Overpriced childcare, wokery in schools, an unfair tax system: that’s what UK parents have to put up with
Source - Daily Telegraph - 27/08/23
Britain is an increasingly difficult, expensive and unattractive place to raise children. Getting one child to 18 will now cost, on average, over £200,000. The tax system is unfair towards families: couples with the same overall income can end up paying wildly different amounts of tax depending on how earnings are divided between them.
Our society cannot decide if it wants children to “grow up” or to perpetually infantilise them. We expected young people to make crushing, life-changing sacrifices to protect the elderly during the pandemic, yet we are creating a Peter Pan generation who won’t be able to afford their own homes until their mid-30s and could be making withdrawals from the Bank of Mum and Dad for far longer.
Parental choices in how to raise children are narrowing as the scope for state monitoring increases. There is now a perceived “right” choice at all stages: natural birth, breastfeeding, nursery, inculcating in children the dogma of diversity and inclusion, a university education.
But none of it is working. Maternity services are a scandal. Improvements in infant mortality have stalled since 2013. A full-time nursery place for the under-twos is more expensive in the UK than almost anywhere else, thanks to excessive regulation, forcing many to stay home rather than return to work after parental leave.
Our education system is becoming an ideological minefield. As many as 59 per cent of British pupils may be encountering Critical Race Theory-derived terms such as “white privilege”, “unconscious bias” or “systemic racism” in the classroom. The language of climate “emergency” is seeping into many elements of education. Teachers in some schools are letting pupils change their names or uniforms without parents being alerted. Yet last month, the Government broke its own deadline to provide schools in England with much-needed guidance on policies for transgender pupils. For all the talk of preparing pupils for the future workplace, there is a growing sense our narrow, exams-obsessed curriculum is failing.
And for some parents, it doesn’t stop at 18. Many young people are deferring their entry into the workplace for three years, as they spend up to £50,000 on a university education they may not need. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 36 per cent of graduates are overqualified for the jobs they currently hold. The value of degrees has been artificially inflated; just like the grades needed to attend them or the ones they’ll be awarded at the end of their course. The vast expansion of occupational licensing means the Government now decides who is qualified to work as everything from a social worker to a racehorse trainer.
By saddling themselves with student debt, young people are postponing their first step onto the housing ladder. One in four new homeowners under-25 rely on financial support from their parents, yet governments refuse to address our housing crisis. The average age of a first-time buyer in the UK is well over 30, potentially delaying the age at which people start families at a time when our fertility rate lags worryingly far behind the replacement rate.
Few adults have children expecting it to be cost- or hassle-free. Life is much better than in the past for most, technological advances are being made more quickly, and we generally spend more time with our offspring. But that progress is slowing dramatically: underpinning this all is 15 years of anaemic growth. Real wages are still below their 2008 peak.
We are slipping behind countries we once viewed as our peers. The productivity gap between Britain and America is wider than it is between Britain and Romania. The UK’s economic trajectory could soon be overtaken by Poland’s. No parent wants to bring a child into the world knowing it will live a less prosperous life than they did. So why would they do it here?
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