Pay mothers to stay at home, says study

[frigidmagi]

telegraph

Mothers should be paid to stay at home and raise their children, according to a report released today.

The review found that most women wanted to work either part-time or not at all while their children were under five, but were prevented from doing so because state help for families had been channelled into tax credits.
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The Policy Exchange think-tank is calling on the Government to scrap the current system of tax credits and grants in favour of a universal child care allowance - worth £60 per young child per week - that parents could keep or spend on a care provider.

Maria Miller, the shadow family minister, will help to promote the report. She said: "Support for families in the first three years is still a neglected area of policy.

"Great strides have been made in some areas but many women are still feeling they have got really little choice in how they structure their family's life."

The report, entitled Little Britons, claims that billions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been wasted on formal child care when parents would prefer to care for their offspring at home.

Labour has spent £17 billion on services for young children in the past decade in an attempt to encourage mothers back into work.

British parents pay 70 per cent of their child care costs compared with a European average of 30 per cent.

Although parents were more likely to choose nursery care for their children at the age of three than they were at the age of one, the majority still favoured family care over collective arrangements.

Nearly 60 per cent said they never used any formal provision for children up to the age of 14. Even working mothers chose childminders and nannies almost as often as nurseries.

Catherine Hakim, of the London School of Economics and one of the report's authors, said: "Numerous studies into parental values regarding child care have revealed a much greater diversity of parental preferences than the Government would like to believe.

"One study showed that, in an ideal world, only one third of mothers in Britain would use any child care at all before their child's third birthday."

The study was critical of the Working Tax Credit system, which distributes £1.4?billion a year for child care and is aimed at tackling child poverty by encouraging lone parents back into work.

Fewer than one in four of the million-plus eligible parents claims the credit.

The Government's £3.1?billion Sure Start programme to improve services for deprived families with young children was also criticised in the report, which said it had changed so often that people were "uncertain what its purpose is".

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "We have opened up choices, not narrowed them, making child care available to parents who would not have been able to access it before - through Children's Centres and by making child care more affordable through the tax credit system."

Huh, well as long it's completely voluntary I guess it couldn't hurt...