To think someone MUST be profiting from private nurseries?

If people are making huge profits more will open and parents will be able to just put their children in one without needing to go on a waiting list. Certainly no nurseries will have to shut because they can't get staff.

Well obviously privately owned nurseries make money. If they didn't why would anyone open one??? They HAVE to make a profit or they will close. It is hugely stressful to own and manage a nursery - if you didn't make money, you would not do it. It is a fair living, not a fortune.

Nurseries are like care homes - they charge a lot, pay their staff little, but plead poverty.

Possibly not in the same sector, but I manage the finances of our church preschool. For the last 3 years it hasn’t even broken even and has been subsidised by the church. PP are correct in saying that the amount the Govt gives per child doesn’t cover the cost of having them in preschool, so in order to survive we have made the difficult decision to increase fees from September. No profits here!

About 20 years ago, 2 nurse friends said opening a nursery would be a money printing machine, they asked me if i would be interested in joining them as a qualified teacher....they didnt go ahead, i do hear that now many struggle to make decent profits.

The difference with care homes is some people really do need this care I don't think they are comparable .Some people families can choose for them to go and not do go the care any more . What is it twenty two thousand they can go down to . Or you have someone with nothing and no one and the council has to pay for their fees cos there is no alternative .I don't think childcare is the same when you have elderly people hurting themselves on a daily basis ,and no one even knows .We can't allow people to just disappear, yes childcare is different because they have someone to care for them .

The property owners/landlords are usually the winners and profiting the most.

Very few nurseries own their buildings.
Rent will be higher than employee costs in most parts of London.

Also, not all private nurseries are the same. My dc went to two different private nurseries. Both family run businesses, in small rural communities, not big national chains. No one was driving a porsche. There were no top up fees. With funded hours, I paid £100 a month for 5 7-hour days - because I needed to pay for an extra hour each day to allow me to do the school run for my older one. £100 a month for near full-time nursery, 30 hours completely funded, I paid £5 per hour, 5 hours per week for the extra. Yes, people were paid their salaries, but the business itself was not making huge profits.

In one of them, they were already a wealthy family thanks to huge inheritance and had masses of start up capital and nothing to lose. But private nurseries do tend to build up profit very quickly in general.

30 hrs / 15 hrs free childcare is so hypocritical.
Private nurseries have a free structure that they worked out saying this is how much you need to pay for your child for us to be worth it looking after them.
And then the government comes in and says "this is how much are we going to pay for those hours". It doesn't make sense! They are in their right to charge how much they want for the unfunded hours, but then are they supposed to give the funded hours cheaper?
Our nursery is pretending we need to pay extra for food. But what they charge is so obviously more than what they spend on food, I know this is their way of making up for the lost income. And it makes sense - then I sent my child to that nursery I expected this is how much I'm going to pay. It is still more fair to say I need to pay for the difference the government pays and what the fee would be than having the parents of the non-funded children cover the difference.
If the government says they can cover the price of the nursery place for the price they pay for the funded hours, they need to open more state nurseries. No wonder those nurseries are usually attached to schools where they just re-use existing parts of a building, so they don't need to pay so much for the building.

If the issue is “they” are complaining and you wish they wouldn’t.

1. Next time they complain, make an excuse and leave the conversation.
2. put your kids elsewhere

I voted YABU only because they are a business, and their only reason to exist is to make a profit for the shareholders.

Unless you are in a public sector job, I'm sure you know your company needs to make a large profit to be viable?

! £1m net profit!
😲

I am involved with the tax preparation for the small (4 branches) nursery group my child happens to also attend. They achieved £1million in net profit two years back.

I can see why nurseries would be struggling if they’re not topping up. Mine always required top-ups and I’d much rather a sustainable business with good provision than a nursery cutting corners on staffing ratios etc. the nursery my children went to were above ratio for example and sent out some fairly strong communications about that when there was talk about reducing staffing numbers by the government. Realistically I don’t think it’s possible to run a good nursery on the government subsidy alone.

The whole funding issue has now become a smoke screen to hide the Government paying public funds to shareholders. We know that at least one of those shareholders was the PM's wife.

^This. Today’s example of the PM siphoning off wealth was the announcement of £240m to modernise the GP phone system to tackle the morning rush to get a GP appointment…..(sarcasm). What is needed is to increase the # of GPs so we have more appointments, not spend £240m on a bot to answer the phone with a labyrinthian set of menus. Guess which company loves automated phone systems and bots? Infosys, owned by Mrs Sunak and its increase in value driven by U.K. government contracts increased their wealth by £100m this year alone.

The £240m should imho go to fund University bursaries to encourage students to study general medicine without going into massive debt.

Not a useless bot managed phone answering system
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/all-gp-surgeries-in-england-to-have-digital-phonelines-by-march

Struggling probably means the nursery managers are finding it more challenging to keep within the budgets they have been given to run the nursery.

Those budgets are set to keep the profits at the same level to pay those directors fat salaries and buy Porsches, not that the directors are living on beans on toast.

Same with care homes for the elderly. My SIL is a home manager and her budget per head to feed her clients 3 meals a day + snacks and drinks
are shockingly low. It was a few years back she mentioned it and I can remember saying I spent more feeding my dog each day!

It is the owners of the land/buildings who are profiting. The nursery operators pay massive rents to offshore companies, which are often owned by the same people who own the nurseries. They then make a loss on operating the home, so they don't pay tax, while making large profits through offshore companies which don't pay UK tax..

Exactly the same goes for care homes: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/care-home-operators-beg-taxpayer-17553469.

It depends on the nursery. Some smaller independents are struggling. The larger nurseries that are part of a chain are not. They're backed by investors - often foreign investors.

The whole funding issue has now become a smoke screen to hide the Government paying public funds to shareholders. We know that at least one of those shareholders was the PM's wife.

You didn't honestly think Jeremy Hunt had your interests at heart, did you?! 🤣

1. Their salaries are a labour cost, so would be deducted prior to determining profit.
2. Dividends are taken from after corporate tax profits minus reinvestment.

Same as care homes really - i know a few in private equity who have moved into this sort of business. Making eye watering amounts.

You can look up their financial statements on the Companies House website and see if they are making a loss of profit, and if so how much.

Its not a big mystery.