Tories campaigning to remove the childcare maximum income threshold

[FlakyPastries]

Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Tories want to remove the upper income threshold on childcare.

This means all working families will be able to claim it, including those earning over £100k.

Do you agree with this policy?

My baby’s nursery charges £30,000 and the free hours and tax free childcare is worth around £15,000 - so this is quite a significant benefit for those currently unable to claim.

Childcare should be universal. The current petty removal of child care is counter productive. Why are so many GPs and parent professionals only working 3 day weeks. Cliffedge taxes and the removal of education stops people wanting to work and families where both parents are working pay and extraordinary amount of tax. No brainer.

I wholly support this. Thanks to the 62% tax rate trap between £100-125k, plus the loss of childcare means that you need to earn about £140k or £150k to have the same amount of money was before.

Why should you be punished for doing well?

Don’t talk nonsense the vast majority of the well educated and hard working aren’t paid above £100k.We can’t afford to chuck away £700million a year. It’s sheer lunacy designed to lure Reform voters. Tories still thinking about themselves as opposed to the needs of the country. The unbelievable arrogance that the country as a whole will just suck it up and vote for them is hysterical. They’re so out of touch and have learnt zilch through their last few years of disaster .

I definitely feel that there should as a minimum be a "triple lock" (hell, we would even be grateful for a double lock) on the thresholds for child benefit and childcare cut offs

This is brilliant, did you produce the graph yourself or can you share the source? I'll use this to arm myself against the inlaws for our christmas 'debates'

It's still only a small percentage. Even in London.

Good luck with arming yourself against the electorate as a whole who will just be incredulous that the Tories would chuck away this kind of money on the richest!🤣 The Tories need to be in power to implement it and with policies like this I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Because their children would then mingle with children of working families, instead of living in a bubble of people who don't work, thinking it's OK not to work.

1 in 10 workers in London earns >£100k.

Around 2 million people will earn over £100k this tax year.

And - this group pays >50% of all income tax, so their behaviour is important.

Fewer barriers to employment if you have universal childcare

Because of course all non working parents are just going to get stoned or go to the pub while their kids are in the nurseries you’re paying for.

FFS.

Or we could look at it from the perspective of the children, who would benefit hugely from the experience of being in nursery with other kids, learning to socialise and prepare for going to school. Kids from non working families are already at a massive disadvantage. Personally I would rather my tax went towards supporting them than giving handouts to families earning over 100k. But this is MN.

Yes, it's about 1 in 10 workers in London. Just under, I believe.

They won't all have pre-school children in need of childcare though.

I don’t think your average £100k+ earner with nursery aged children is predominantly likely to be a reform voter (?).

It’s urban voters living in HCOL areas who will be voting Labour and Lib Dem.

It's the low paid workers that are struggling the most with the CoL. Maybe taper the personal allowance so it's higher for the lower paid. There are people working very hard in low paid jobs that are really struggling.

ill vote for them

I don't think it should be a cliff edge at £100k but also don't think it should be free for mega wealthy people. There must be a way to introduce a sliding scale.

Utter madness giving millionaires benefits. What a waste of money. And they want to do away with the environment agency to fund it! Something that benefits us all at the expense of a benefit for the wealthiest. Kind of sums the Tories up.

Meanwhile Andy Burnham is working at creating a much needed cross party overhaul of the care system.

Hey Kemi this is what proper prime ministers do, they try to sort out major issues for the country as a whole.Take note!

The additional costs are a choice. Should we give people with dogs extra money for their additional costs? People with bigger houses?

The Tories want to stop giving free money to people who are disabled, not through choice, but give extra free money to people who choose to have multiple children. Bizarre.

Cliff edge taxes are always bad policy.

We have people we desperately need, like surgeons, going part time to bring their income down below the limit, because it costs them more to work full time.

It's a badly conceived tax and should be replaced with a graduated tax.

Are people earning £100k a year (and particularly of the age to have preschool children) likely to be millionaires?

More likely middle class professionals with big mortgages!

Mega wealthy people aren't screeching into the nursery car park at 5.55pm, they're using nannies and they're not remotely interested in whether they're ofsted registered so they can use tax free childcare because £10k is small change to them.

If you're going to notice the difference between having that subsidy and not, to the extent you're only working 3 days a week, then the country is almost certainly better off with you working 4 days a week, paying more tax and NIC and buying your coffee and lunch on that 4th day.

Yeah I wouldn't have thought this is aimed at the Reform defecting contingent. More the soft right, the sort of people a lot of Tory stuff in the last few years has scared off.

Most of us would be worse off if we chose a much more expensive lifestyle, eg. having children. 😂 You don't qualify for benefits anymore when you reach a certain income level - is that not the way it should be or do you think everyone should be on benefits?

But everyone earning <£100k is subsidised for their childcare ‘for choosing a more expensive lifestyle’.

So why is it only relevant at that specific income threshold (which has been frozen for over a decade), that you’re seen as having ‘chosen an expensive lifestyle’?