In last week’s speech outlining the government’s priorities for 2023 and beyond, Rishi Sunak stressed the importance of family. He said:
“family is something politicians struggle to talk about because you can all too readily be pilloried for being out of touch or worse, hostile to those who don’t conform to some idealised form.
We live in a world today where family can and does take many forms.
But whatever your family looks like, it doesn’t matter as long as the common bond is love.
We shouldn’t be shy about it: We cannot not talk about the thing that is most important in most of our lives.”
Sunak discussing families like this is tiresome for two reasons beyond his saccharine choice of wording. First, leading figures on the right have lamented the supposed departure of family values from the political discourse for years. But while the issue may not be that, it is hardly a fringe debate. Those who continue to pretend that referencing family values is a brave act of rebellion against the fascistic left are either ignorant or disingenuous.
Second – and more importantly – Sunak’s pro-family rhetoric contravenes his government’s anti-family policy agenda. A few days before his big speech, for instance, the government scrapped the Truss government’s proposals to deregulate childcare.
One of Truss’ key proposals was to scrap Britain’s mandatory staff:child ratios, which are among the highest in Europe. In Denmark and Sweden governments have avoided introducing this regulation. With staff accounting for 78 per cent of childcare costs, relaxing the ratio would ease the financial pressures on nurseries, leading to lower bills for families.
If Sunak wants to give parents more than warm words, he should reconsider shelving the proposal. Childcare costs are one of the biggest drains on family budgets. According to research by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the average cost of a placement for a child under two in 2021 was £13,939, a 171 per cent increase since 2000. At more than the cost of some private schools, this is patently out of reach for many.
Given women put in more than double the proportion of unpaid work when it comes to cooking, childcare and housework, they are likely to feel the burden of high childcare costs more acutely. This doesn’t make the difficult decisions many faces between their professional and personal lives any easier. While policymakers too readily assume that all mothers want to return to their jobs after the birth of their first child, this should not be the aim of childcare policy. Rather we should create the conditions in which women can re-enter the workplace should they choose, which means ensuring nurseries aren’t prohibitively expensive or childminders – many of whom have been pushed out of the sector by regulation – inaccessible.
Or consider our misguided housing policy. Between 1970 and 2021, wages increased 36-fold and a range of consumer goods, from cars and computers to coffee and self-raising flour have become cheaper. But house prices have increased by a factor of 60 because of burdensome planning and land use regulations.
The consequences have been dire across the economy: the housing shortage has limited labour mobility, contributed to Britain’s sluggish growth rate, and hampered the fight against climate change. The consequences are most damaging for young people, who are waiting longer and longer to get onto the housing ladder. In 2022, the average age of a first-time buyer was 32, a three year increase on 2011.
Several studies have suggested that individuals and families want to have more children than they end up having. Research by the Adam Smith Institute in 2017 concluded that 157,000 children may not have been born between 1996 and 2014, in part, because the stability of home ownership is effectively off the table for people in their twenties. Given that upsizing also tends to require moving away from the social and economic opportunities presented by cities, it should come as no surprise that young people might forgo plans to start or expand their family.
But this isn’t just a question of home ownership: in France around 40 per cent of the population rents yet it has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe (though still below the replacement rate). But in Britain, while young people may be more mobile than older generations, rents have gone up and up. This has had a similar impact on family planning.
Our new government has no more appetite to liberalise planning and trigger a house-building revolution than any of its recent predecessors. If anything, the situation is worsening, with Sunak capitulating to backbenchers in December and removing mandatory housebuilding targets.
Short of wholesale planning liberalisation or restoring the right to do as you wish with your own property (as was the legal default before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947), imposing targets is one of the few ways to build houses over local objections.
Childcare and housing impose colossal burdens on families, particularly those which are young and yet to be fully formed. If the Prime Minister wants to do more for families, he should overhaul policies which drive up the cost of having one. By deregulating the housing and childcare sectors, and allowing the market to expand supply, he can go some way to doing just that.
