The Guardian view on childcare: Truss threatens to make a bad situation worse

The Guardian view on childcare: Truss threatens to make a bad situation worse

In the summer of 1947, 35 mothers locked themselves into a Yorkshire children’s centre to protest against its closure. Having expanded nursery provision to enable women to join the war effort, the government drastically scaled back. In four years, around 500 council-run nurseries were shut. Then, as now, women knew what this meant for their prospects. They were recast in their traditional role as carers, and lost their financial independence.

Childcare has remained one of the gaps in the welfare state ever since. While the UK is relatively generous towards new mothers, with maternity leave and free prescriptions and dentistry for a year after birth, the state has never stumped up the investment necessary to ensure that parents are able to keep on working from when their children stop being babies until they start school. In England, cuts in public provision combined with privatisation and price rises have made a difficult situation worse, with fees for under-twos doubling since 2010 (the devolved administrations are all more generous, and the number of free nursery hours in Scotland has doubled). At the end of this month a March of the Mummies, organised by the pressure group Pregnant Then Screwed, aims to push the issue up the agenda and persuade ministers to do more to support flexible working and part-time jobs.

So far, the signs are that Liz Truss and her colleagues have their eyes and ears shut. Having had her idea of reducing ratios in childcare settings knocked back more than a decade ago, Ms Truss is now considering even more radical deregulation. One proposal is to scrap ratios altogether, so that providers decide how many children each adult can care for. Another, floated by a rightwing thinktank, would see existing entitlements to free part-time nursery places withdrawn. A third idea under discussion is to give nursery funding to parents instead, to spend where they choose – a measure that would further destabilise an already fragile sector.