Ms Roma Burke:

I thank the Chairman. Childcare is the trigger for helping more women participate in the workforce. The Chairman is really asking whether the commission considered the impact of women being better facilitated to either return to the workforce or work more? Yes, that was fully and very carefully considered at our technical sub-committee level. I am a lay person on economics but I was sitting beside two very able economists and we had a discussion about participation rates within the workforce, how that increases and the role of women within that. One of the conclusions from the committee which is already built into the calculations is not what I would consider to be an optimistic calculation but one which is at the higher end of a range of assumptions. Basically, an increase in the labour force participation rate from 62% to about 66% is built into these calculations. Looking at the research and discussing it with my colleagues, we felt that there was probably limited scope for further participation given that that was a fairly challenging increase in labour force participation. That, in turn, is dependent upon childcare and other factors to help people.

We also looked at the impact of increasing education levels on people going into the workforce and staying there. There were a couple of elements to that consideration.