One Nation Labour's promise to give parents of three and four year olds 25 hours a week free childcare is a welcome reminder of more progressive times to come after 2015; or a gruesome reminder of past policy mistakes, according to your taste.
Let's assume that putting young children in a nursery is better for them than staying at home with a parent (it may be, but where's the evidence?), what might be the consequences for the labour market? The obvious one is that many young mothers will be free to go back to work earlier than they otherwise would. This all sounds OK until you consider that if young mothers are back in work more quickly they will be doing jobs that would otherwise be done by women and men without childcare commitments. Again, this might be a good thing, but the benefit of helping one particular group back into work (young parents) at the expense of others isn't at all obvious.
Secondly, if as it appears this is to be a universal benefit, what is the point of paying the affluent for something they don't need? We have, for heavens sake, just got rid of universal Child Benefit. This has cost my family about £150 a month, but we didn't need the money anyway and neither did a lot of other people. Why start up another scheme that pays money to people who don't need it?
Thirdly, why does Labour think it's a good idea to increase public spending when Britain has been living beyond its means for all but five of the last thirty years or so? Today, Tuesday 24th September, our country will have to borrow between three and four hundred million pounds just to stay afloat. That's a staggering figure, and we're borrowing that amount every day. Ed Balls says his new childcare scheme will be funded by increasing the Bank levy. Curiously though Labour said in 2012 it would use an increased tax on bankers to fund a Youth Jobs Guarantee. Similar taxes have also been proposed to pay for a wish list of VAT cuts, Regional Growth Funding and a number of other Labour policies. The Bankers appear to be the gift that just keeps on giving.
So Labour's childcare giveaway is a policy whose benefit is unproven, whose consequences for unemployment may be deleterious, whose focus includes people who don't need it and whose source of funding has already been claimed repeatedly elsewhere.
In about 2004 Frank Field wrote an influential article in the Guardian (well, it influenced me anyway) which ended "In the future governments are going to have to provide better public services with less money, not more". Unfortunately Field's article doesn't seem to have influenced Ed Miliband at all.
