We don't NEED the vouchers in that we'll starve if we don't get them. We NEED them in the sense that if we don't have them the already slightly marginal "should I WOH or not" question gets tipped further towards not. I'm currently a very few pounds better off a month from working. If we lose childcare vouchers then it probably ceases to be worth my financial while to work, so I drop out of the workforce and pay no tax at all[1]. I'm struggling to see how this is a massive win for the economy.
And what's the "saving" being used for? To provide, specifically, 10 hours' free nursery care for lower-paid parents of 2 year olds. From the sound of things, this is likely to be like the "free places" for 3 year olds and be five 2-hour sessions a week, which will be as much use as a chocolate teapot in terms of enabling lower-income parents to work, and of no benefit to those who'd rather use childcare or child socialisation arrangements other than a nursery. The whole set of "get children from lower-income families into nursery care" initiatives appear to be motivated by a sense that the poor are one vast featureless underclass whose children need to be rescued by being funneled into institutional childcare at the earliest possible age, and I find that a profoundly un-Labour and anti-working class attitude.
While scrapping childcare vouchers would hurt us personally, I wouldn't mind so much if (a) I were confident that there would actually be savings that wouldn't be offset by lots of middle-class women dropping out of the workforce and out of paying tax entirely and (b) the savings were going to do something useful like offset some part of the deficit or actually alleviate the childcare tax burden of lower paid families in some meaningful way. Extra childcare tax credits for the low paid? Vouchers for the low paid to be spent on any registered childcare of their choice at a time convenient for them? Those ideas might have some merit. But 10 hours a week of nursery education specifically for two-year-olds is a big pile of steaming crap.
In my opinion, of course.
[1] Hypothetically. In practice it's not coming in at all because Labour will lose the next election for five years, at which point my DCs won't be in FT childcare any more. But a hypothetical me a few years younger would be making very different choices about whether to return to work (i.e. not doing it).