Rising pension age will lead to childcare gap

The grandparents’ charity warns that this will mean that many grandmothers who provide childcare will have to juggle work and care.

Grandparents are also likely to be older and may be in poorer health or have a partner who needs care, which could reduce their capacity to look after their grandchildren.

The charity’s new report ‘Doing it all?’, which compares data from the British Social Attitudes Surveys in 1998 and 2009, reveals that grandmothers aged 55 to 64 provide the most childcare, the group who will be affected by the increase in state pension age.

Nearly two-thirds of grandparents with grandchildren under 16 are providing childcare.

On the Autumn Statement George Osborne said that the state pension age will rise to 67 from 2026, a decade earlier than originally planned.

One in five grandparents provide at least ten hours of care a week to enable parents to work, and half of mothers rely on grandparents to look after their babies when they return to work after maternity leave.

Grandparents Plus warns that without adequate state support for both formal childcare and ‘eldercare’, there is a risk of a serious care gap emerging.

It says that grandmothers could also become increasingly vulnerable to poverty if they leave work early to provide care for their grandchildren.

The report also shows that grandparents are getting older. Eight in ten women aged over 75 are grandmothers, compared to seven in ten in 1998.

Four out of ten grandmothers are relying on the state pension and just less than half of grandmothers are living alone, compared to 38 per cent 13 years ago.

The report also makes a number of policy recommendations including:

• Making sure that Sure Start children’s centres are genuinely welcoming to grandparents, and they support the role which grandparents play in looking after young children.
• Investing more in high quality affordable childcare.
• Removing the requirement for grandparents who are registered childminders to look after children who are not their grandchildren and to make the process for registering as a childminder simpler.
• Ensuring that guidance for job centres from the Department of Work and Pensions recognises the role that grandparents play in providing childcare and supporting families, and that job-seeking requirements do not undermine this.
• Exploring how grandparental care could be recognised, including the question of payment.
• Giving grandparents access to flexible working

Denise Murphy, interim chief executive at Grandparents Plus, said, ‘With childcare costs soaring, many parents are becoming increasingly dependent on grandparents to look after children so they can go to work. 

'But we think one of the consequences of the raising of the state pension age may be more mothers giving up work because grandmothers are no longer available to provide childcare.

‘Take London as an example - where childcare costs are highest, and fewer families have grandparents they can turn to for help. Here, proportionately fewer women are in work than elsewhere in the UK and there are some of the highest rates of child poverty in the UK’

Case Study

Grandmother Dawn D’angelo, 45-years-old, from Middlesex cares for her two grandsons aged 17 months and 14 months-old three to four days a week. She also helps her mother-in law care for her father-in-law who has Parkinson’s disease.

She gave up her full-time job to care for her grandchildren after asking to go part-time but failing to get a reply from her employer.

Ms D’angelo intends to return to work on a part-time basis in a year’s time when her grandchildren go to nursery, so she can continue to look after them. However, with the proposed changes she will have to work up until the age of 67 in order to receive the maximum state pension.

She said, ‘It was inevitable that the Government would increase the state pension age. I’m relying on my state pension.

'I’ve got five private pensions on hold after being made redundant numerous times, but with the charges on private pensions schemes they won’t amount to much. Hopefully I will stay fit and healthy until I can retire.’