30 free hours of childcare sounds good, but doesn’t fully deliver

Kate Nicholl is the Alliance Party MLA for South Belfast 

With many people’s childcare bills outstripping mortgage costs, parents and carers struggling with the strain of juggling careers and childcare, and providers struggling to keep their doors open, you don’t need to look far to see the impact of crippling childcare costs on our children, parents and carers, our economy, and wider society.

The lack of affordable childcare in Northern Ireland was at the heart of my decision to run for the Assembly back in 2022, and over a year since that election, it is completely devastating and totally unacceptable that we have not been able to deliver a better system due to the lack of a functioning Assembly and Executive. This is a cross-cutting policy issue that requires co-ordination between departments, and we need serious engagement and a long-term plan to develop a system of childcare that puts children first and creates more affordable options for families.

In response to the crisis in childcare, the ‘30 free hours’ has become a popular model that proponents claim will solve the problem. Most recently, the UK Government announced an expansion of support to provide 30 hours of free childcare every week for working parents of all children over the age of nine months in England in the 2023 Spring Budget. During the Assembly election campaign, the DUP, along with other local parties, advocated for the implementation of the 30 free hours model in Northern Ireland, although I’m not sure how they ever planned to do that while failing to play their part in re-forming a government.

Sometimes politicians promise things that sound good, but don’t actually work in practice. That is the reality with 30 hours of free childcare. Any notion that there is a quick fix to this crisis, such as providing some more free hours, is not rooted in reality and demonstrates a detachment from the lived experience of families and the sector.

For over a year, we have been on the ground engaging with experts, parents, providers, academics and businesses about childcare. We have listened to experts in the sector and we know that the ‘free hours’ model fails children in low-income households and has distorted the market for childcare, creating issues regarding the sustainability of supply. A model based purely on the provision of hours also centres around parental employment, rather than the child. It drives demand for childcare, whilst failing to create any means by which government can influence the supply of childcare in relation to areas like workforce planning, standards and quality.

Our proposals centre on an alternative model – an Affordable Childcare Scheme -that will deliver better outcomes for parents and will enhance the quality and sustainability of childcare provision.

Our Affordable Childcare Scheme would operate through government payments to registered childcare providers to limit the costs paid by parents. Essentially, childcare costs would be subsidised – however, this would be delivered through providers as opposed to directly to parents, as in England. Participation in this scheme would be conditional on the delivery of:

Child-centred care

Reduced costs for parents and carers

High-quality provision

A well-qualified workforce

Training for staff

Flexibility

In practice, our proposals would significantly reduce households’ childcare costs and at the same time deliver substantial public investment in the childcare sector. In strengthening the childcare workforce through new training and qualification opportunities, staff morale and retention should improve, therefore delivering better outcomes for children. This investment in the sector would also allow providers to enhance pay and conditions for their staff, further combating the workforce crisis we are currently seeing in the sector.

This will require significant investment in order to deliver long-term transformation that benefits children, parents, employers and the wider economy. Whilst we acknowledge this could be costly, we are also conscious that it would be extremely costly not to invest in expanded childcare support – research has shown that it is one of the highest-returning investments a government can make. It could cost hundreds of millions of pounds to replicate a 30 free hours scheme for Northern Ireland, and if the best we can do for families in Northern Ireland is to replicate failing Tory party policy, something has gone seriously wrong. Our families, children and providers deserve the very best possible system that will deliver child-centred, affordable, and high-quality childcare.

The current state of the childcare system in Northern Ireland is a symptom of broader political failure, with a lack of stable government preventing us from making the long-term commitments required to create a more child-centred and affordable childcare system. The ability of any one party to collapse the Executive for any reason is failing all of us and is having a monumental impact on our children and families. It is time to reform our institutions to ensure an Executive can deliver a child-centred and affordable childcare system for Northern Ireland.

Read more about the Alliance Party proposals for delivering this kind of childcare system here.

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