Childcare for All - Now

There was a startling government promise this week. Until now, ministers had balked, but this week Margaret Hodge, the new children's minister, put out a statement that should mark a whole new era. She promised to fill in the great missing slice of the welfare state: cradle-to-grave will finally get its cradle.

"My long-term vision," said her statement, "is for a children's centre in every community." SureStart will no longer be a small programme for the most deprived, but ("in the long term") there will be universal affordable childcare for all who want it, rich and poor. Odd how not one newspaper picked it up - another sign of the dismal salience of under-fives in the nation's (male) priorities. For mothers, this could be the great leap forward.

Hodge's appointment was the reshuffle's best news, but it got muffled in the lord chancellor's tights. Until now, under-fives were shunted off to a junior minister in the Lords. Now, in Hodge, young children have a strong advocate, backed by Charles Clarke: both ministers argue that they prefer spending on under-fives - where it dramatically improves life chances - than on easing university fees, which has virtually no impact on equality.

It is a good rhetorical argument to shame whingeing middle-class students - but now it means they really do have to put under-fives first. That is hard when all the clamour is for middle-class priorities - money for secondary schools and universities - with hardly a voice raised for young children whose life chances can be transformed. By primary school age, it's too late. The brightest poor children have already fallen behind stupider children from better-off homes. Every penny spent in the first five years outshines all other interventions, leading in later life to higher earnings, more home-ownership, better qualifications, less crime, less social security and more happiness.

Labour's most astute tactic would be to put Hodge's new childcare pledge at the top of the next manifesto, so loud, so prominent that even Daily Mail women get the message that their troubles will be over. Their unreliable childcare nightmare will be replaced by a guaranteed place as dependable as the local primary school, with fees according to income. No more patchworks of minders, nursery schools, grandmothers and neighbours. This could become the totemic policy that persuades families that paying taxes collectively works better than struggling to pay for things privately: even middle-income mothers pay out most of their wages to private childcare. (And Ofsted's worst nurseries are in the private sector.) There is real political magic in this: programmes to help poor children's chances are invisible and unknown to middle Englanders. Tony Blair fears middle England withdrawing from public services - but this one unites the interests of middle-class mothers with the poorest.

Now, has Labour the wit to run with this? It is one thing for Hodge to be allowed to declare it as her "long-term vision": chancellors don't worry about visions without due dates. So how long is "long term"? That depends on whether Blair and Brown (both) see the political gold dust in this and put a dated target on universal childcare in the next manifesto.

This is what the centres do: the first 32 full SureStart children's centres that earned their official branding this week offer childcare, good nursery education, health visitors and clinics, outreach programmes for depressed or struggling mothers in their own homes and classes to help parents back into work. Ideally, they should be in or near primary schools, to cut down on mothers' shuttling time. Ideally, they should include early and late hours now that many women work unsocial hours. Crucially, it depends on local education, health and social services working together, and that is the hardest part. Seamlessly, the centres must provide everything children and parents need.

Alarming new research presented by Professor Jonathan Gershuny this week to an Economic and Social Research Council seminar in Whitehall revealed something new: many women's opportunities are diminishing. We know inequality between rich and poor is high, and social mobility is all but halted. But his findings show that the underlying inequality between different groups of women is getting progressively worse. While men follow their fathers' occupations with little mobility, which is bad enough, women from poorer backgrounds are falling below their fathers, while women from wealthy families keep their birth status.

In the old days, when women were housewives who stayed securely married, they enjoyed their husband's social status for life. Now they have jobs, and although they still marry someone of similar rank, soon after marriage they start to take on more domestic tasks and do less well in their careers than their husbands. And once they have a child, that's it. Only the richest women from top families, who can afford full-time childcare, flourish, while the middle and poorer women give up or go part-time. Many become deskilled during their children's early years, so the gap between rich two-earners and the middle and poor one-earner family grows wider. If the marriage fails and the husband departs, the deskilled woman left with children drops into an abyss: divorced rich women survive in their jobs.

Gershuny concludes that only affordable childcare can break this pattern; plus fathers sharing the care, jobs with civilised 35-hour weeks, and one year's full paid maternity leave so women can get back on their feet without losing their careers. Otherwise women will never recover the ground they are losing. The wages gap between women and men is 18% and growing: the real gap in lifetime earnings among women is much worse and accentuates the difference between rich and poor families. Latest figures for the New Deal for Lone Parents show little progress: the number of lone parents working is only 8% greater than in 1997. Although the scheme yields high returns, with 200,000 extra mothers now in jobs and paying taxes, 46.4% are not working: lack of childcare is the reason.

The new job of children's minister may at last join up children's policy. With all services under one minister, Margaret Hodge can put nurses into schools to improve sex education and access to contraception: she owns the target to cut teen pregnancies. She can put social workers into schools, so teachers no longer need telephone unresponsive numbers in distant offices. In kudos, education always has the edge over community health and social services, so this was the right place to put children's policy.

It won't be plain sailing: Professor Norman Glass, who nurtured SureStart through its early days from his unlikely Treasury post, this week warned against watering down its focus on deprived children's development. Indeed, it would be disaster if the rush for universal childcare abandoned quality for quantity. But Ofsted is there as the quality guardian. And Hodge is the champion this needs. Now let's hear Blair and Brown give the date and the cash for it sometime soon.