A new year always brings a new set of political pledges from our leaders as they seek to reset their agenda and inject some hope into the year ahead.
It is also customary to “trail” bits of a speech before it’s officially delivered.
This can become an art form for spin doctors, who will divvy up what they consider to be the best lines from a 40 minute speech and place them all with different newspapers the day before it’s given.
Such a practice is the best hope they have of getting good headlines, but it can also go spectacularly wrong.
In a trail for a speech that Rishi Sunak will give shortly, we’re told the Prime Minister will acknowledge that the public are apprehensive about the year ahead.
Apprehensive?
That’s an understatement equivalent to saying Pele was a decent football player or the Tay is a bit chilly at this time of the year.
I suspect that when other political leaders rise to their feet this week they’ll speak more frankly and recognise that the vast majority of us are worried sick about what lies ahead.
Do Sunak’s plans stretch to childcare reform?
We’ve long known that the cost of living crisis was going to endure throughout most of 2023.
Energy bills are expected to stay high.
Inflation will dip but not enough to see our food bills substantially fall.
Wages will be frozen or at best rise only in line with inflation.
On top of all that associated worry, we must now fret too about the NHS.
Each day brings shocking new headlines about the state of emergency care, leaving us all to question whether if we needed help in a hurry we would get it in time.
It is of course the duty of our leaders to understand the mood of the nation, but they must offer prescriptions for it too.
The trails for the Prime Minister’s speech this week are littered with what he won’t do, while the big offer so far is a big increase in maths provision for English school kids.
A maths question for Rishi Sunak:
If you promised to hire 50,000 additional nurses but 40,000 nurses quit last year, how many nurses are you short of your target thanks to your refusal to improve pay and conditions?
— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) January 4, 2023
One of the things he won’t now do, according to this speech, is deliver on the promises his predecessor Liz Truss made on childcare reform.
She promised a “big bang” policy, reforming the whole area with a view to getting more women economically active and reducing the cost.
That’s before the economy went pop under her watch and she had to resign.
Childcare reform challenges north of the border
Childcare is of course devolved to the Scottish Parliament, but big investment in England would lead to more money for Scotland, thanks to the Barnett formula.
It may also have encouraged our leaders here to be even bolder on the issue of affordable, flexible childcare north of the border.
Credit where it’s due, major investment in childcare has been made here in the past five years.
It is, however, heavily focused on three and four-year-olds with a bit of provision for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds.
There are still huge gaps in provision over the summer holidays and in wrap-around care for school aged children.
If we want more women – and it is still women who are the majority of primary carers – to return to work and bring in that extra revenue for their families and our public services through the tax system, then we need a universal system that is as affordable and as flexible as it possibly can be.
Politicians in search of a big idea this year to drive economic growth, create jobs and reduce the cost of living on families will struggle to find a better area to focus on than childcare reform.
I fear Rishi Sunak has already got his first foot into 2023 wrong by ditching the one thing Liz Truss got right.
Conversation