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Mother's little helpers
Nannying is a good prospect for the lazy, the greedy and the light-fingered.
The mere mention of the Government's Better Regulation Task Force, rather like Dickens's Circumlocution Office, makes one fear the worst - pointless, costly intrusion and obfuscation spring to mind. The very words Task Force make me feel cross; they are part of a social services newspeak. It includes expressions like "addressing issues around" something, meaning (I suppose) avoiding actually dealing with something, and "mental health concerns", meaning the problems of mental illness.
It also includes the conciliatory-sounding phrase "I'm not very happy about that", which actually means the person refuses point-blank to co-operate. And teamed up with the words Task Force, Better Regulation doesn't sound much like less, which, of course, would be better. However, I am glad to say that I seem to be wrong about this. The Labour Government's Better Regulation Task Force has recently, and much to its credit, announced that it is against more regulation of nannies; at least it is against a national register of nannies. We could not have relied on the Virginia Bottomley Tendency of the last Government to come up with such a sensible and Conservative view. Yet there have been howls of outrage as this laissez-faire approach.
It has been a tendency of this country for much too long, and under years of Conservatism too, to imagine that when something dreadful occurs, the Government must do something to stop it happening again. Governments cannot, nor should they try.
Louise Woodward was convicted of killing Matthew Eappen. Last week a properly registered child-minder from Norfolk was on trial for allegedly shaking to death a five-month-old boy in her care. That is extremely distressing to everyone, not least to those who worry constantly about their own child-minders. But I cannot imagine any way in which the registering or licensing of nannies would prevent tragedies. The Eappens knew that Louise Woodward was an inexperienced and untrained girl; licensing her as such would not have affected their choice or the outcome.
That is surely the point. Registration is not worth much. What could it tell you? It could list a nanny's age, address, school achievements (if any), training and experience with children (if any) and even the names and addresses of people prepared to give her a reference - all the things responsible employers insist on having, anyway. I suppose it is theoretically possible that the registration authority, or whatever large and expensive public body might be set up to deal with this mass of work, at the taxpayers' expense, could check all these details, and update them constantly, as women drift in and out of such employment. In practice it could not possibly happen, regardless of expense.
Anyone who has actually employed lots of nannies, as I have - I have hired every kind, from Norland- and Princess Christian-trained girls to girls with NNEB certificates and travelling Australians - will know how extraordinarily difficult it is to make proper checks. Most agencies, even the most expensive ones in London, are pretty hopeless about this. Very often they fail to check references, or check them only by telephone; telephone references can be faked by any girl with an ounce of enterprise or charm. And as for written references on headed writing paper from Brisbane or Zagreb or Philadelphia, I can't count the times I have been told by nannies that it might not be worth writing or ringing, as the previous employers or teachers have moved some time ago to Hong Kong, address unknown. Besides, for reasons I have never understood, a great many employers write good references for bad nannies. I have some sympathy; when I gave a bad reference (in code) for a disturbed Frenchwoman, she hounded me for months with reproaches. When I later reproached her previous employer, who dumped her on me with a good reference, the woman said frankly she was afraid of her.
The truth is that a good nanny job is one of the most desirable prospects going for the lazy, the greedy, the drifter, the light-fingered and the psychotic. Only the formidable forensic skills of a very capable woman maddened by anxiety about her baby will provide the least scrap of useful evidence about a prospective nanny, and even that, very often, is not enough to go on. A State Better Nanny Task Force could not possibly take on this impossible task. Nor could it bear the legal responsibility for nannies who turned out, disastrously, to be not as licensed, and the monstrous legal costs that would mount up once we all had someone to blame for our nanny disasters.
However, even if licensing nannies were practicable, it is obviously undesirable. As the Task Force says, surprisingly enough, parents and guardians are and ought to be responsible for the care of their own children. The state already regulates schools and nurseries, and the Government is considering restrictions on nannies with criminal records, but otherwise there can hardly be any more important freedom than the freedom to bring up our own children as we see fit, without any interference from the state, and to take responsibility for the frightening risks involved, which are inseparable from that freedom.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 19, 1998
