So, who should pay for childcare?

This is not, in fact, quite true:

With the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, looking at measures that could reduce childcare costs, which are some of the most expensive in the world,

The Chancellor is not looking at reducing childcare costs. He is looking at altering who has to pay them.

…demanding action on increasing state help

Quite.

Of the parents surveyed, 70% said they would work more if childcare were available for free. Treasury insiders accept that childcare costs are one factor keeping some people out of the labour market.

But this opens up that question which all too few are willing to discuss. OK, taking care of children is something that must be done and is expensive when it is done. So, who should be carrying those costs?

There are three - and only three - possible alternatives.

The first is that parents, in some mixture, take care of their own children.

The second is that parents work in order to earn the money to pay someone else to take care of their children.

The third is that taxpayers pay to take care of their children. Or, as that can also be put, everyone else in the country has to go to work in order to care for the children of those original parents.

An illustration of this happens to also be in the papers:

Which is to say, I birthed two babies in relatively quick succession, looked at the cost of childcare (£42.5k a year for a baby and a two-year-old in my part of London, towards which the government will contribute up to £2k a child under the tax-free childcare scheme), and decided that staying home made more sense than putting them in nursery and desperately trying to earn enough to break even.

So, the cost of caring for those two children is £42.5k a year. That’s just the cost. It doesn’t change whether it’s the parents doing it themselves, the parents working to pay it or everyone else being taxed £42.5k a year to pay for it.

That is, no one at all is talking about making childcare free, the only conversation happening is over who should carry the cost of childcare?

The argument in favour of the taxpayer picking up the tab is that there is some benefit to society - it makes us richer in some economic or possibly even moral manner - in the taxpayer doing so. Children are better looked after by paid labour perhaps. Or the value of the work done by the now freed-up mother (for it will likely be the mother who is the stay-at-home parent) is more than the value of the work lost by pulling some other young woman (for it will likely be a young woman doing the childcare) out of some other job to care for children. The problem with that second argument is that if this were so then the wages gained by the mother working would be enough to cover the cost of employing the other.

But this is the question that does need answering. Not, at all, whether childcare should be made free simply because childcare never will be free. There’s a cost and expense to it. The only thing that can be discussed is who is it that should be carrying that cost? Either in their own labour opportunities foregone, in the spending of the fruits of their own labour or in a slice off the top of everyone else’s labour?

Well, which should it be?

One answer we’re convinced is wrong is the Edwardian one, which is that finally the government should take action to solve the servant problem. So, other than that, what is the correct answer over the distribution of these costs?