Every Thursday, Maureen travels an hour and a quarter across the capital to Wimbledon to look after her three grandchildren: Harry, 8, Ella, 5, and Lily, 2. She takes them home from school, listens to Harry chat about football, before a second later Ella will be on about her pink spangly butterfly hair-clip. She often looks after their friends, too: six or seven children in a small sitting-room, making a racket, drinking juice, eating biscuits, charging around with dolls, playing each other at computer games.

“I love it,” she says. “I’m a big part of their life.”

Without granny, her daughter-in-law’s child-care bill would be £1,000 a month – “a third of my salary”, as Sarah Regan points out. To enable her to work as a part-time clinical nurse specialist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, she already needs a child-minder (£145 a week) and a nanny for school pick-ups (£60 a week). She needs granny to save her and her husband, Paul, a director of a printing company, around £120 a month in babysitting fees – and even more in the holidays (around £100 a day), when granny steps into the breach to do cooking, feeding and bathing, while grandpa, a retired civil servant, takes them to the park…Continue reading