Half of all stay-at-home mothers want to go out to work and the government is right to target tax breaks at working women, the education minister said last night.
Elizabeth Truss said two-earner families were ‘now the norm’ and said she was concerned mothers were ‘made to feel guilty’ when they had no choice but to go out to work for financial reasons.
Miss Truss, a 37-year-old mother-of-two, said Margaret Thatcher was ‘the original working mum’ and would support the Government’s efforts to enable more women to go into work by helping with the cost of childcare.
‘I think it is a problem where 50 per cent of stay-at-home mums say that they want to go out to work and can’t afford the childcare,’ she told the BBC’s Newsnight programme.
‘Two-thirds of mums in Britain go out to work - for economic reasons, and this is a trend across the world. Dual income families are now the norm.
‘I’m very concerned those mums are made to feel guilty about a choice they don’t really have. In a country like France, with very high quality early education, parents do feel less guilty, it’s more of a normal thing.’
Some Tory MPs and a new pressure group, Mothers at Home Matter, have criticised the Government’s policies on tax and childcare and risk the ‘cohesion of society’ by undermining the one earner family.
Last month’s Budget confirmed the Government’s plans to reduce child benefit from families with a single earner on £50,000, and axe it altogether for those with one on £60,000.
Two earner couples who each earn just under those thresholds will be able to keep on claiming.
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While the Government has set out plans to offer tax breaks worth £1,200 per child for working couples, to come into effect from 2015, a long-promised tax break for marriage, which would benefit both single and dual earner families, has yet to materialise.
Juggling act: MissTruss said many mothers were 'made to feel guilty' when they had no choice but to go out to work for financial reasons
Miss Truss insisted the Government was not discriminating against stay-at-home mothers by reducing child benefit for the top 15 per cent of earners.
‘What we’re saying is, why should someone who works at Tesco on a shift, why should they pay to support people who are very well off? That’s not right. What we’re doing is we are targeting resources on where it is needed most,’ she said.
The minister said Baroness Thatcher was ‘the original working mum and she introduced independent taxation for women which was a massive reform in its day’.
‘Rather than saying married women should be taxed according to their husband’s income, [she] actually said women’s income is valuable in itself. And that was a major change. She was very supportive.
Margaret Thatcher pictured with her children Mark and Carol in 1959. Miss Truss described the late former Prime Minister as 'the original working mum'
‘It is obviously true that having a higher maternal employment rate does help a country’s GDP. That’s a decision Germany made when they had one of the lowest maternal employment rates.
They were educating a lot of women and finding that they were dropping out of the labour force simply because the school day was half as long as in Britain such that they were not able to go out to work. Germany has now changed its system.’
Miss Truss repeated her criticism of pre-school education in Britain, insisting more nurseries should adopt the more formal French model where children have structured sessions led by a graduate-level teacher.