What child-care reforms say about Britain’s welfare state
It is a hybrid of liberal and social-democratic thinking
Britain’s first attempt at providing universal child care fell victim to the baby boomers. The 1944 Education Act, part of the construction of Britain’s post-war welfare state, instructed local authorities to make provision for nursery places for the under-fives as well as schools for older children. The post-war surge in the birth rate, however, meant there were just far too many nippers for Britain’s cash-strapped government to fund these places and expand secondary schools. Priority was given to the older children and early-years education fell by the wayside.
In the budget on March 15th Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, completed the job of making good on this omission. In England working parents of children between the ages of nine months to two years old will, from 2025, get government funding for up to 30 hours of child care. That builds on an existing scheme for those between the ages of three and four. The reforms both expand the welfare state and exemplify a peculiarly British way of thinking about it.
In 1990 Gøsta Esping-Andersen, a Danish sociologist, divided the rich world’s welfare states into three categories: liberal, social-democratic and conservative. Liberal welfare states prioritised market solutions and individual decision-making. The state should get involved only to prevent extreme poverty: think of America, with private insurance for health care and food stamps for the very poor. Benefits tended to be means-tested, providing a safety net for those who struggle rather than a means of escaping from the labour market altogether.
The social-democratic type, like the one in Sweden, was characterised by universal benefits and high-quality public services that cater to rich and poor alike. State-funded child care and copious public-sector jobs helped ensure that a woman’s place was in the office rather than at home. Conservative welfare states, associated with the legacy of Otto von Bismarck, were more concerned with preserving traditional family values than squashing pay differences. Pensions and unemployment benefits were often based on how much you contributed and were more generous to high earners; the tax system, meanwhile, gave breaks to married couples.
No state fits perfectly into Mr Esping-Andersen’s typology (which also could not account for the emerging East Asian welfare states nor for Mediterranean ones that combined a big role for families alongside minimal state social security). But it is a helpful way of thinking about Britain’s particular conception of the welfare state.
Britain is typically placed in the liberal category. But from the start it would try to combine liberalism with a degree of social democracy. William Beveridge, author of the report that became the blueprint for the post-war welfare state, wrote that there would be a guaranteed minimum “of right and without means test” but also “for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family”. That mixture helps explain why Britain has both the National Health Service and private schools for the affluent. And it also illuminates why the child-care reforms are designed as they are.
British voters seem to crave something Nordic. Polls consistently show a majority of the public favouring a combination of higher tax and spending on public services rather than the reverse. The government has spent over a decade emphasising the “grave” part of its “cradle-to-grave” welfare state—health care and pension spending have been largely protected from cuts in recent years. A tilt towards the cradle is popular with Britons.
Mr Hunt’s expansion of child care for working parents was backed by over 70% of voters for all the major parties, according to YouGov, a polling company. An annual survey of Britain’s social mores finds that attitudes towards working parents have turned Scandinavian. In 2007 around 20% disapproved of a parent (usually a mother) working full-time with a child under three; by 2019 that had fallen to 11%, the same figure as Sweden. (Only a handful of Conservative mps lamented the idea of the state displacing the family in caring for bairns: the conservative tradition has few adherents in Britain.)
The reforms will mean a significant expansion of the welfare state, doubling the amount that the government spends on child care to £8bn ($9bn; 0.4% of gdp), creating a new and permanent political battleground over the funding and management of the scheme. Yet if the child-care reforms have social-democratic aims and implications, their design remains liberal.
The state will foot the bill and help set prices, but it is up to profit-seeking businesses to actually provide the places for children. The entitlement, too, will not go to higher earners; British parsimony has trumped Nordic universalism. Families where any parent’s wage exceeds £100,000 risk losing tens of thousands of pounds of state support for earning an additional pound in income.
“That ends up doing some weird things to work incentives,” points out Christine Farquharson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. If the goal of the policy is to help get those with the heftiest child-care costs into jobs, she says, it fails: such costs are largest for high earners in London and the south-east of England. Bungs for the upper-middle classes are frowned on, however. The welfare state may be getting bigger, and taxes rising to pay for it, but it remains the same muddle of competing British instincts. ■
No comments:
Post a Comment