In a keynote address at the conference 'Childcare's Changing Britain - Childcare for All: From Vision to Reality', Patricia Hewitt stressed the growing economic and social importance of childcare. She said it 'increasingly is a central part of our entire economy' and is 'an important business sector in its own right'.
Ms Hewitt told delegates, 'Childcare as a business sector, childcare as a central part of our economic infrastructure, is just as important really as the transport system in enabling women, in particular, to participate in the economy for their own benefit, but also of course the benefit of the economy as a whole.' She added that the number of people working in childcare had risen by 50,000 in the past three years to more than 250,000 people, 'so that we now live in an economy where there are more childcare workers than there are car workers, and that's a change that perhaps not everyone's comfortable with and certainly not everyone's noticed'.
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