AIBU to feel annoyed about ‘free childcare’

[CoolMoose]

My 2yo has just started to receive the ‘free’ 15 hours. AIBU to feel like it’s such a joke?! He attends full time at nursery and our bill has reduced from £1600 a month to just shy of £1400 a month (£240 a month reduction). They only offer the funding stretched (you can’t just access the free childcare) and you have to pay for ‘add on’ costs. It’s £15 a day for food….a 2yo doesn’t eat that much, surely! In addition, you have to pay full fees for bank holiday closures.

I have an older child and this is definitely getting worse and worse for families even with extra government funding. When my older child was little I paid £550-600 a month for full time childcare without funding and about £150-200 a month with funding (10 years ago).

You don't end up with less money at the child benefit threshold - just a terrible high marginal tax rate.

If you have altered your behaviour because of the loss of £2k a year, can you imagine how your behaviour might change if you are going to lose £15k year on income already subject to a tax rate of >60%?

'where does it end' - firstly, every other country in Europe provides vastly more affordable childcare. It's a social good.

Secondly 'someone has to pay for it' - by not allowing the people funding the policy to have access to it (and everyone I know in this situation / have seen on mumsnet discussing it is absolutely seething about it), you create an 'us and them' mentality. Why support these generous benefits if we are totally exluded from them?

What else should we exclude high earners from. Maybe they should have to pay for their health and education privately so as to not 'take from lower earners'?

It's absolutely ludicrous that people who are supposed to be in the top 5% of earners can't afford two children. Completely broken system.

The parents?

Where is that?

A nursery in the north west .

Oh absolutely it would infuriate me- but to me the issue is the tax brackets and the shitty wages.
im also fully for better funded childcare- but as stated I don’t feel more aggrieved for the 6 figure earners. Funding a policy you don’t have access to is the very nature of the benefits system fyi.
I think it’s crazier that people earning enough to begin being taxed 40% can’t afford 1 child. Like i said my sympathy lies with the middle and lower income earners.

Exactly. Politicians complain that too many people are ‘economically inactive’ - how many of those are women with young children, who might well like to work but can’t, because childcare costs would eat up more than they earn?

Funding keeps nursery staff on low pay. If nurseries were able to charge the real costs of each place it would be significantly more than the funding offered and the little bit nurseries can claim in 'consumables'. Private nurseries also have to pay VAT that school nurseries are exempt from.

Funding only covers term time hours - this is fine when approaching it as an educational package but not the realistic needs of full time childcare that most families need these days. If you need all year hours most families have it stretched to keep from having more expensive months.

We do follow the rules and have completely free sessions but the hours aren't much help to most working families (ie 9-3) and are really only helpful for families using the settings for education rather than childcare.

Private nurseries do not have to charge VAT.

I honestly don't know how people afford this and with the funding not even really helping. I think more employers should help with costs, my work don't charge the nursery rent on their site so any staff get it £42 a day ( non staff £70 a day), plus a salary sacrifice so my bill for 3 days a week is £650 a month, but it's really only £400 I'm down a month because of the salary sacrifice.
Soon with the cost of living people just simply aren't going to afford full rate nursery even with the funding, and the nursery staff aren't even super well paid which I then feel bad for because their jobs must be pretty tough!

I think it's a complex issue.

On the one hand, most people need two full time incomes to afford a house large enough to have children. So with most parents, both partners will work full time. And on the other hand, long term as a society we do need people to keep having children. So therefore, some kind of (properly) subsidised childcare makes sense.

On the other hand, there is an element of individual choice to having kids (and certainly how many), and have both parents working full time. It is unfair to ask young single people, or older childless people to subsidise what is partially a choice.

And as people have said, when you get to school age, there's still wrap around care, holiday childcare etc to pay for. For many families it does make sense for e.g. both parents to work 4 days part time/compressed hours, or one or both to work term time only, or to have a parent working flexible hours/shifts etc to bring the childcare bill down. But I fully accept for some families this isn't possible, and I do wonder if certain jobs (e.g. healthcare) should come with subsidised childcare. For private sector employers, perhaps it's on larger employers to offer heavily subsidised childcare as a benefit?

Part of the issue is definitely that wages have not kept up with house prices- it isn't so long ago that families where both parents worked full time weren't the norm, even in London. And there's no reason it has to be the woman who works part time, either.

