Full Monty to Humpty Dumpty - the New Deal and childcare
Résumé
With the inauguration of the Childcare Strategy in 1998, concomitant with the New Deal, the New Labour government typically tackled both the phenomena or symptoms and the causes of social problems. In the realm of employment, childcare or the lack of it has been both a cause of difficulty in returning to work, and an area in which job creation has occurred. This ‘push-me pull-you’, double-sided approach to social questions endeavoured to combine what the New Labour government would call a ‘social contract’ between society and parents, between employers and future workers, and state semi-intervention, or semi-state intervention in the labour market, creating new jobs by proxy in the private childcare sector with a wave of the social policy wand. This paper examines, firstly those well-known but oft-ignored obstacles to paid employment outside the home namely children, secondly the expanding labour market in the area of childcare and finally the way in which the New Deal was used to bridge the gap between both labour force and labour market in the childcare sector in the first six years from 1997 to 2003, period which was to set the pattern for intervention in this area.