With his overwhelming victory in the New York Mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani has proven that childcare is a key election-winning issue.

A very simple reality helped the new Mayor beat his billionaire-backed rival, Andrew Cuomo: it’s obscenely expensive to exist in New York City. And in America’s most expensive city, who can possibly afford to have children?

The staggering cost of childcare in particular (upwards of $26,000 a year in NYC) is literally driving families out of the city where they live, work and pay taxes. And if they’re not leaving the city altogether, parents, mainly mothers, are being forced to give up work to do unpaid childcare.

On this side of the pond, the cost of living, including the spiralling cost of housing, has also led to families fleeing cities, depleting schools of children and forcing them to close. Parts of London are being described as a ‘child desert’, and I have seen valued primary schools having to shut their doors in Brighton, my constituency, as costs for families continue to outstrip wages.

That is one reason why Mamdani’s pledge to deliver universal free childcare is a policy I’ve already been shouting about in my work as a Green MP. His view of childcare as an essential social service is precisely the approach I am taking, working with the fantastic Mandu Reid, the former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, who has an unwavering passion for how this policy could transform every sector of our society.

Mandu is a parent with direct experience of the pressures of finding affordable childcare, and I am not, but together we both recognise that everyone in society benefits when parents (and often grandparents, who often pick up the slack) are supported in bringing up the next generation. This is about free as in freedom, as well as free of cost.

In July, Mandu and I published a manifesto for a Universal Early Years Future. We listened to parents, childcare workers, service providers and children to expose the gaps in the current system that puts the burden on parents to claim the limited allowances and hunt out the scarce providers who can cover the hours they need. Meanwhile, the sector is loudly calling out the rates paid to them under the government’s policies and raising the alarm about their inability to keep a valued workforce on the job.

That is why our call is for readily available childcare, free at the point of use, based on the values and principles that our NHS is built on.

Not just in New York City, but across the UK, we need to start investing in childcare the same way we do in hospitals and railways, and regard it as essential national infrastructure. With this approach, we too can build a system that improves developmental and educational outcomes, supports early years workers, and relieves parents of undue financial and organisational burdens.