Hansard

I thank the members who signed the motion that is before us to enable it to be debated and those who have stayed behind to participate in or listen to the debate. I thank Save the Children and the Daycare Trust for bringing to our attention the matters that are in their report “Making Work Pay—The Childcare Gap”. I specifically thank Save the Children for assisting me in preparing for the debate and for bringing robotic dolls to the Parliament earlier today to publicise the debate. That generated some press interest and no shortage of sideways glances from bystanders.

Those of us who are parents know the trials and tribulations of organising childcare. I consider myself fortunate, in so far as my wife and I have been able to find reliable, good and affordable childcare for our young daughter. However, as “Making Work Pay” demonstrates, not everyone is so fortunate. Earlier this year, Save the Children and the Daycare Trust jointly surveyed more than 4,000 parents across the United Kingdom to explore their views on how the cost of childcare and access issues impact on their employment and family budgets and, in turn, to explore the effects on child poverty.

More than 14 per cent of those who were surveyed reside in Scotland, and the trends here are consistent with the overall findings. Those findings are striking, but they are not new. We know a lot about the difficulties that parents experience and what could make a difference. The results of the survey focus on the experiences of parents who live on the very lowest incomes—those in severe poverty. It will be no surprise that those families face the greatest challenge in accessing affordable childcare. Of the parents who responded to the survey, eight out of 10 who are in severe poverty said that cost is a barrier to accessing childcare. Parents who live in severe poverty were twice as likely as other participants to cite cost as a barrier to accessing childcare above any other barrier. The majority of parents who are in severe poverty—61 per cent—said that they had struggled to pay for childcare, whereas the figure for parents on higher incomes was 37 per cent.

Of the respondents, 41 per cent said that their childcare costs were similar to their mortgage or rent costs. That such a large proportion of families find the cost of childcare to be on a par with paying for a roof over their heads is surely a stark demonstration of the challenges. The high cost of childcare is felt by most families, but for families in severe poverty the impact is particularly drastic. The survey establishes that parents who are in severe poverty often need to cut back on key essentials simply to pay for childcare. Nearly half of families living in severe poverty have cut back on food to afford childcare and such families are more than twice as likely as families on higher incomes are to cut back on household bills just to afford childcare costs. We can surely all agree that no family should have to choose between feeding themselves or heating their homes and paying for childcare.

Many children are missing out on opportunities to help them grow and develop. Parents who are in severe poverty are more than twice as likely as parents on higher incomes are to cut back on after-school activities. Many parents in severe poverty have to make difficult financial choices simply to pay for childcare. The cost of childcare has caused a third of parents who live in severe poverty to get into debt, whereas that has happened to less than a quarter of parents on higher incomes.

It is little wonder that many parents in the UK struggle with the costs of childcare when they face the highest childcare costs of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country relative to their income and spend 33 per cent of their net income on childcare. The pressures continue to rise. The Daycare Trust suggests that average costs for childcare have risen significantly since 2010. For instance, between 2010 and 2011, the cost of a childminder for kids aged two or over increased by 8.3 per cent, which is about four times as much as the uplift in the average wage in the same period. Make no mistake—the ramifications of those pressures are serious and, again, are particularly acute for the poorest families.

The survey indicates that a quarter of parents in severe poverty have had to give up work as a result of not being able to afford childcare. Those are not parents who have been made redundant or parents who could not find work. They are parents who had work but felt that they had to quit because they could not afford to continue to work. One third of parents in severe poverty had had to turn down a job; a quarter had not been able to take up education or training; and one in 10 had had to move home as a result of difficulties finding suitable childcare.

Recent changes to working tax credit by the UK Government will only exacerbate those problems. Its decision to reduce the percentage of costs of formal childcare that is covered from 80 to 70 per cent will be very damaging to poorer families. There is no better demonstration of the concerns that were caused by the changes to working tax credit than those expressed by one of my constituents in Kilsyth, who took part in the survey and said they felt that

“it is very short sighted of the UK government to make cut backs in working tax credit and tax relief for child care as there is a real benefit to the health and well being of parents plus the economy of helping parents work.”

I turn to what we can do to go some way to tackling the problems that are identified in the report. First, we can call on the UK Government to reverse its decision to alter working tax credits in a negative way. I hope that the minister can state what the Scottish Government might be doing to that end.

Here in Scotland, we can call upon local authorities to provide their statutory hours of childcare provision in more flexible ways to support parents into employment. In the longer term, we can consider Save the Children’s other suggestions—that those statutory hours of childcare provision be extended to two-year-olds, beginning with the poorest families; and that more be done to support out-of-school care for children aged up to 14 in low-income households.

Given the budgetary pressures, that may not be easy, but investing in that area may have wider economic and social benefits. It could also fit in well with the Scottish Government’s expressed desire to increase preventative spending. It might also make life that bit easier for some of the most vulnerable families in the country. Surely we can all agree that that is a goal well worth achieving.

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