To be annoyed the Tory 30 hour free childcare doesn't apply in Scotland!

[RagingJellyBean]

It's just annoying, to be honest.

I don't like the Tories, but if we have to have them the least they could do is throw us a bone up here.

30 hours free childcare when my DD turned 3 would be absolutely fantastic. I could actually afford to live a normal life again, why isn't in Scotland? 15 hours is great, don't get me wrong, but 30 hours would be PERFECT.

HOW ANNOYING!?!?!?!

That is a lot of money for the dental treatment then. Was it NHS or private treatment?

I hope your tooth feels better soon OP.

The SNP spin machine has been at work again.

Where?

Just on University tuition fees. This is also not as clear cut as it appears.

Scottish degrees are four years rather than 3 which ought to come out in the wash as my Scottish DC will be going to school a whole year after her English cousin. Many Scottish students also still go to university a year earlier than English students giving another reason why at least year 1 should be free.

Grants as opposed to loans for subsistence in Scotland are much less generous than in England.

Repayment provisions for student loans in Scotland are completely different from those in England and so not comparable.

I think keeping free University tuition in Scotland is the best thing the Scottish Parliament has done, but given the above and the fact that many will never repay tuition fee loans in England I am not convinced it is costing more.

Hospital parking in Scotland is free unless it is a hospital built through PFI. Hospital parking in England can be very expensive in any hospital.

Yes university costs a lot more in England. You pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees in England. That means £27,000.

My mums crown was NHS.

In Scotland young people who are eligible, get £5,750 a year grant for living costs. A part time job would easily make that up so that you have no debt when you graduate.

"Don't hate on Scotland because successive Scottish governments have prioritised things that you wish that the UK government had."

I don't hate on Scotland, but Scottish MPs sure as heck came to England and actively voted when it did not concern Scotland for non-Scottish students to get fleeced, and voted for free tuition for Scottish students when it did. They prioritized the hell out of that one.

Not only that, one thing people don't seem to realize is that when students down south have been paying their expensive top-up fees with loans etc, that has been counted as "public spending" for the purposes of calculating how much money Scotland gets, and that amount of money, (eg the cost of the fee they voted for that person to pay), is given from the public purse, to Scotland. Scotland gets paid for every individual payment, of every extra pound tuition fees go up for the rest of us.

So, not only there will be shelf stackers south of the border who will never see or afford an expensive university education, as well as Scottish ones who might, paying for uni for Scottish people regardless of their ability to pay. There will also be people completely priced out of university whose subsequent taxes are used to pay Scotland a premium because someone else managed to go to uni, to match that person's fee payment.

The whole arrangement is packed with fucked up things like that, and I think the Scottish Independence movement has done Scotland a disservice by shining a light on just how good a deal they've been getting

The maximum grant you can get in England is £3,387. So a poor student in England is way worse off than the same in Scotland.

my kids will leave uni with around 50k's worth of debt because we live in england. i'd swap no tuition fees for the extra childcare any day, especially with all the other bonuses like no persciption charges. maybe one day the budgets will be allocated more fairly so the english don't always suffer!

Wow? Seriously? You can't have your cake and eat it. Sometimes Scottish people get a better deal in certain areas but this time not. Education has always been devolved to Scotland.

Even with free tuition it is still hard for those from deprived areas to afford to live whilst at university, to get the required grades to even qualify and to top it all off the FE budget has been hit for colleges where these children would go to. Having to pay for prescriptions I always check what I can get from the pharmacist cheaper which saves more in NHS time and resources. Nothing is ever black and white and we all pay.

Don't ever let the facts get in the way of hating the Tories!

This would be funny if it weren't so headbangingly frustration - the Scots are still blaming the English for stuff they don't like even though it is their own government doing this...

frustrating not frustration - sorry

"England is the only country within the UK still charging for prescriptions."

In fairness, not everybody in England has to pay for prescriptions. Personally I hate the expense and worry about the day it stops me getting something important, but can see that free prescriptions are really for people who need more medicines than me where it would get prohibitively expensive for the individual/family concerned not that it isn't anyway.

Also, it shows just how expensive they really are behind the scenes. That's clearly something we need to work on, and I'd hate the already overloaded NHS to be absorbing pounds and pounds for a 15p box of paracetamol for me, I'd rather know and buy it from the shops.

I'm not sure why anyone would need to 'blame' anyone. The Tories won the election last month on a platform of extending free childcare where they have jurisdiction. Nicola Sturgeon has also committed to extending free childcare in Scotland, the difference being that she hasn't yet won an election with it in the manifesto, what with that election being next year.

"You can't have your cake and eat it. Sometimes Scottish people get a better deal in certain areas but this time not."

Interesting choice of phrase, since the Scottish MPs' effect on top-up fees in England vs Scotland, the Barnett Formula, and the way Scotland is rewarded financially every time English top-up fees go up, are almost definitive examples of having your cake and eating it.

dreamingofsun - it's not the budgets that are the problem, it's the democratic deficit with England not having a dedicated parliament. English votes for English laws won't adress it adequately either unfortunately. The English get a raw deal in decision with the West Lothian question and a lot of people in Scotland were disgusted when Scottish MPs voted to impose tuition fees on England, and that's the problem with the entire set up, that they were perfectly entitled to vote, that said vote does ultimately impact on the budgets of the other parts of the UK. Asymmetrical devolution is a bigger problem than anyone in government wants to admit.

The SNP spin machine has been at work again.

Really? One uninformed person on a web forum asks a question about childcare and it's the BIG, Scary SNP spinning? And people wonder why some of us wanted independence?

Not spin but I would observe that blaming Tories is a socially normal thing to do in Scotland so much so that the OP will probably be surprised to see the negative response on this thread.

It's not spin on a particular topic, more a permanent prism through which to see events in UK politics.

There are stories in the press today, about serious concerns with this Bill, and the draconian measures in it, to punish anyone who claims incorrectly (even though it may be pretty complex to work out if you are entitled, in some circumstances - ie. you get it if both parents work, but what if one is on a zero hours contract and does no work in a particular week), and against nurseries who don't have accurate and complete records on the employment of all parents of children claiming these free hours.

Given this, I am not sure it is an unalloyed boon to parents!

Re tuition fees: is it true that English students to Scottish unis pay but students from other EU countries don't?

Free hospital parking in Scotland is mostly a myth. Yes, if the hospital or car park isn't built under PPP it's free, but good luck finding one of those.