Making the Island family-friendly
Young families are leaving, and our economy relies upon working-age people. Births have fallen by more than 40% since 2010. There were 574 births in 2024, the fewest since 1918, and deaths now exceed births by more than 350 a year. The population is ageing around a shrinking group of working-age people and more than a third of new residents leave within five years. The financial deal for parents of young children is better in the UK. If we want an Island with a future, we have to make it a place where young fmilies can afford to stay.
Childcare credit for babies from six months
The childcare credit doesn't reach the youngest children, leaving parents to cover the most expensive stage of childcare alone. I'll push to extend the credit, universally, to babies from six months ofage. In England, a working family gets thirty funded hours of childcare a week in term time from 9 months old. Here, support doesn't start until the academic year in which a child turns three, so most families have to shoulder the first two to three years of childcare alone. That's a gap that helps push our young workers to the UK, and it's a gap we can choose to close.
The 2021 Census showed that 2,503 people ere out of work because they looked after the home or family, and 87.1% of them were women. By giving parents a real choice about returning to work (for those who want to) we would be keeping skilled people in the Manx workforce at a time when we are reliant on inward migration to fill jobs. Affordable early childcare is an economic policy as much as it is a family policy, and the Island benefits both ways. Research shows that parents who leave the workforce and return when their children are older suffer a "child penalty" in their earnings - and for Government income that means lost tax revenue - which never fully recovers.
A single policy can't reverse a birth-rate decline this steep as it also involves the housing crisis, but on the doorstep people have been telling me they can't afford to have children, or to have more. This is one part of that we can actually do something about.