To not pay the childminder

[Surelyunsure21]

Hi all,

I am hoping to get some advice on a very tricky situation. DP and I have always seemed to find it impossible to find good reliable childcare and as a result we have bit the bullet and put both our DC (aged nearly 3 years old and 18 months) in nursery over 3 days. They are due to start next week which is lucky as I start a new job on Tuesday, it is my dream job so I don’t want anything to mess it up.

Previously to this we have had a childminder for the last 10-11 months however she is highly unreliable.. DP started a new job in February and he was hoping to pass his probationary period this month.. since May the childminder has been incredibly unreliable to the point where on the days where he is working from home he ends up looking after the children, in between working. His job is a lot more flexible for this.. my previous job was in a contact centre so it impossible to even grab a drink when it was not scheduled.

The childminders excuses were always legitimate and obviously there would be no payment for the days they didn’t do but we didn’t mind paying.. we’d rather have smooth childcare than none. The one issue with payment and it was a little something was that they insisted on getting paid for bank holidays even if we didn’t need to send the children (which we didn’t) and if we wanted or needed too it was double fee. We never sent them but we just thought the whole process was ridiculous.

So long story short the childminder has been that unreliable in the last few months that it nearly cost my OH his job. They have chosen to extend it for 3 months but he cannot work from home anymore and he basically doesn’t get any privileges for 3 months (it’s better than being fired though)

I’m due to start a new job and he’s in a probationary which should have ended and we’ve just put our house on the market too sell and move closer to my new job so obviously cannot afford for anything to screw it up. I sat down with OH and we rang a few nurseries in our new area and one had space to take them from next week so we signed them up and paid the deposit.

We then text the childminder to advise them that we would not be requiring their services any longer as they have been so unreliable they have nearly cost my OH his job and that as a result of this we would not be returning them in September and we would not be paying anymore money.

I understand that you are angry and upset and it's a very frustrating situation but I think you would be better to pay the full amount minus the 4 days from August. She can easily take this to the small claims court and I suspect she would win her case. Is it really worth all the extra stress and hassle? I think it's better just to pay up and be done with it all.

38% of days is utterly ridiculous. “Legitimate” reasons or not, that is not a way to run a business and in your position I would probably be telling her she would need to take further action if she felt you should actually pay notice as you feel her service was so poor she was already in breech.

I think your offer of paying 38% of the notice is reasonable. I wouldn't feel like paying her one brass farthing more than that. The times her boiler broke and she had a leak - she should still have had your children. the only times she was reasonable was if she was sick or the covid stuff.
Let's face it - if I only worked 38% of my contacted hours for work, because of leaks and broken boilers, I'd get the sack.

[quote Surelyunsure21]@Still1nLove we aren’t happy to pay for days when she doesn’t take time off.. we either ask for the fee to be returned for those days or she will ask for an occasional day extra so she doesn’t lose out on too money which sometimes when I’ve got housework to catch up on or something I will agree too or I will accept overtime with work. I’ve stopped doing that as of late though because it was making payments messy.

I am not overreacting but August’s payment was only £200 for our fee because she has taken that much time of in July which we paid in advance for.

I’m not happy about the Bank holiday rule because no one else I know works like that. She should charge double for taking the children but nothing if she doesn’t take them.. we shouldn’t have to pay for her being contracted that day but still not taking them.[/quote]
Of course you need to pay for bank holidays, you should also need to pay if you don’t send your child for whatever reason, I assume this is all in the contract?

This is the CM livelihood, she needs to cover herself. You would need to pay for these instances in a nursery, at least you do where I stay.

@Mindyourbusiness22 I don’t want to not pay anything. I am happy to pay 38% of the 4 weeks notice minus the days she owes us so £132.. or she can keep the money she owes us for August and leave it at that

@WaterIsBest

Our nursery does not charge for bank holiday Mondays

If she states that the hours are 8-6, she’s got a right to demand you pick them up by 7:30! That’s an hour and a half over her time.

Frankly she sounds awful and I'd be paying whatever I had to just to get rid of her.

I'd refuse to pay and let her issue court proceedings if she's stupid enough.

It will cost her £105 to issue a claim and pay the hearing fee for the amount of money you're talking about (£300-£500).

If you lost (you wouldn't, given her failure to perform) the maximum costs against you would be the £105 plus a very small, capped fee for legal representation if she was batshit enough to use a solicitor.

So all in all you've nothing to lose in letting her try to get a judgement against you.

