If there’s a word that best encapsulates the struggles of 2021, surely it’s ‘shortages’. Shortages of fuel, shortages of NHS staff, shortages of gas, shortages of toilet roll and now, seemingly, shortages of nannies. The heady cocktail of living in a pandemic at the same time as the UK’s messy withdrawal from the EU has hit supply chains for goods and services hard, and, if an article in the Daily Mail today is to be believed — wealthy parents in south-west London are going to great lengths to secure childcare in a context of scarce resources.
The piece, which describes the experiences of a nanny agency based in the area, paints a bleak — and at times dramatic — picture of competitive, desperate parents pushed to extreme behaviour, nanny theft, dark deals and court battles. If it weren’t such a damning indictment of the abject failures of the UK’s childcare situation, it would probably make a good HBO series.
Instead, it is a bleak reminder of just how dire the situation has become for parents of young children juggling their caring responsibilities with their careers, a subject Grazia has covered extensively for its parenting community, The Juggle.
As it stands, the UK currently comes in second place in the world based on the OECD’s global index of net childcare costs, which estimates that 30% of the average wage of parents goes towards this. Added to this, UK-based charity Pregnant Then Screwed, says that “over a third (35.5%) of those that return to work, only just break even or make a financial loss due to the cost of child care”. In a country where the gender pay gap is still perilously wide (women get paid 87p for every £1 paid to men as of April 2020), and the effects for working parents of a series of national lockdowns when many schools and nurseries were closed, it’s clear that surging childcare costs are pushing many parents (but let’s face it, mothers) to the brink. Not only that but housing has become unaffordable for many families, with almost no protections for private renters and inadequate supply of council homes. Considering such a grim series of statistics, is it really a surprise that the birth rate continues to plummet?
That the most affluent are only just beginning to feel the effects of this deepening crisis says a lot about the insulation provided by wealth. So what is causing this shortage? The article rightly mentions the impact of Brexit on visa rules for foreign au-pairs, as well as Covid-related travel restrictions. But it fails to mention the exodus of foreign workers that left the country long before Covid arrived because of the “Brexit effect” — a combination of fear, uncertainty and climbing xenophobia that followed the UK’s decision to leave the EU. The net impact of this and the pandemic, revealed in a study at the beginning of this year by the government-funded Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE), showed that up to 1.3 million immigrants had left the UK (700,000 of which from London) in the ‘largest population fall since the Second World War’.
As proven by the article, not only does the shortage of childcare drive up the cost. Pre-covid, it says, it cost £32,000 to £35,000 per year to employ a nanny in South-West London, but now it costs £46,000 on average. And let’s not forget that price surges among the rich don’t just affect people within those income brackets, but end up filtering down to those much less affluent.
In a country that talks the talk of supporting women in the workplace, where policies abound to protect working mothers in particular from discrimination — when will the government actually start walking the walk? In a situation where 77% of parents say that cost has prevented them from accessing the childcare they need, you’d think addressing this issue could hardly be more urgent.
Because the truth is that women are still likely to be those most affected by such pressure; most likely to drop down their hours to look after their kids and most likely to leave the world of work out of necessity, rather than desire. And until we live in a country where having a child is seen as a basic state-supported experience rather than an expensive luxury afforded by only the most well off, we can never truly say our society is equal.
So what will it take for the government to pay attention? Recent lobbying by Grazia and Pregnant Then Screwed has certainly caught the attention of policymakers, pushing for the issue to be discussed in parliament. Whether or not this issue, like so many others, gets pushed down the priority list as we move through another winter of Covid remains to be seen. One thing is obvious though, parents, women and anyone who has aspirations to have children are being massively short-changed, and the current situation is unsustainable. Something has to give, and it is clear that parents really can’t take much more.