With his overwhelming victory in the New York Mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani has proven that childcare is a key election-winning issue.
A very simple reality helped the new Mayor beat his billionaire-backed rival, Andrew Cuomo: it's obscenely expensive to exist in New York City. And in America’s most expensive city, who can possibly afford to have children?
The staggering cost of childcare in particular (upwards of $26,000 a year in NYC) is literally driving families out of the city where they live, work and pay taxes. And if they’re not leaving the city altogether, parents, mainly mothers, are being forced to give up work to do unpaid childcare.
On this side of the pond, the cost of living, including the spiralling cost of housing, has also led to families fleeing cities, depleting schools of children and forcing them to close. Parts of London are being described as a ‘child desert’, and I have seen valued primary schools having to shut their doors in Brighton, my constituency, as costs for families continue to outstrip wages.
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That is one reason why Mamdani’s pledge to deliver universal free childcare is a policy I've already been shouting about in my work as a Green MP. His view of childcare as an essential social service is precisely the approach I am taking, working with the fantastic Mandu Reid, the former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, who has an unwavering passion for how this policy could transform every sector of our society.
Mandu is a parent with direct experience of the pressures of finding affordable childcare, and I am not, but together we both recognise that everyone in society benefits when parents (and often grandparents, who often pick up the slack) are supported in bringing up the next generation. This is about free as in freedom, as well as free of cost.
In July, Mandu and I published a manifesto for a Universal Early Years Future. We listened to parents, childcare workers, service providers and children to expose the gaps in the current system that puts the burden on parents to claim the limited allowances and hunt out the scarce providers who can cover the hours they need. Meanwhile, the sector is loudly calling out the rates paid to them under the government’s policies and raising the alarm about their inability to keep a valued workforce on the job.
That is why our call is for readily available childcare, free at the point of use, based on the values and principles that our NHS is built on.
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Not just in New York City, but across the UK, we need to start investing in childcare the same way we do in hospitals and railways, and regard it as essential national infrastructure. With this approach, we too can build a system that improves developmental and educational outcomes, supports early years workers, and relieves parents of undue financial and organisational burdens.
Did I mention the value to society as a whole? The ratio of benefits to costs of this kind of service speaks for itself: every £1 spent on high-quality early years provision can return over £7 in lifetime benefits. This is how we build a stronger economy, not just how we make sure our future generations thrive.
I want politicians to stop asking if we can afford to introduce universal free childcare, and instead ask if we can afford not to?
Parent-led campaigns have led to some improvements within the current system. Ministers have recently doubled the number of government-subsidised childcare hours for pre-school children from 15 to 30. Still, free hours remain restricted to term-time and are only available to working parents, at odds with the principles that would properly value parents of all kinds to have more freedom and choices. Children from the poorest backgrounds, whose parents don’t meet the required income threshold for the newly expanded hours, are missing out.
And with childcare providers still struggling, the crisis in availability adds to a situation so dire that one in four UK mothers has had to unwillingly give up work, and one in four women without children say they are not planning on having children in the future for financial reasons#. That is millions held back not by choice, but by a broken system.
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Mamdani has also called for the wages of childcare workers to be brought in line with public school teachers, and this is another point where we agree completely. As with many professions traditionally viewed as primarily for women, skilled childcare is severely undervalued. In our Manifesto, Mandu and I call for radical improvements in pay and conditions for childcare workers, to end the crisis of recruitment, retention and low morale in the sector.
Childcare providers I have met in my Brighton constituency have told me running their service is becoming impossible. They say they are being “forced into making drastic, panicked and far-reaching decisions that will have profound and lasting impacts for the entire community.”
My mission now is to start a serious conversation about why universal no-cost childcare is the transformative policy our parents, children, employers, economy and towns and cities need.
We can make every place a space where parents, especially mothers, can work if they choose to. Productivity would rise, and investment in care would create good new jobs in every region. If we invest in the foundations now, generations to come – whether they choose to have children or not – will feel the benefits.
We must be more imaginative and ambitious to build this future.
Zohran Mamdani’s critics fruitlessly labelled his plans as unrealistic socialist fantasies, but his incredible victory this week is a testament to how people are overwhelmingly ready to think big and work with us for this kind of transformative change.
Siân Berry has been the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion since 2024. In July, she published All our children: manifesto for a universal early years future with former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, Mandu Reid.
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