Thoughts on what children and family policy may look like under a Tory/Lib Dem Government
fSome thoughts on what children and family policy may look like under a Tory/Lib Dem Government.
The Government will aim to make Britain the most family-friendly place in Europe. This is obviously a very admirable goal and will see another competition between Britain and Germany as the latter one has pledged to do the same. I am curious who is going to win that cup.
We might see parental leave increased, from the current paid nine months leave for the mother and two weeks for the father. As argued before, the current regulation is highly unfair in terms of
equality. Parental leave might be increased up to 18 months and allow parents to allocate this leave in a way that suits them bests. This would also sit well with the LibDem's idea of 20 hours free childcare starting from the age of 18 months. Currently, there are 12.5 hours available, once the child is 3 years old. Unfortunately, funding for the 20 hours proposal is insecure, so this is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Leaving it up to the parents to decide which way suits them best sounds nice and right in principle, but does not take into account the constraints fathers may be under at work. Even if a father would like to take a couple of months off to look after his child (and there are more and more who would like to do so) he might not dare to do it as he fears disadvantages at work. Britain is not a place where equal rights for fathers are high on the agenda, and gender equality (both ways) is still a long way away. This is why there is no time for a voluntary approach on sharing parental leave. If we want to make it possible for more fathers to take longer parental leave there should be a right to dedicated paid ‘daddy months' as seen for example in the Scandinavian countries and Germany. With the introduction of those, uptake of paternity leave has risen sharply. Anyway, the extension of parental leave will only become a reality when “resources and economic circumstances allow” so parents might have to wait a very long time until this happens.
The right to flexible working is likely to be extended to all parents with children under the age of 18. But this might only be the first step as this could be extended to all employees in the public and private sector. This is a very progressive step and could help everyone to achieve a better work-life balance. However, nothing is said on how this might work in small companies with only a few employees. Small companies might be less able to offer flexible working hours as they have fewer staff – for example serving customers during fixed opening hours. However, relationships between employees and management are more likely to be informal, based on trust and personal relationships which makes it more likely for small companies to have some kind of flexible working scheme in practice anyway, without needing a law to get them started. It would be very hard indeed, but even harder in a job where you only have a few colleagues to take your boss to court because s/he is not willing to offer flexible working hours.
The Conservative Party would like to recognise a commitment such as marriage or a civil partnership in the tax system with a transferable tax allowance of up to £750 for couples earning less than £44,000. This might be no longer the case under a Tory/LibDem Government as the latter recognise that “families come in all shapes and sizes”, taking up Labour's mantra.
Safeguarding children is a relevant topic for both (well, all three) parties. Tories would like to abolish the obligations on local authorities to set up Children's Trust (not to confuse with the Child Trust Funds a Tory/LibDem Government is likely to scrap). However, LibDems would like to extend the duty to cooperate in children's trusts, i.e. the sum of all arrangements and partnerships between local organisations with the aim to improve outcomes for children and young people, to housing professionals. Hence, it is not clear where that leaves the Children's Trusts' future.
It is very positive that a Tory/LibDem Government would be committed to slash bureaucracy around social work. Both parties want to scrap the database ContactPoint and want to offer administrative and technical support for social workers instead. Currently, social workers spend about 80 (!) percent of their time filling in forms and paperwork which leaves very little time to spend with families. Anything that tries to reverse this percentage can only be seen as desirable.
The Government might abolish child tax credits, at least for those on middle to high incomes (over £50,000) and will abandon Labour's child trust fund that gives £250 to parents of every newborn in the country to set up a bank account in their child's name. The child trust fund might be kept for the poorest third of families and families with disabled children if the Conservatives get their say or be scrapped entirely if the Liberal Democrats can push their aim through.
Both child tax credits and child trust funds have been Labour's flagship policies to reduce and finally eradicate poverty. Scrapping those and maintaining the commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020 at the same time (and a Tory/LibDem Government is likely to do so) seems to confirm the view that a non-Labour Government is explicit in linking child poverty and poverty in general to the causes of poverty such as long-term worklessness, drug addiction and family breakdown and will not just focus on the absence of income. In a nutshell: in the future any measure targeted at eradicating poverty will focus much more on the personal responsibility of the individual, rather than on the responsibility of the state.
DCSF is likely to be reduced in size or reformed as a new department with a focus on education. Nothing has been said so far on where all the other areas of the current department such as Safeguarding and Wellbeing of Children will be located. Under the auspices of which department are these areas likely to be placed? As part of this rejig, reform could well include Sure Start Centres. The Liberal Democrats would like to improve outreach services of Sure Start whereas the Tories would like to cut spending on this service. Also, the Tories aim to focus Sure Start on the neediest of families, so quite a few ‘un-needy' ones (i.e. middle class) will lose excellent nursery places and services and might have to go private instead. If Sure Start is to be focused on the most disadvantaged families however, the Tories should go with the Lib Dem idea to improve outreach services, as the neediest ones are quite often those families who are hardest to reach.
Under a Tory/LibDem Government we could see the introduction of a pupil premium policy. Under such plans, ‘premiums' would be allocated to state schools providing extra funding for pupils from poor backgrounds with the aim to improve their educational attainment. This would mean that the funding effectively follows the pupils and the schools could spend it on, for example, hiring more and/or better qualified teachers.
The model favoured by the Conservative Party of creating a single national funding formula that includes a pupil premium is seen as unfair by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Around one in 10 schools could see their budgets cut by 10 per cent through this method, according to a report recently
published. The Liberal Democrats model of offering a pupil premium on top of existing funding, in contrast, will ensures that no school receives less money. Proponents of the pupil premium policy say that it will help plug the gap in education inequality, dealing with a covert selection process used by some top performing state schools that ensures a stream of middle class pupils. The 'pupil premium' is essentially a bribe to schools to ensure disadvantaged youngsters get a fairer deal in the admissions stakes.
Critics of the policy, however, say it would not create the necessary competition among good schools to recruit poor children, because many heads and governors would think it easier for a school simply to teach predominantly middle-class pupils using a small amount of money, than children from disadvantaged backgrounds using a large amount of money. Also, this premium assumes that all financially-disadvantaged pupils are more difficult to teach and less desirable as school recruits – lumping all pupils together regardless of behaviour and performance records.