It was fairly inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later a pressure group would demand that the taxpayer pay grandparents for looking after their grandchildren. After all, there is barely anything in life these days that passes unpaid, so the climate must be right for some judicious exploitation of this most uncomplicated of relationships. So, we are told, your average granny would now like to be rewarded for her hard work with little Sofia or Emily or Jack. Or all three at once.

Looked at through accountant's spectacles, grandparents are a big business proposition. The UK has an estimated 13 million of them, more than a third of whom are said to spend the equivalent of three days a week caring for their grandchildren. If they all received extra state funding - in the form of national insurance credits and two weeks' “granny leave” - and if their children received childcare tax credit for using them as carers, we are looking at a scheme that involves a considerable bill for the taxpayer.

But how feasible is this? How hard should any politicians, in particular the Tories, be listening? The argument is put forward in a plan called Rethinking Family Life by Grandparents Plus, a tiny campaigning charity based in Bethnal Green, East London, which seeks to promote the role of kinship care by grandparents, particularly in cases of family breakdown, single parenthood and other difficult circumstances. And while I do not doubt that good hearts are beating at Grandparents Plus, which has only two members of staff and an income of £37,000 last year, I do think this is a classic example of a single issue group, armed with an internet poll of 2,270 adults, attempting to finesse the real state of affairs.

I'm not sure that I am convinced that six in ten of the population think grandparents should receive options for flexible working or some other reward, nor that 75 per cent of us believe they should receive pension credits. And I certainly don't recognise any widespread sense of injustice among grandparents because their contribution in the lives of their grandchildren goes unrecognised.

What is depressing about this campaign is that in attempting to highlight the undoubted importance of grandparenting, it distorts what is precious about it. It reduces one of the closest of family bonds to a financial transaction, and tries to put a value on it. That's very sad and ultimately destructive.

Some things, happily, can't be costed. Handing out money does not by itself aid social cohesion. However much the world has changed - and it has - grandparenting is still about love and family, not about remuneration; and the average grandparent regards looking after grandchildren as both a duty and a privilege. It is a bond, in a way, defined by its generosity.

At its best, a grandparenting relationship provides unconditional care, wisdom, perspective and time. For the child, those are precious things to receive, but so too, often, is the relief from the tensions of overstressed parents.

Valerie Grove wrote movingly in times2 yesterday about her inadequacies as a granny - too busy, too burdened - and it is indeed true that many of today's grandparents are still far too active to fulfil the folksy image of the old woman in the corner handing out sweeties from a tin.

And it is true, too, that today's grandparents can, in some circumstances, be just as absent and dysfunctional and flawed as anyone. But giving them state allowances won't change that. Most people are more successful as grandparents than they were as parents - if only because they are older and wiser. This time around, to use the old cliché, they have all the pleasure and none of the responsibility.

And there is another really significant thing to remember. The issue of payment raises the issue of the compliance that will necessarily follow it. You only have to look at yesterday's ludicrous news about nutritional school meals, designed by computer and impossible to cook, to understand that bureaucracy is the wolf that forever bays at the door, and that modern government of any hue is incapable of shooting it dead.

If the State starts paying grandparents, inevitably it will want to enter their homes and regulate how they look after their grandchildren.

And we have been forewarned about what form that regulation will take. In September new statutory guidelines for childminders came in via the Early Years Foundation Stage, under which they must carry out risk assessments, plan their days, keep records, fulfil learning and development requirements and be registered as food premises. Predictably, thousands of childminders quit. All grandparents will feel a chill run down their spines if they read the new rules. There's the educational programme to fulfil, and the hygiene, and the written record of the child's progress towards early learning goals, using a set of 13 assessment scales. How long before granny has to do the same?

It's not worth the money. In fact, unpaid or not, it's scary enough to put one off grandparenting altogether and send one off on a cruise.

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