Is 2023 the year that business steps in for childcare?

With Sunak’s alleged abandonment of Truss’ childcare agenda, is it time the business community finally steps into the breach? Our childcare in the UK is the third most expensive in the OECD and parents are feeling the squeeze. The average cost of full-time childcare is now a crippling £11,700 per annum. Those able to absorb the eye-watering costs of childcare also find themselves with little choice. The UK is experiencing a chronic shortage of childcare capacity, there were 100,000 fewer spaces in even before the pandemic than in 2015. This is a particularly bleak picture when compared with the situation in other countries. Take Sweden, where families spend on average 15% percent of their household income on childcare compared to a whopping 34% in the UK.

The economic and social implications are serious. A staggering 43% of women in the UK have considered leaving their job due to the cost of childcare, whilst 40% have already reduced their hours to cut costs. PwC estimates enabling increased participation of women in the workforce could see the UK gain up to £48 billion per year.

Given the high stakes, change is both necessary and urgent. The issue of childcare has been a consistent bugbear of successive governments in the UK. Reforms mooted by the short-lived Truss administration to extend the amount of free childcare hours available and cut red-tape around staff-child ratio to increase places have been shelved, with the coveted silver bullet nowhere in sight. Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak has shelved plans to raise free childcare to 50 hours, and to increase the toddler to carer ratio in nurseries and day care centres.

Given the obvious economic, social and political upsides, we can expect to see this issue receive more attention as we gear up for the forthcoming General Election. Championing childcare promises to mobilise a small army of followers as the UK grapples with a sustained cost of living crisis, stubbornly high inflation, and looming recession. And that’s before we consider the three quarters of women of working age who are also parents.

This presents a real obligation and opportunity for employers. Businesses have not traditionally been seen as primary providers of childcare. By integrating childcare benefits such as subsidised prices or on-site care into employment packages, employers would be going some way to alleviating the burden of childcare. Whatsmore, incorporating such measures will contribute to tackling existing barriers to employment - especially for women.

Many employers have long provided staff with a range of additional benefits covering everything from private medical cover to gym memberships. With intense competition amongst businesses to attract and retain the best talent, we can expect to see employers embracing a more progressive approach to childcare in future.

Companies that do so will reap the rewards. Alongside the talent dividend, their improved ESG profile will make them more likely to attract new investment and consumers. 86% of people ranked companies’ commitments to solving societal issues as amongst their top priorities when searching for jobs. Furthermore 76% of investors are willing to pay a slight premium for funds consisting of ESG rated firms. Taken together, these two statistics should cause business leaders to stop before dismissing childcare provisions. In a world with renewed competition for capital and workers, rewards are ripe for the taking!

Is social prescription the path to a healthier, happier workforce?

If in a few years you ask your GP to prescribe painkillers for back pain, you might be surprised to find yourself being sent to a gardening or walking club. But with the explosion in interest of social prescription, the whole modus operandi of GPs is due a serious rethink. Let us walk you through the world of social prescription and outline what role businesses can (and should) play in their employees’ health.

Social (as opposed to medical) prescription is the idea that small prescribed changes in people’s behaviour or habits can have dramatic effects on their health. Take for example, our patient with back pain. Sedentary lifestyles combined with low general activity levels is a major cause of aches and pain in office workers everywhere and was even identified by the ONS as a key contributor to the recent exodus of employees from the workforce. In this sense a doctor’s note to do some light cardio is much more effective than anti-inflammatory treatment because it takes aim at the cause, not symptom of the general malady.

Furthermore, if we look at the other cause of our patient’s back pain, sedentary lifestyle, we see a clear opportunity for business to help drive social prescription. Businesses should encourage their workers to get up and get moving. Standing up just once every hour can seriously reduce your risk of developing cancer or osteoporosis. Further, companies which allow and encourage their workers to get moving will see the real effects of social prescription on their bottom lines. Reducing worker sick days has a real potential to boost firm productivity. In the UK women lose 2.3% of their working hours to sickness. Funds consisting of firms which have embraced in-work health outperform their peers by over 2% every decade.

Social prescription is also a key strategy to wrestle with the challenges of an ageing population. Countries across the Global North are ageing rapidly and keeping workers and the retired healthy is a key aim of lawmakers. Establishing behaviours and habits to address health issues before they become chronic is far more sustainable than building a purely reactive healthcare system. Socially prescribing universally accessible ‘treatments’ such as walks, runs, and a healthy diet might seem trite at first glance, but it has a serious capacity to fix our nation’s health.

So, the questions must now be, how do we transition to a proactive social prescription model? What are the respective roles of government, business, and GPs in this new era of healthcare? Answering these questions might just lead to a healthier, happier society…

Key Environmental Takeaways from Rishi's Big Policy Outline

Listening to the party leaders’ speeches last week, it is important to think about what has been said (and what has not) about the environment. Rishi Sunak surprised many across the political divide by omitting any mention of the environment in his New Year’s speech, with the climate crisis not listed amongst his “five foundations on which to build a better future”.

Is the Prime Minister’s decision to focus on issues like inflation and the NHS a reflection of shifting public priorities? Certainly, the cost of living crisis has come to dominate the political and public discourse in recent months, and will continue to do so this year. Whilst resolving immediate issues from the looming recession to the NHS ‘permacrisis’ monopolizes the Government’s bandwidth, we can ill-afford to relegate climate change to a second-tier issue.

The climate crisis is not a distant nor ill-defined threat unlikely to affect the UK for decades (if at all). To take just one example, the unprecedented drought last year is projected to become a much more frequent event. It was announced last week that 2022 was the hottest year on record as we witnessed 40 degree heat in parts of the UK where it would be unthinkable just 30 years ago. Since the consensus view is that the cost of living crisis is unlikely to last very long and inflation is forecast to drop to just 3.9% by the end of this year, it seems a short-termist strategy to ignore the green agenda. Voters will not be distracted for long.

The Government is also making a key strategic mistake by refusing to see the cost of living crisis as linked to the lack of green investment. The UK still refuses to allow the construction of onshore wind which has been proven to provide cheaper and greener electricity than oil and natural gas combustion. In this sense, one of the fastest ways out of the twin fiscal and energy crises is to embrace green power.

What can we learn from Rishi Sunak’s speech then? If this was a political calculation that ‘green issues’ won’t play with the electorate this may yet prove to be flawed. What’s more, strong leadership means building a long term strategy to solve problems rather than ignoring them. And there’s no doubt that the climate crisis is a problem in need of some solutions. Let’s hope that this speech does not reflect the sum of Sunak’s environmental ambitions.