Husband been made redundant, tax free childcare

[Dimpous]

Hi,

Sadly my husband was made redundant last month, we have some money put by but doing my worse case scenario sums and was looking at JSA, does anyone know would this mean we are no longer entitled to used the tax free childcare account? As he is unemployed, will ring tomorrow but my late night worrying has kicked in!

Thank you in advance!

You're fine until your next confirmation date. Then you'll lose it if he doesn't have a job by then.

You're fine to use it until you next reconfirm. And even then you can continue to use and access it, they just won't u top up the 20% anymore.

When is your next confirmation? You’ll lose it at that point if he hasn’t got a new job by then as you won’t be able to do the reconfirmation. You’ll lose the additional childcare hours too if you get them as the 30 hours is based on both working too. You’d still get the 15 hours from age 3 though.

Assuming you don't have a job, you're correct.
If your savings aren't too high then you can both claim universal credit and then you can get 85% of the nursery fees paid

We lost ours at the next confirmation date, so I had to start working 6 days a week to ensure she didn't lose her nursery place - we'd never have got the days and hours back.

Hello, thanks for all the replies, I do work full time. He is trying very hard to get a new role, we have to reconfirm by 16th Jan, hopefully we will be okay by then! Thank you for all your replies, this is making a hard time even more stressful!

This happened to me when I got made redundant and it was a really stressful time. Honestly, I get that the government is wanting to target support to families where both parents work, but the policy isn't well designed to deal with situations where one parent is temporarily out of work. Many nurseries have long waiting lists and you can't just take your child out temporarily and then expect to get a place again when you find a new job. Not to mention that if you're looking for work you actually need childcare to be able to work on applications, attend interviews etc.

One thing to be aware of is that the 30 free hours and the tax-free childcare top ups operate in a different way. You will lose the TFC top up immediately when you do your quarterly reconfirmation, but there's a grace period for the 30 free hours, which is linked to the school terms. Unfortunately this also means that if you do lose the 30 free hours you won't be able to get it again until the beginning of the next school term.