It's an exciting moment to be taking over the reins as Labour's shadow children and families minister. We are about to see a general election campaign where childcare is at its heart like never before. As costs of childcare for parents have soared over past years, it has become increasingly clear that we can never build an economy that works
or everyone without taking radical steps to tackle affordability and availability. High costs make it harder for parents to return to work, drain family finances and feed into child poverty.
That's why Labour will be making a clear offer to dads and mums and parents-to-be at this election: an expansion of free childcare for threeand four-year-olds to 25 hours per week for working parents, alongside guaranteeing wrap-around care for school-age children. This will help to ensure that all parents have the choice of when and how to go back to work, a choice I was lucky enough to have but which should be universal. We want to create a childcare system that is affordable, flexible and - crucially - understandable for parents.
The Government's latest response to the childcare crisis, tax-free payments for parents, takes the complexity of the system to hitherto unscaled heights. Parents will need a PhD before they can work out whether under this new system they will be better off in work or out, opting out of tax credits or universal credit so they can claim these new payments or sticking with them. And all before we take into account the 200,000 families who could miss out on these exclusively web-based payments because they don't have access to the internet. This isn't just a sticking plaster approach: it's applying a sticking plaster on top of a great pile of older plasters, creating an impenetrable mess. And with the Government rapidly scaling back the amount it claims an average family will benefit under the scheme, it's an increasingly ineffective sticking plaster too.
Parents need an easily understood system - but so too do childcare providers. I believe that Labour's 25-hour offer can provide exactly that, with funding going direct to the provider and much greater certainty on income.
Over the next few months I will be talking to providers across the private, voluntary and independent sector to ensure we get the details of creating an affordable scheme, with quality and flexibility at its heart, but which does not threaten business sustainability. This must be an offer that exists on the ground in the real world, not just in politician's rhetoric - we need to learn the lessons of the Government's under-resourced two-year-old offer, which has fallen 60,000 places short.
Getting those policies ready to go is obviously going to be my top priority in the coming months. But I also hope to have the chance to talk a bit about the way we think about childcare and family policy. Rightly, we talk a lot about mums. After all, Britain has the lowest maternal employment rate in the OECD and our gender pay gap is failing to close - on both of those counts, the gaping holes in childcare provision play a big part.
However, our conversation about childcare risks becoming sidelined if it becomes too gendered an issue - and more importantly, it will fail to reflect the realities of life. Dads are just as concerned about their children's care as mums.
Tens of thousands of dads across the country curtail returning to work or returning full time because there isn't childcare available; and on the flip side, many dads are unable to take on care responsibilities they would like to because what childcare is available isn't flexible enough to work around part-time employment.
We can take steps to tackle these issues - but we also need a bit of a culture change. It should be seen to be just as normal for a new father to switch to part-time work as it is for a mum. It shouldn't be a matter for comment when a dad drops off their child at the nursery or manoeuvres a pushchair into a cafe on a weekday morning.
I've already started encouraging fellow MPs who are fathers, along with journalists in the parliamentary lobby, to talk openly about how they have juggled work and childcare, in the hope that this might help to kickstart a national conversation on childcare that includes dads as well - though this has led one journalist and dad already to complain to me that he was with his child in a local coffee shop and no-one was flirting with him.
I can't promise that Government can deliver universal flirting for new dads. But I do think we can do the debate on childcare in a better, more inclusive way. I'm looking forward to that challenge - as well as the policy challenge - over coming months.