare provision that we need, that the country needs, then we need the organisations who are here today, and many, many others, to work with us to create that provision as well as to get the policy framework right. And if we're to achieve our ambition of ensuring that every parent knows what their legal rights are and has the confidence to get in there and get better arrangements with their employer, then again we need everyone of you here and many others helping us to get that message across and then to support parents and businesses in making those new family friendly rights work. So I hope that although undoubtedly you will want us to do more, and to do it faster and to put more money in and all those things that we will do as soon as we can, I hope also we can work together in an increasingly strong and effective partnership to make our vision of modern family life and in particular a better life for our children to make that vision a reality. Thank you. |
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Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt
(the following are available from the archive) |
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