Marriage, partnership and cohabitation

This briefing note is provided as evidence to the Work and Pensions Select Committee as to whether childcare could be provided for all parents who need it to help them to work. It looks at the ways in which this could be achieved.

The current Labour Government wants to reduce the level of child poverty in this country.

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.

This IFS book (March 2002) reveals that mothers still face substantial hurdles in undertaking paid employment. For those who do manage to work, childcare arrangements are a diverse mixture of carers, cost and quality. Government initiatives to increase the availability of childcare places have a substantial shortfall to address while measures to increase the

Childcare subsidies are typically advocated as a means to making paid employment profitable for mothers, but also have important ramifications for the use and quality of paid childcare. Even if one is concerned primarily with the quantity aspect, the quality dimension cannot be ignored. This paper provides an exposition of the potential biases in estimates of price elasticities with respect to quantity that do not allow for quality variation or for the possibility of non-linear pricing structures.

The subsidy of childcare for pre-school-age children has moved rapidly up the political agenda in the UK, and government policy has developed considerably in this area.