With three children and a high-flying career, Wenche Fone shows what Scotland’s working mothers stand to gain from the Nordic model of social support that is the holy grail for independence campaigners.
The 42-year-old Norwegian took a year off to care for each baby on her full salary and when she returned to work, her one-year-olds went into a full-time nursery with a ratio of one adult carer to every three children.
There are many similarities already between Scotland and Norway — the shared fishing and shipbuilding heritage, the long coastlines, sparse population and huge reserves of oil. Even the word kilt is of Scandinavian origin.
Yet while Stavanger may be geographically closer to its fellow oil city Aberdeen than London, there is a long way to go before Scotland could match the world’s most generous welfare state across the North Sea. The Scottish nationalists have yet to provide costings for the process of transforming their country into a Nordic idyll or say how much of the oil windfall will be used.
“To live in Norway in many ways is like winning the lottery,” said Ms Fone, director of advocacy for Norwegian Church Aid, sister organisation to Christian Aid. “It is quite cheap here to have children in kindergarten and it gets cheaper for the second and the third. The whole structure of our society encourages women to have a career.”
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It also seeks to promote equality of opportunity, so her husband was able to take 12 weeks off on full salary to help care for their daughter Hedda, now aged three. The state pays up to 400,000 Krone a year (about £40,000) to the parent on leave, with the rest of the full salary made up by the employer. The maximum cost to parents for nursery places is about £230 a month.
Scottish nationalists hope to emulate the Norwegian dream, with plans to extend childcare to all one to five-year-olds. They claim that increasing free nursery provision will encourage 6 per cent more women into the workforce and raise £700 million through extra tax revenue, although independent studies say that there are not enough young mothers to make this viable.
Norway is finding that even its generous childcare provision has drawbacks. “We have pushed the limits very far to make it possible for women to work and have children at the same time. In a broad perspective it has been very successful but it means that you have to put your child into childcare at one years old, you have institutionalised childhood in a way,” said Mathilde Fasting of the Civita think-tank in Oslo.
“It has pushed the age of the mothers really high up into their mid-thirties, which is the age when they are really productive at work, so there is a question whether that is good for productivity.”
Experts also caution that generous childcare is just one aspect of a multilayered system. “The Norwegian welfare model, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, is a very complex fabric,” said Ulf Sverdrup, director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
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Save The Children this year named Finland the world’s best country for mothers, followed by Norway and then Sweden. The UK was placed 26th.
Inevitably, a much higher level of taxation lies behind this success. “One aspect of the Nordic model is a generous level of public services but you do not hear so much talk about the high levels of taxation which is the inevitable consequence of it,” said Michael Keating, professor of Scottish politics at the University of Aberdeen.
Scotland aims to save much of its oil revenue to create a sovereign wealth fund to match Norway’s £554 billion nest egg built up over the past 20 years. This was achieved by refusing to splurge all the oil money on social provision, however.
“If you want to move towards the Scandinavian model you cannot do that with the oil money, you have got to raise taxes in Scotland to do that,” Professor Keating said. Direct taxes in Norway amount to 42.2 per cent of GDP on average per person compared with 36.7 per cent in the UK, while indirect taxes are also substantial, with 25 per cent VAT.
“The weakness of the SNP positon is that they tend to want to spend the revenues and use it for the oil fund as well,” Professor Keating said. “The nationalists play on this myth of egalitarianism in Scotland, as an aspiration we can all share, but it is all very vague.”