Is free-market Britain fair enough for all?
In a three-part series, the Monitor looks at how Britain, France, and Finland are adapting their social benefits models to the information age.
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The new gym at Abby's school was made possible by parental and community effort and investment, not by help from the central government. Thirty miles north in London, however, a new schoolbuilding program has started due to much-vaunted partnerships between the state and the private sector.
One group, Partnerships for Schools, plans to remodel all of Britain's 3,500 secondary schools, and has secured £2.2 billion ($3.9 billion) to put toward the project this year. "This has to be a good thing as [his wife] Tracey was teaching out of a portacabin [trailer] when we lived there," says Rix.
A plan to extend school days with after-hours care over the next three years could make it easier for Tracey to get back to paid work should she want to. Jeremy, on the other hand, might be able to stay home from work if they have more children - and if another one of Blair's plans, this one to grant three months of paternity leave, becomes law. In truth, however, it might be hard for a company director to absent himself for so long.
Indeed, these are small benefits that are dwarfed by the substantial hurdles that lie ahead for a young British family. Getting two children through university in Britain in a decade's time will take more out of the average budget, given Labour's plans to raise annual tuition fees to £3,000($5,300) from the current £1,000. Beyond that, there is the issue of retirement funds - possibly the biggest challenge facing European governments and their ageing populations at the moment.
Rix says he's not expecting much help from the state with any of this. He says his own parents have already shown the way, amassing their own private savings rather than relying on the paltry state handout. (Though Britain did offer its citizens the option of switching some of their social-security payments to private accounts over a decade ago, few were pleased with the results.)
"The future may be unpredictable because of things like university fees and pensions, but I'd imagine that if I was someone of my age in France, it would be just as unpredictable, because what they have may not be sustainable," he says.
The solution, he feels, again goes back to the workplace. Rix and his peers will not be able to retire at 55 like the current babyboomer generation. Some may have to work until 70, he says. But that may not be a bad thing.
"You'll get the opportunity to have more than one career," he says. "I wouldn't expect to be 65 and working full time, but ... to be able to give up the hard graft at 55 and do something completely different, something part-time, might be a blessing."
Hampton Court will provide a setting for a lot of these ideas to be thrashed out. "It's not going to be a pitched battle between two sides slugging it out in the gardens," says one British diplomat familiar with the summit agenda. "Each country has its own social model and likes it.
"But we have to ensure that [these] levels of social protection are affordable in the future. Can we go on providing that level of social protection if our economies don't grow faster?" he asks. "We are going to be saying [at the summit] that we've got a collective problem and we need a collective solution."
