Mark Woods: Family Matters

The Family and Childcare Trust report found that a family with one two-year-old child at nursery for 25 hours a week and a five-year-old at after-school club will be forced to cough up £7,549 a year on average to cover it all.

This compares to an annual average mortgage cost in the UK of £7,207.That also means that for many households childcare spend even outstrips what the weekly shop comes to. Now I’m no socio-economic expert, but that doesn’t seem at all sustainable to me.

This is a problem that’s been a long time in the making, of course. Childcare costs have seen a greater than inflation rise every year since 2002 – to the extent that in Britain we now pay out more than a quarter of our salaries to looking after our children while we earn – a higher slice that almost any other European country.

What to do? As ever, Sweden has taken a very different route. Its super well funded social security system makes it not only easy to arrange affordable childcare but ensures parents can take regular time off work to spend time with their children too. A month of childcare will set you back just £110 a month and each Swedish child benefits from a combined 480 days of combined paid parental leave. Unsurprisingly it’s a very popular system but it comes at a cost and requires a cultural approach and set of priorities that one wonders if we will ever come to share. Imagine a country where the state spends more on pre-school child care than on its defence budget.With a population of not even 10 million, the parental benefit allowance cost £3.2bn in 2011 – meaning the Swedes spend more on their pre-school child care alone than they do on their entire defence budget. And of course they pay eye-wateringly high taxes across the board to foot the bill – something they gladly and repeatedly vote in favour of at the ballot box. Would we really ever do the same?

Twitter @mark_r_woods