The Irresponsible State? The Politics of Child Daycare Provision in Britain

Abstract

This article seeks to shed light on the scarcity of public child daycare provision in Britain. Following a brief account of the development of policy since the Second World War, it notes the institutional and discursive fragmentation of the process through which child-care policy has been resolved. However, it concentrates on the way that process has been shaped by the intersection of two variables, the type of issue constituted by child care and the British national policy-making style. It argues that public child-care provision is both a ‘redistributive’ issue, and as such particularly unappealing to recent Conservative governments, and an issue that concerns the family, invoking an ‘ideology of motherhood’. Moreover, national policy style has entailed a reluctance to intervene either in the labour market or in the ‘private’ family sphere. This combination of issue type and policy-making tradition has conspired to marginalize child care on the national policy agenda.