To the point: UK needs higher wages

Experts now suggest that this is because wages have been squeezed rather than jobs. People have stayed in work but they have effectively taken a pay cut for the privilege.

Britain's problem with low wages isn't new. We have a higher proportion of low-paid workers than any other OECD country, except the US. Over a fifth of all workers in the UK are paid below two-thirds of gross median pay - the OECD's standard measure of low pay. This is in contrast to the OECD average of 16 per cent.

What does this have to do with childcare? The answer is that a major part of our childcare problem reflects the dominance of low-wage employment in this country. First, if you are earning close to the minimum wage, childcare will always eat up a huge chunk of what you earn. The average cost of an hour's childcare is more than half of the hourly minimum wage. This means that making childcare affordable for parents requires governments to spend more in countries like Britain where there are a lot of low wage workers than in a country like Denmark where only a tenth of workers are low-paid. The dominance of low pay also means that greater investment is needed to create strong incentives for parents to move into, or progress, in work because, having paid for childcare, the money they take home may not justify the effort.

The connection between the high costs of childcare and the growth of low pay makes particular sense when you see that nearly two thirds of low-paid workers in Britain are women. This is partly explained by the fact that women are more likely to work part-time. Nearly half of all part-time workers are low paid.

This means that it will be difficult to fix childcare affordability without improving pay and productivity in low-wage sectors. Higher wages would help families, especially in light of cuts to state support, and save billions through higher tax revenues and lower spending on tax credits. If wages continue to be low, making childcare more affordable only gets harder.