HUMPHRYS: The Government wants women to go to work, or at least as many of them as possible. Far better than living on benefits for all concerned, they say. But do all women agree? The Government has been carrying out its own inquiry into into the views of women in Britain and it will be reporting on that this coming week. As Jo-Anne Nadler reports , the results will not be entirely welcome to ministers. JO-ANNE NADLER: New Labour set out to be women friendly and in 1997, it won a majority of women's votes for the first time. BROWN: For lone parents looking for work, the age of exclusion is over. NADLER: For women and men with or without children, work is the foundation of New Labour's welfare policy. ALISTAIR DARLING: We're making sure that people are better off in work than they are on benefit. BROWN: A common obligation to work. DARLING: We're helping people into work. NADLER: Labour's next generation enjoying their bit of the conference fringe. This conference cr�che allowed parents to attend the main event knowing the kids were safe. In government Labour have also boosted childcare as part of a range of policies designed to help people off welfare, stressing that work is best. But the Government's own research will show that many women feel this emphasis on work strikes the wrong balance between work and family life and that those who would choose to stay at home to look after their children feel the Government is not on their side. Sarah Cameron was a teacher, now she's a full-time mum. She's chosen to take time away from work to look after her son, two year old Ewan. As a lone parent she feels a particular responsibility. SARAH CAMERON: Well I've got a happy secure child, who I love being with, he loves being with me. There's plenty of time to go back to work later, I just feel particularly in the formative years where his personality is forming I should be with him. DR CATHERINE HAKIM: It's certainly the case that we don't fully recognise that being at home full time is work if you have got children to look after and if a women gives her children to someone else to be looked after that's counted as being in paid employment and recognised in national statistics and so on. BARONNES JAY: Our whole package of new working rights gives a new security, especially to women who work part-time. NADLER: When the Women's Minister Baroness Jay spoke to the party's conference she was able to remind delegates of the many measures which the Government has to taken to help working women. It's been a comprehensive programme of action driven by New Labour's welfare agenda and includes a Working Families Tax Credit to ensure a minimum weekly income of two hundred pounds, the National Minimum Wage to increase the incomes of the lowest paid, often women. The New Deal for lone parents which requires all lone parents to attend a job advice session, developing a National Childcare strategy and making employers increase time off for parental leave. BARONESS JAY: Well the primary intention as you know is to get them to exchange benefit for working and of course with things -..additional encouragement like the Working Families Tax Credit and the tax credits that go towards child care, that becomes even more of an opportunity that people want to take up. NADLER: As part of a concerted effort to prove a commitment to women the government has been listening to women, consulting thirty thousand of them over six months. The findings, to be published next week, show that very many women do not share the Treasury's zeal for paid work. Many feel strongly that regardless of improved child care they are the best people to look after their own children. CAMERON: Particularly with the introduction of the Working Families Tax Credit it seems the message is that most mothers should be working. I just think there should be more emphasis on mothers staying at home. NADLER: And these values are widely shared according to the findings in the Government's research. They show that women want choices. If working, they want flexible arrangements to balance work and home, and if not working they want their role as mothers to be valued and respected. These findings will be reinforced by a study which the Economic and Social Research Council will be publishing later this year. This will show that two thirds of all women want to be able to choose to take time out of work when they have children and there's also a trend away from women putting a career ahead of family life. HAKIM: The feminist movement has argued for so long that women wanted jobs and should have equal rights in the workforce that it became assumed that everybody wanted to have a full-time job and nobody wanted to stay at home, and I think this is a mistake we've made. The research results do show very, very clearly that a substantial minority of women don't want to work at all, actually prefer to be home makers and others want a much more moderate involvement in the workforce and so I think we just have to take account of research results, and with a government that is interested, positively interested in evidence based policy I hope that these sorts of research results will be taken account of. NADLER: For families which can manage on one income it's possible for a mother not to work but campaigners say the Government's welfare