The well-presented Partnership 2000 Report on Childcare, published on Thursday, was prepared by an expert working group. That conjures up a picture of a small number of professional experts. But this working group comprised well over 80 people, more than 50 of whom represented private bodies, including quite a number involved in the provision of group childcare. This certainly ensured that a wide range of experience was drawn upon but it also means that its recommendations were bound to reflect pressures from a wide range of interest groups.
There is a fundamental problem about this report that involves no criticism of the working group. This is the fact that the terms of reference given to it by the Government, through the sponsoring Justice Department, confined it to day-care facilities and services provided by people other than the parents or other relatives. It thus addresses only part of a problem that involves a reconciliation of society's dual interest in two potentially conflicting objectives.
One of these objectives (which nowadays tends to be downplayed but which I believe to be of crucial importance) is the optimisation of the conditions for the nurturing of children so as to give them the best chance of becoming healthy and fulfilled members of society in the future. The other is the alleviation of the impact of the particular pressures on women that derive from the childcare role in which they traditionally play a predominant part.
In many cases these pressures limit the capacity of women to contribute their talents to society generally. They also affect women's capacity for self-fulfilment, either by preventing them from pursuing a career or, in other cases, through financial pressures forcing them into the workforce when they would find greater fulfilment looking after their young children. Both these pressures are an important practical factor affecting gender equality.
But neither of these objectives constitutes the primary drivingforce of this report, for the terms of reference of the expert group were directed towards only one aspect of the first objective (for optimal childcare by parents or other relatives is excluded) and also towards only part of the second objective, viz. domestic pressures inhibiting the entry of women to the workforce. The group was precluded by its terms of reference from addressing the financial pressures that force some women to undertake paid work when they would prefer to look after their children at home.
The narrow terms of reference of this report seem to reflect an unstated economic, rather than social, objective, viz. expanding the workforce, and thus national output, by maximising the flow into employment of women with children, and especially women with young children.
It is, of course, clear that we are at present facing a growing shortage of workers with various skills. This reflects our recent success in generating employment on a quite remarkable scale, a process that by the end of last December had brought our unemployment rate down from 15.6 per cent in 1993 to 7.1 per cent. (These figures are standardised unemployment rates for Ireland based on International Labour Force criteria).
At the rate at which unemployment was falling last year this latter figure could be reduced below 5 per cent within 18 months. With 2.5 per cent of workers leaving jobs and seeking other employment every month - a process that usually takes some weeks to carry through - an unemployment rate as low as 4-to-5 per cent effectively means full employment. And that in turn means upward pressure on wages.
Naturally, employers have an interest in expanding the labour supply in order to prevent wages being bid up. But we should not become too upset at the thought of some generalised upward pressure on wages after a period in which pay increases have been held down by national agreements designed to foster employment growth.
That said, it is of course right to extend the benefits of current prosperity to women who are currently looking after their children at home but who want to enter the labour force. And this can be done by removing obstacles to their seeking employment, an action which will have the incidental effect of easing employment shortages that could otherwise generate wage inflation through the relativity claim process.
What is important, however, is to ensure that measures designed for this purpose are accompanied by provisions that will facilitate women who would prefer to look after their own children, but who may have been, or may in the future be, forced into the workforce by financial pressures. Otherwise there is a real danger that instead of a balanced social policy based on the desirability of freeing women from constraints of either kind, we could end up with an unbalanced economically driven policy directed towards pushing women into the workforce.
It should be added that within its restricted frame of reference this report has many worthwhile recommendations. These include the registration of childcare facilities and workers, combined with a tax relief for child-minding earnings and the disregarding of childminding income for social welfare means test purposes. These provisions are justified by reference to the small amounts of revenue involved and the need to expand the pool of child-minders.
The report also proposes that a Joint Labour Committee set a pay scale for childcare workers, who at present are often grossly underpaid.
But the report comes down against increased child benefit on the grounds of cost and because it "is not targeted on childcare". Inevitably, perhaps, given the terms of reference and focus, other considerations favouring increased child benefit were ignored.
Instead it favours tax reliefs for expenditure on childcare. And although group care is shown to cost between £2,200 and £3,400 a year, a tax relief of up to £4,000 a year on vouched expenditure is proposed for a child under 5 years of age - a rare case of offering a relief in excess of the likely cost to be covered. These tax reliefs are estimated to cost £30 million a year, but I have the feeling that the cost could be double this.*
Now, tax reliefs are often regressive in their impact because they offer no benefit to people who are not well enough off to pay tax, and offer least benefit to those whose incomes are too low to benefit fully from a tax relief. Moroever, if the proposed childcare tax reliefs for families in which both parents are working were to be conceded, it would be impossible to refuse parallel financial aid for the much less-well-off families in which one parent is staying at home to look after children instead of going out to earn a second income - and where the need is correspondingly greater.
And if that is not to be done by means of tax relief - which might be difficult - the alternative would seem to be an increase in child benefit for these families. In these circumstance, might it not be better to meet both needs by increasing child benefit rates, which in any event, by European standards, are grossly inadequate?
Yet another unfortunate consequence of the narrowness of the working group's terms of reference is the absence of any reference to the need for paid leave for parents of young children, fathers as well as mothers.
This report must now be fully costed, its recommendations subjected to a careful and balanced scrutiny, and the whole placed within the much wider context of the needs of single-earner families as well as ones in which both parents are earners. A comprehensive policy for the whole childcare area should then be announced in time for initial implementation under the provisions of next December's budget
* Over 80,000 children under 5 years of age are currently in childcare. Applying the figures given in the report for the cost of different forms of childcare, this suggests that some £250 million a year is spent on childcare for children in this age-group. The total for all ages up to 12 must exceed £300 million a year. The great bulk of this would benefit from the proposed tax reliefs at a tax rate of 24 per cent. This suggests a potential cost of about £70 million a year.