I think if they're Covid related reasons you just have to ignore all those (even if it's that they're sick with something else, but have Covid symptoms so are waiting for PCR test results). Covid has had an absolutely dire impact on all childcare settings, lots have been closed off and on repeatedly. Hopefully you'll find that's less the case now, but I wouldn't bank on it tbh, unfortunately all working parents do need some sort of back up childcare atm if their employers aren't flexible. It does sound like she has been unreasonably unreliable for other reasons too though, so you're well within your rights to move your LO to a nursery. You do have a contract with her though, and she could persue payment via the small claims court. You could potentially argue that she's been in breech of contract, but you could lose and you'd end up paying the court costs too. It depends really how much you fancy going down that road, you could try and come to some kind of compromise first, or just refuse to pay and see what happens in the small claims court.

@AngelDelightUk we never pick them up at 7:30. She texts asking that they are picked up by 17:30, sorry it must have been a typo I meant 5:30PM

even though they have no symptoms

^this is the point of testing as so many people pass it on are symptomless.

I don't think you're being unfair to her at all regarding payment. She is in breach of contract. As long as you have evidence of this I'd let her crack on with legal action.

I’d be inclined to pay 38% of the notice period.

@SausageRollFan

If you breach the contract by not paying the notice period she will have a case against you and could well get that money plus costs back via court action. Equally if you think she's breached the contract, you can also take court action. You can't just not pay unfortunately.

Courts are overrun and take a pretty dim view of people instigating cases against each other with no attempt to resolve or mediate beforehand. Encouraging people to simply take retaliative court action in the first instance is irresponsible.

Personally I don’t think YABU OP, she has caused you serious inconvenience. What did she say when you pointed out that her level of service is below 50%?

@ejhhhhh I just want her to accept the offer of £720 minus the 38% of her contracted days that we can prove she has worked since May and then minus the 5 days she owes us for August so £132.

She already has £300 which is owed back to us so I don’t know why she doesn’t keep this and we will leave it there

Your DH is probably in trouble for not being open about it, if he just hasn't been doing any work and keeping his head in the sand hoping they won't notice im not surprised. Did he have a conversation with them about having to work with the child home as no other option?

Being open about it or not makes no real difference. An employer doesn't really care about why someone isn't producing all they know is Ops DH isn't producing. Even if he did keep saying CM let us down again, his employer will think he's either bullshitting, trying to save money on childcare or has incredibly unreliable childcare.
Employers may be sympathetic to the odd day but if the childminder has done less than 40% of her time that is a heck of a lot that he's been trying to multi task.

Op your doing the right thing going with nursery. But I'd hang off with the house move until his probation period is over. Unless he can use holidays to help move.

I that would be reasonable, it's probably worth sticking to that. Even if she does go to the small claims court, the fees area excessive.

*aren't

She’s not text back since DP text her with all of these details. We went all the way back to 8th of May and we checked all texts and every day where we have either had to have them at home and where my mum has had to have them at short notice.

Bearing in mind all the notice she gives us when she does cancel is about a half an hour before I am due to start work so it always affects the day ahead. The repair issues were the most annoying because she’d say she couldn’t have them because she had no hot water and heating which I understand but it was during the summer months

* I would be VERY concerned a nursery had space for two children from next week.*

^I wouldn’t be at all. In my large town there are no waiting lists for miseries. Not a concern at all.

I know 3 childminders and they don’t charge for bank holidays. Local nurseries do charge.

@Lockdownbear thank you for the advice! I didn’t think about trying to book time to move. His direct line manager has said at 5 days in the office again then they will definitely be able to see an improvement in his work sooner than 3 months so he may be able to be passed sooner. His direct line manager said he didn’t want to go with 3 months as that seemed a bit steep and he really likes DH’s role as he is a specialist in his field. They basically hired him as web developer (front end) but he is also a designer and he used to specialise in improving existing websites and making them better so I think they are really nice to keep him on and give him a chance

They’ve even enrolled him on to a course to learn back end developer software whilst the design front is quiet. He really doesn’t want to lose this job.

Plus I start my dream job on Tuesday and the hours are so accommodating that I don’t want to risk losing this either

I wouldn’t believe her excuses about the boiler.

@Beaudalaire I think that’s definitely what it looked like when I went round, children had recently all moved up and out to school etc. 🙂

@drpet49 I just thought it was strange that she said she couldn’t take the children because the boiler broke down and then when the engineer came round one day she told us we could bring them when they left which ended up being in the afternoon time and we still paid the whole fee for that day rather than like half a day