Take this fact: the average cost of a full-time nursery place for a child is 7,300 a year. Take another fact: the average salary of a full-time childcare worker is said to be 6,100. Add seasoning, and the mixture is a mess.
No statistics offer a more poignant portrait of the childcare industry.
Although it has been blessed by Government investment and goodwill, the childcare scene is precarious. No one knows that better than the providers who have gone to the wall since 1997.
Although 623,000 new childcare places were created between 1997 and 2003, a staggering 301,000 places were also lost. The crazed reaction to the recent evaluation of Sure Start could actually make childcare provision even more unstable.
The contradictory progress since 1997 is well charted by the Childcare Commission, which began the new millennium with a prospectus offering the Government a national strategy. Its review, published this week, shows that the Government responded positively to proposals for an exponential increase in provision, for out-of-school care, for children's centres located in all schools and new duties to support parents.
But the commission's inventory of high cost, low salaries, and patchy standards and staff training reveals a bedraggled sector still languishing at the bottom of the league compared with schools.
Its portrait becomes even more dispiriting when the commission turns its attention to parents' circumstances. The labour market is still structured as if it were full of fathers working all hours while mothers toil in solitary confinement at home.
Of course, the male breadwinner was always a myth, and in any case now, mothers are a permanent feature of the labour market. But the structure of paid work is still modelled on the man who is a provider rather than a parent, and it is still hostile to the mother who doesn't want to be treated like a man, and to women who think they should be paid the same as men.
Childcare exposes a contradiction in New Labour - an historic commitment to childcare, and an historic amour with business. They are incompatible.
What the Government has never done is work out what child-centred politics imply for our economics, for our cities, for parents and childcare providers.
