ALL childcare vouchers ending april 2011

[monkwick]

The Government has announced plans to phase out childcare vouchers from April 2011, in favour of providing 10 hours a week of free childcare for some 2 years olds.

There won't be any immediate change to your childcare vouchers, and parents who order vouchers in March 2011 will be able to continue to order vouchers, free of tax and NI, until April 2015. However, childcare voucher schemes are expected to close to new members from April 2011 onwards.

If you believe that the Government has underestimated the importance of childcare vouchers to working families. If you believe parents should be able to continue enjoying the benefits of childcare vouchers, please take a moment to sign the official Downing Street petition at petitions.number10.gov.uk/keepvouchers.

Computer Voucher Services (Busy Bees Vouchers) has launched a blog about this at VouchersBlog.co.uk. Accor, Care-4 and Sodexo are all supporting it. Not that surprising really, given that if the voucher scheme ends, then there is no need for the voucher companies to exist.

Off to do it now - thank you for the link.

Thats only if Labour get back in at the next election, which is highly doubtful!

This petition must be the fastest growing No 10 petition ever. It was only created 10 days ago, yet it now has more than 34,000 signatures and is ranked 4th. Yesterday morning there were only (only!) about 14,000 signatures, so 20,000 people have signed in 36 hours.

Gordon Brown (or his advisors, at least) and David Cameron (because the Tories also want to scrap the vouchers) should take notice of the speed of growth of this petition because it must surely be an indicator of the strength of feeling about this cost cutting measure.

As for GB's claim that the vouchers are a perk used only by the well off middle classes, he is so far off the mark that he could quite justifiably be accused of lying.