Companies slide towards family friendliness ...

... but it's proving an uphill battle to get them to take on the issues, reports Hilaire Gomer

Family friendly companies - how many of them are there? Not enough says Margaret Hodge, the Employment and Equal Opportunities minister. Once it was a marvel that 10 per cent of companies helped their employees with childcare, now, with rising expectations on the part of parents at work, it is considered far too low.

Ms Hodge has boosted charities and organisations like the National Childminding Association and Day Care Trust with her approach to the shortfall in the nation's childcare provision. "An enterprise has to suffer if employees don't have affordable, accessible, quality childcare," she says. And that doesn't mean just for the under fives.

National Childcare Week, sponsored by Day Care Trust last week, released a MORI survey on Tuesday which revealed that 80 per cent of parents with children from under 14 think employers should provide more help with childcare and 92 per cent want the Government to do more to get employers to help.

Despite the role models of the bigger concerns, only 17 per cent of employers in the survey offer incentives to encourage mothers back to work after a baby and only four per cent give financial help.

US consultants Work/Family Directions set up Ceridian Performance Partners in the UK to tap the growing childcare market. It specialises in help lines to assist staff on everything from elderly parent care to finding a childminder for a six-month-old. It now has an impressive client list including six major banks.

"We could assist smaller companies but they would have to form a group," says Penny de Valk, UK managing director of Ceridian. "But the issue as we see it is the big company where the work-life balance is more extreme than with smaller firms. The big companies' whole raison d'etre is that they are service companies servicing staff as well as clients and they want to retain staff."

Under the present Government, the Department for Education and Employment has turned on its head the previous 17 years of laissez faire toward child issues. European integration (Continental EU countries tend to have more generous childcare arrangements), more women than men working, and 20 years of campaigning by charities and working parents have had a cumulative effect. Companies are beginning to accept the zeitgeist.

The DfEE's National Childcare Strategy, launched two years ago, aimed to get everyone to address the issue and boost the number of childcare places available. There are now 150 Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships which promote the under-fives care available.

Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has an excellent incentive for women returning top work after childbirth. For a year they receive vouchers, produced by the firm Childcare Vouchers, which they can use to pay for their child-carer.

After the year is up they can purchase vouchers out of their salary which is more cost effective than cash because the vouchers are not eligible for National Insurance Contributions. They can also participate in the company's flexible benefits scheme where all staff have a choice of "buying" various benefits like a car, insurance, and up to 10 extra days off a year. Human resources manager Carolyn Wilkinson says: "When I hadn't 'spent' all I was entitled to I had just enough to 'buy' an extra day off to be with my son during his holidays."

Colette Kelleher, director of Daycare Trust, says that while it could be described as relatively cushy to work for a big company, there is still a gap between rhetoric and reality. "Help with childcare is not reaching many ordinary families. Employers who help with childcare for their staff benefit from lower recruitment costs and higher productivity."

Many a smaller company with a tight budget, although recognising the business case for helping with childcare, doesn't have the resources to subsidise a day nursery or child-minder place, or even offer flexi- time, part-time, term-only time and shared jobs.

It is significant that the companies working with Focus Central London Training and Enterprise Council, which is helping the Government reach its childcare goals, are mostly state owned or charities. Stakis, a hotel group, is an exception. Ciosa Dallas, general manager of the new Stakis hotel in Islington, north London says: "I spent a lot of time recruiting the hotel staff and I don't want to lose them so I'm prepared to be very flexible and twist rosters to suit their needs. If their morale is good they work better and the client benefits."

Stakis Islington offers the statutory minimum in maternity leave and has never heard of Childcare Vouchers or nursery-place subsidies, but Ciosa Dallas can cite many instances where she has fixed it so that staff who are also young mothers have been able to be with their children when necessary. "A male assistant manager needed help the other day because his parents had to go to a funeral abroad and he had to look after his three younger siblings. Another had to go back to Africa for 12 weeks and his job was held open for him."

A key area which no one is tackling, least of all employers, is the shift workers' plight. Only 10 per cent of employees in the UK now work a standard 40 hour week and they have to arrange childcare as best they can when they are out working. Ideally, says Daycare Trust, there should be an all-day service for three- and four-year-olds, not just part time nursery education places.