The demand for day-care for children in the Netherlands has risen explosively. That is a success for the Dutch government, which relaxed its subsidy policies in order to enable more women to participate in the labour market. But the success has a downside: last year the cost was 500 million euros over the budget. So is day-care really a success, or has it become a problem?

On the way to my office to write this story, I ran into Anja pushing her 14-month-old baby daughter in a stroller. Anja is a lawyer, and works four days a week. She brings Marijke to a new day-care centre here in The Hague, established just last year. She says she's lucky - without the new day-care centre, she doesn't think she would have found a place for her daughter.

Anja is one of tens of thousands of parents who are making use of the explosive growth in the day care sector. In 2007, the day-care sector grew by 35 percent. The growth is the result of a number of major policy changes in the last few years that have resulted in more options and lower costs to parents.

Attitude
But an even more important change, according to the chairwoman of a lobby group representing day-care centres Lenny Versteeg, is a general change in attitude toward day-care.

"The biggest change is in the way parents think. Parents used to have doubts about whether or not it's a good idea to bring their children to day-care. So we had to convince them, and I guess it's paid off."

Ms Versteeg goes on to say that the Netherlands has lagged behind other European countries when it comes to day-care. The fact that child rearing is seen as women's highest priority could be a vestige of Holland's Calvinist past. Still the number of hours women work are relatively low.

Bottomless pit
As it becomes more socially acceptable to put your kids in day-care, more and more couples are doing so, thanks in part to generous government subsidies. But the government underestimated how quickly the sector would grow, and now has to find hundreds of millions of euros to pay for the generous subsidies.

Marieke Stellinga is the economics editor at Elsevier, a Dutch news weekly magazine. She says the costs have gotten out of hand. "Day-care has become a bottomless pit. They were already spending millions on it, and now a new pile of money has to be found. This is a recipe for waste and fraud."

Even supporters of the subsidies admit there is some fraud. But, they argue, that's inevitable when the government is handing out subsidies. The growth in the sector has mostly taken place in traditional day-care centres, and before and after school care. The cheating many people are concerned about is a result of subsidies for individuals providing care in their home. The number of people claiming those subsidies is growing, but remains a very small percentage of the total.

Successful
Many are willing to pay the extra costs. Ineke Dezentjé-Hamming is a member of the Conservative VVD Party in parliament. She says the extra money above what was budgeting should not be seen as a setback. "I would say it's very successful. Because there was a great need, and now we are finding the right track. And after a year, we already say this is costing too much money? I would say it's a big success. Deal with it and make sure our child care is the best in Europe."The government is going to look into why they got their estimates for the costs of day-care so wrong.

Meanwhile, the need still is not meeting the demand, and waiting lists are long. Anja, the lawyer bringing her daughter to a day-care centre, says for her there's no question. If it weren't for the new day-care centre, she would have had trouble keeping her job.

26 March 2008 

[Copyright Radio Netherlands 2008]