20 Jan Anna Whitehouse (aka Mother Pukka)
Last week, campaigner Anna Whitehouse (aka Mother Pukka) and the TUC launched a call for working parents to share their experiences of how they are coping with both work and childcare commitments during lockdown.
She is asking the government to support all businesses to enable them to offer a much more flexible solution and furlough options, and for business to implement this wherever possible.
After posting a callout on her Instagram, Anna helped the TUC receive over 50,000 responses from working parents. This is an unprecedented response to a survey of this kind (for context the TUC typically get around 2,000) and the results are shocking.
Anna is naturally hugely passionate about this and is available today/next week so do let me know if you’d like to speak to her? Happy to discuss first-person pieces as well as it’s such a huge news topic at the moment. (you may have seen Anna discussing on Sky News yesterday).
The survey found:
- Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents who asked for furlough had their requests refused.
- Nearly all (90%) of those who replied said that their anxiety and stress levels had increased during this latest lockdown.
- Most (78%) hadn’t been offered furlough by their employers.
- 2 in 5 (40%) of all mums who replied were unaware that the furlough scheme was available to parents affected by school or nursery closures.
- And almost half (48%) were worried about being treated negatively by their employers because of their childcare responsibilities.
- Around half (44%) of mums told the TUC they were worried about the impact having to take time off work would have on their household finances.
- A quarter (25%) of mums were using annual leave to manage their childcare – but nearly 1 in 5 (18%) had been forced to reduce their working hours and around 1 in 14 (7%) were taking unpaid leave from work and receiving no income.