The United Kingdom’s finance chief unvieled plans to encourage over a million more women to enter the workforce, as the ironically-named Conservative government continues to emphasise the value of paying taxes over motherhood.
Announcing his Spring Budget in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt unveiled new measures to encourage women to forgo raising their own children in favour of participating in the workforce.
The central means of doing so, Hunt said, will be for the government to fund up to 30 hours per week of free childcare for children under the age of three — to as young as nine months — for parents who both earn less that £100,000 per year. At present, only parents with children between the ages of three and four are eligible for the programme.
To help accomplish this, the government will provide local authorities with money to support “wraparound childcare” schemes at schools, which could see children staying in school from 8am in the morning to 6pm at night.
Expanding government-funded childcare services has long been lobbied for by corporate interests, including the Confederation of British Industry, which has claimed that while it may cost the taxpayer several billion pounds on the front end, the move could bring in upwards of £10 billion in future revenue by getting more parents to work.
Speaking at the Commons dispatch box, Chancellor Hunt said: “We have one of the most expensive [childcare] systems in the world. Almost half of non-working mothers said they would prefer to work if they could arrange suitable childcare.
“For many women, a career break becomes a career end. Our female participation rate is higher than average for OECD economies, but we trail top performers like Denmark and the Netherlands. If we matched Dutch levels of participation, there would be more than one million more women who want to work, in the labour force. And we can.”
The government has argued that following the coronavirus lockdowns, in which millions of workers were paid by the state to stay home, more workers are needed to fuel the economy, despite the Conservative government opening the floodgates to mass migration and handing out a record over a million visas.
The Conservative Party has long targeted families as a potential source of labour, with former Home Secretary Priti Patel describing a group of stay-at-home mothers in 2020 as “economically inactive” and that they should leave the house in favour of an office.
As one commentator said at the time: “It was an irony of the way government values citizens that humans are judged to have worth if they look after other people’s children or clean other people’s homes — in return for wages — but are looked down upon if they perform the exact same tasks for their own family”.
While the party will likely try to use the childcare investments as evidence that it is pro-family, the economic policies of the government appear to some as demonstrating the exact opposite.
An example of the anti-family attitude comes in how the government levies taxes, with the state targeting earnings individually rather than on a family unit as a whole, meaning that families reliant upon a single income of £50,000 will take home less money than two salaries of £25,000, thereby incentivising both partners to work rather than stay at home with children.
Decades of such policies, have seen millions of more women enter the workforce, with 72.2 per cent of women between the ages of 16 and 64 working now compared to 52.7 per cent in 1971. Unsurprisingly, this has coincided with far more women delaying marriage and having children, with last year marking the first time in recorded history that the majority of women remained childless past their 30th birthday.
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