SOCIETY

THE Observer’s editorial, on Sunday January 15, the sister newspaper of the Guardian, concerns how hostile the UK has become in families having children. The editor points to how parents are being forced to bring up their offspring in conditions that will have grave repercussions for society.

According to the old proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That will have little meaning for many parents today, but the proper place for institutions outside the family in the birth and upbringing of our children is a pressing matter indeed. Recent evidence suggests that government is grievously failing parents in many ways.

Alarmingly, it starts even before birth. A report released last week from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), highlighted a worrying decline in women’s experiences of NHS maternity services in England. The trend comes in the wake of several inquiries into the very poor maternity care on offer in some hospital trusts, with more than 1,000 babies dying or who are left with severe injuries each year as a result of something having gone wrong during labour. The CQC has found four in ten maternity services are providing unacceptable levels of care. This goes well beyond the general resourcing and staffing issues within the NHS that have created a national crisis; it reflects more directly a cultural under-prioritisation of the care of women and their babies that has not been adequately addressed by successive UK governments.

Government policy, too, has a marked influence on the context within which parents bring up their children: the expense in having a child, the level of support on offer when things go wrong, and the difficulties of juggling childcare with maintaining a career. Political decisions made over the last decade has, undoubtedly, resulted in Britain becoming a more hostile place to bring up a family.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed up the already high cost of raising a child to the age of 18 even further. An estimate provided by the Child Poverty Action suggest the average figure is now £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents. Even if both parents work full-time at the minimum wage, it is forecast they will fall more than £1,700 a year short of the income needed to attain a basic minimum standard of living. This reflects the fact that as wages have stagnated over the last decade, the cost of living – including housing, food and energy – has increased, and government support for low-paid parents has been significantly scaled back since 2010 through austerity.

Successive Conservative chancellors have reduced tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children while introducing generous tax cuts that have benefited the better off: a redistribution not just from the less to the more affluent, but from families with children to those without. This has undermined the financial safety net that was put in place for families by the last Labour government. It was a provision in recognition of the fact that Britain has too many jobs that simply do not pay enough for parents to be able to provide for their children. It should come as no surprise, then, that child poverty rates have risen since 2010, with almost one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

Long-term issues in the housing market have also introduced much greater uncertainty in relation to raising children. Rising house prices mean more parents will never be able to afford to buy their own home: one in five households now live in privately rented accommodation, up from one in 10, 20 years ago. This trend will continue to rise, with more children being brought up in rented homes. This not only has a huge impact on living standards – Britain has the most expensive rents in Europe – but on safety and security. More than a quarter of homes in the private rented sector do not meet the government’s minimum “decent homes” criteria. Also, a vast number of renters remain vulnerable to short-term tenancy agreements, at the end of which they can be evicted through no fault of their own. The law in England, in particular, has much to do to protect tenants from the uncertainties they face. The growing numbers of parents who rent property deserve to be able to achieve much greater stability for their children through controlled rents and long-term tenancies.

The other pressing factor for parents is childcare, a huge financial outlay, particularly for young children not yet at school. Recently released data shows that Britain now has the joint-highest childcare costs of any OECD country. Government support with these costs is generally erratic and it is harder still to access quality nursery provision in the least affluent areas. Yet, as studies have shown, high-quality childcare provision is associated with better educational outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, higher levels of parental wellbeing and better economic outcomes for women. Modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests that investing in universal free childcare for the under-fives would boost economic growth and result in a higher tax take.

The anti-family sheen of government policy and neglect mean that many parents cannot give their children the level of security they aspire to, affecting the rest of their lives. It will also put some people off having children, with wider consequences for the whole of society given the higher tax burden that Britain’s low birth rate will impose on future generations.