I do feel for nurseries (although I accept that there are ways and means of communicating it to parents). They are dealing with rising costs (rising staffing costs, higher energy bills, higher costs of consumables, probably increasing rents etc), whilst parents are expecting their bills to come down by a significant amount, and there's no way to make that work.

I can totally understand why parents feel annoyed too. However, I think the overall issue is part of the wider cost of living crisis.

That's crazy to me. My daughter is four and had had the 30 hours funding since she was three. She goes for two ten hour days a week and one five hour afternoon and we use the remainder of her entitlement to stretch it into the holidays a bit. Food and things like suncream are included in costs so we literally don't pay a single penny for her.

£15 a day for food is insane.

I don't understand all these additional costs nurseries are adding on.
When DS was in nursery 20 odd years ago it was a fee per day all in (with meals provided as standard).

When did all this change and why?

"Hi. 5k seems a bit low for years ago. I live in a poor area with lower costs and my day care bill even then was £35 per day for my now 16 year old."
@Hankunamatata
It was about £28-30 per day 20 years ago but I guess it depends on the nursery.

Yes our last nursery bill was £800 and this was with a 10% discount. And it’s only 3 days a week !!
I think it’s scandalous the way private nurseries are allowed for example to charge from 8am to 6pm even if you drop at 9am snd collect at 3pm. It’s all or nothing. I recently considered changing my hours so I could collect at 3pm every day and the saving was so minimal it wasn’t worth it.

I keep telling myself at least I will have most of that cash in pocket when older 😂🙈🥴

It's the same with the standard 30 "free" hours you get when they turn 3. I think we save about £60 a month. How that equates to 30 "free" hours I don't know. Its 1 free day in reality.

Typically it's all in until a child starts receiving funded hours and then they start charging for food / activities to make back some of the money being lost through funded hours. In a roundabout way meaning parents don't actually save much at all from these "free" hours.

We took ours out a private day nursery (£130 a day, London) and put in a school based preschool from age 3. Not because of the funding but because the private nursery wasn't the best place for them once they were out the baby and toddler room.
Yes holiday cover was a nightmare but it's always an option. People like the convenience of private nurseries and 52 weeks a year flexibility but convenience does cost.

I don't really know why the government is so obsessed with nurseries.

Dedicated facilities are such an expensive way to provide care compared with childminders working from their own home, using toys, furniture and equipment they already own.

There are already a pool of women who will choose to stay at home when their own children are young. The government could massively increase the pool of childcare available at low cost by encouraging childminding with incentives.

We pay £1690 for 4 days a week for daycare in an unfashionable part of zone 4 London - a hideous amount of money but our only real option. Once her funded hours kick in, I plan to spend the extra on lattes and avocados.

There used to be a half day option at DS's nursery and they didn't charge full price if you were on holiday. A retainer I think it was called.

It seems they are very much ran as a business these days and not so much a service. I realise property and other general costs may factor into this.

Perhaps they could get a business rate refund or something? Centrally funded and accounts tested though (not via struggling LAs).

Also maybe offer better and longer maternity pay (with job protection) so parents can actually look after their children too.

Bellamountain
They won't do that because we have a labour market shortage, and economically as a country, we are not productive enough to afford having women at home only looking after their own 1 or 2 children

They will only do things that involve increasing the average number of children cared for by each adult and thus freeing up other adults for increased labour market participation.

You may not like it, but its true, unless most people are willing to accept a significant drop in living standards.

Oh not this again! Many of ‘the older generation’ understand very well, as it affects their families. Don’t try setting one generation against another on this issue.

That’s a ridiculous notion. Having children in the UK has become a luxury. How do you suggest people afford children without a fairer income distribution model, better taxation and social policies? These are connected problems.

I’m a Brit in Europe. I pay the top end childcare cost due to my earnings. Given it’s a form of indirect taxes, I pay around £100 a month for 12 hours a day childcare. It means I don’t fret about taking on more challenging roles and I pay 50% taxes on my income. If that means that people less financially fortunate get free childcare, so be it. That’s what it means to live in a fair, equitable society. We put into a pot based on ability so that society as a whole benefits.

Childcare provisions are a societal necessity. It must be adequately funded by the government as part of an effective social services programme.

One thing a lot of people forget is in the eras when more women have stayed at home with young children, they also had more of them!

The government would be less bothered about pushing families to use nurseries & work, if it was a choice between a parent caring for four of their own children at home vs 3 of other people's as a nursery nurse.