policies mean that that choice is being denied to women on lower incomes. MEAVE SHERLOCK: I think the Government started where it needed to start and it began at a fairly low base and all that it's done in helping working families needed to be done. So I've very pleased that that's there. I think the challenge for them now is now to take similar measures to help those women who need to be full-time parents, very often because their children are very young or the family has recently been through some kind of crisis. We talked to lone mothers who feel that they may just have been through a very difficult divorce or separation or bereavement, or maybe they have very young children and they feel there are times when they need to be full-time parents. I think it is important that the Government signals that it favours that role of being a parent just as much as it values the role of being out at work. NADLER: Sarah and Ewen enjoy their sessions at Southampton's bouncing babies club. For Sarah it's all part of Ewen's pre-school education, and it's her duty to be involved. Like all parents she's benefited from the Government's boost to Child Benefit and supports efforts to extend child-care, but while Ewen is small she feels there's a greater value in her caring for him than working. It's a traditional view of motherhood which hasn't always been popular with some women's campaigners,, but this week New Labour has been signaling a more reassuring tone. TONY BLAIR: To the women that can work but because they are also mothers and carers and helpers, barely know how to get through the day we'll give you the support to set your potential free. NADLER: But those mothers on benefit who choose not to work are being sent a less encouraging message when faced when faced with the compulsory job advice of the New Deal. HAKIM: The compulsory interviews certainly reinforce the message that going out to work is legitimate and proper and what is expected of all adults, and the message that also that staying at home and rearing your own children properly is not somehow sufficient or socially acceptable. SHERLOCK: What we have been very pleased about is that we've lobbied as have others, to make sure that no-one is going to be forced to take a job, no lone parent will be forced to take a job against her will. So she'll be made to go in for an interview, but if at the end of that process she decides that she wants to be with here children she can do that, and we'll fight very hard to defend her right to do that. NADLER: The central aim of the Government's welfare policy is to more payments off benefits and into work, but as the Government's finding this approach is alienating women who choose to stay at home. Policy makers close to Gordon Brown think these findings are making the Government receptive to changing the balance of its policy, and that it will be open to their calls for a baby-care benefit, which they'll make at a seminar called by the Chancellor later this month. NADLER: Since leaving the Cabinet New Labour's first women's minister has been investigating how to build on the Government's record for women and she now favours financial assistance for mothers who stay at home. HARMAN: We've got a Child Care Tax Credit at the moment which will give you up to seventy pounds to help with your child care if you're going out to work , and what I'm going to be suggesting is that up to the first year, up to the baby is twelve months old we say you can have that either as a Child Care Tax Credit, that seventy pounds to help you pay for child care or you can have it as a baby tax credit, which enables you to stay at home. NADLER: Harman's trusted relationship with Gordon Brown makes her a powerful advocate for such an idea, taking it right to the heart of Government, but if she sells the case for such a proposal others would favour extending it beyond twelve months old. HAKIM: Finland for example has brought in a new home care allowance for mothers of young children which was massively popular, a hundred per cent take up rate within the first year, and the take up rates were most spontaneous amongst working class families, because it's amongst working class families that the amount of money you can earn if you do go out to work is not that huge, and it's not just a question of child care making it possible for you to go out to work. These women could go out to work because they had wonderful day nurseries, there was no problem at all, but what you gain from the amount of money you can earn its value may actually be less than the value of your time with your own children at home. NADLER: That's certainly the calculation which more British women are making, and one which the Government acknowledges it should take account of., but for a government which has invested so much energy in promoting work there's set to be resistance to helping women to stay at home. BARONESS JAY: We won't want to go back to the days when for example people were campaigning at one stage to have wages for housework. I think that sounds very out of date now. NADLER: Sarah has made her choice. It's a choice more women aspire to, but the Government will have to change more than its language if it's to convince women who don't want to work that their role matters. HUMPHRYS: Jo-Anne Nadler reporting there.