9 - Social Infrastructure

Summary

“I’d have to have like breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and the 3-year-old only gets three hours a day paid nursery so I’d have to top that up. So, with that and petrol and parking, it just wouldn't be worth it.”

Young woman, Sheffield (cited in Kumar et al. 2014)

So far, we have focused on how state policies aimed at low-paid workers – on welfare and skills – have the effect of undermining bargaining power in the workplace. However, the state's effects on low-paid workers have much broader scope. In the final chapters of this book we turn our attention to wider factors that influence the labour market, exploring the role of social infrastructure and state regulation in supporting good work and overcoming labour market exclusion.

Starting with the former, we show how degradation of social infrastructure – from declining local bus services to childcare services that don't meet the shift patterns of low-paid workers – conspire to create barriers to work, especially for women. As we show, childcare and transport are not only social policy issues but fundamental to tackling low-pay low-productivity Britain. Childcare Self-evidently, childcare is essential to parents being able to work: no parent can go out to work unless someone is looking after their children. The responsibility normally falls on mothers: employment rates in mixed-sex couples with children under 12 are 20 percentage points lower for women than for men; average hours of work are more than 40 per cent lower; nine out of ten lone parents are women. Time-use data shows that women spend twice as much time as fathers looking after children (Wishart et al. 2019). Seven out of ten mothers of children aged below four say that having reliable childcare helps them to go out to work (DfE 2019).

Childcare in the UK is more expensive than most other highincome countries. Support for childcare is a mix of free and subsidized provision, support through the welfare system, and tax reliefs on childcare expenditure. Taking these into account, the net expenditure on childcare for couples with two children aged two and three using formal childcare is likely to be around one third of the average wage. For lone parents, net expenditure is lower. However, at 10 per cent of the average wage, there are still only four countries in the OECD with higher rates (see Figure 9.1).