Even with the salary-related chèques-service childcare voucher, paying for daycare outside school hours can add a hefty sum to many families’ monthly household outgoings.

Coupled with plans to make school lunches free of charge for all children and teenagers attending primary and secondary education, the new progressive package will cost the state an estimated €22m per year--a drop in the ocean of the €23.5bn expenditure planned in the 2022 state budget. In any case, the state has been saving some €70 million per year since June 2015, when the previous DP-LSAP-Green coalition revoked the early education and stay-at-home maternity benefits for parents of young babies.

Some parents, like Jules Clement, were unhappy though. Clement was the author of a petition that was debated in parliament just a few days before Meisch made his announcement. He and the 4,900 people who signed his petition want equal financial compensation for parents who decide to care and feed their children at home rather than at a maison relais out of school hours.

Clement argues that parents are being financially punished for making that choice. Indeed, many parents do not even have a choice because they work part-time--meaning they are not priority for what are often a limited number of places at a particular facility--or their job involves shift work. Clement reckons that offering parents some sort of financial compensation could allow more people to take up part-time work.

In fact, part-time employment in the grand duchy is falling again after reaching a high in the pandemic-related second quarter of 2021. It has long been thus. 2020 figures released by the OECD showed the part-time employment rate at 12.8% of all employment, just below the EU average of 15.1%, and well below Germany’s 22% and the Netherlands at 36.9%.

Whether encouraging more people to move to part-time work is ultimately beneficial to Luxembourg’s economy--with its current skills gap--is questionable. What’s more, even if they want a better work-life balance, many families with mortgages who want to retain a semblance of their current lifestyle cannot afford for one parent to not be in full-time employment.

Indeed, the government’s decision on childcare may encourage more parents who would otherwise have stayed at home to return to work after their child reaches primary school age. The new policy, like other progressive childcare policies launched by this government such as more flexible parental leave, not only looks like a vote winner but could also reap rewards for the economy.

This article was originally published in the . It has been edited for online.