Finding good quality, affordable childcare can be one of the biggest challenges facing parents

Finding good quality, affordable childcare can be one of the biggest challenges facing parents, but employers could be doing a lot more to lessen the hassle and ease the financial burden on employees, often at no great cost to themselves, says the TUC today.

Launching a new childcare guide to help unions find the best ways of encouraging employers to make workplaces better meet the needs of working parents, the guide says offering good childcare support often makes it easier for employers to recruit and retain staff.

’Who’s looking after the children?’ says employers might want to consider opening a workplace nursery that offers cheaper places to staff. Or it suggests, a group of employers in a locality might choose to come together to offer a crche for all employees to use. Childcare vouchers - which are tax exempt for both employer and employee - or childcare subsidies are other popular ways of helping parents survive the childcare years.

Simple changes like allowing parents the flexibility to change their hours to fit in with nursery drop off and pick up times can make the world of difference, says the guide. In workplaces where unions have been able to negotiate the introduction of term time working, annualised hours or job-share arrangements, both parents and employers have seen enormous benefits.

Despite considerable investment in childcare from the Government in recent years, UK parents do not have anything like the childcare enjoyed by workers in the rest of Europe at their disposal, says the TUC guide. Waiting lists for popular nurseries are often long, places are expensive - particularly in London, and many parents struggle to find satisfactory arrangements.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: Good quality, accessible and affordable childcare can go a long way towards making parents feel happier about coming to work. Workplaces offering no help with childcare risk losing the skills of female employees who can’t afford to return to work after the birth of their children.

But employers who realise the benefits of offering childcare support to the mums and dads in their workforce are less likely to have stressed out employees, and instead have productive staff who get more done. The business case for providing some form of childcare support for employees is overwhelming.

During the compiling of ’Who’s looking after the children’, the TUC has come across many personal stories illustrating how employer support can make a real difference to the lives of working parents:

In the early 1990s, Sonia, a postal worker at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in London began a campaign - backed by the Communication Workers Union - for a workplace nursery. Initially the Royal Mail was reluctant to set up a nursery on site but Sonia was determined not to give in. She and a small team of her colleagues distributed a survey around the various shifts to assess the level of demand and organised for a team of employees to visit other local workplace nurseries. Finally convinced of the business case for a workplace nursery, Royal Mail decided to set one up and 12 years on, the nursery is still going strong. The biggest problem for employees is the waiting list, but compared to other nurseries in London the cost is relatively cheap. Sonia has one child in the nursery who’s been there since she was three months old. The workplace nursery has enabled her to go back to work and do a job she enjoys, safe in the knowledge that her child is happy and safe nearby.

Michelle’s employer, the British Council, opened a subsidised workplace crche when they opened a new headquarters in Manchester in 1992. The nursery was excellent with places subsidised on a sliding scale according to the employee’s grade. It was such a wonderful facility that many people from the Council’s London office chose to relocate to Manchester and it was seen as a very effective recruitment tool for the organisation. Michelle says that without the nursery, she would not have been able to return to work following the birth of her daughter in 1996, because at the time she didn’t earn very much and had just become a single parent. Her daughter went to the nursery from the age of nine months until she started school. Unfortunately the British Council chose to end the subsidy to the nursery some years ago despite a strong campaign by staff and the Public and Commercial Services Union. Managers agreed to continue the subsidy for the parents of children already in the nursery but any new ’users’ had to pay the full fees. The nursery subsidy was replaced with childcare vouchers, but Michelle says that many of her colleagues now find it difficult to return to work because of the cost and availability of good childcare in the city. Any childcare arrangements they make are now off-site which means that parents arrive at work later and have to leave earlier.

Jess lives in London, has three children (two under the age of four) and works approximately three days a week as the director of a small charity. Her employer is too small, and doesn’t have the resources, to provide practical help with childcare. Jess has struggled to find childcare that she is happy with, and says that subsidised, quality childcare would make an enormous difference to her ability to work effectively. Childcare for three children is very expensive in London and her salary is just about enough to pay for three days childcare a week. Luckily her employer is happy to allow Jess a flexible approach to her work, but this means that she often has to work in the evenings when her partner is home to make working at all financially viable. Such is her childcare juggle/struggle, Jess says she often wonders whether it would be simpler, cheaper and less hassle to stop work altogether.