Maintenance/nursery fees

[Arisaig]

I need to check what people consider 'normal' for single parents who work full time and have DC under school age. Are nursery fees considered part of the day to day costs of having a child and expected to come out of maintenance payments?

When we split 2 years ago, DS was 18months, and I was working 3 days a week, but I'm now full time. exH is self-employed and works 4 days so he has him on a Wednesday. I have always paid all nursery fees for the days I'm at work. This seemed fair to me, since the CSA calculator is based on how many days DS is with him, I consider him to be my responsibility for the days he's with me, so my responsibility to sort childcare.

However, the fees have increased a lot this year (from £5.10 in March to £7 an hour since September). This has been hard, and suddenly it seems unfair that I'm bearing the cost of this increase by myself?

Obviously I recognise that I'm very lucky to have an exH who contributes financially at all, and has regular contact. I'm just curious to see what other people in similar situations regard as fair?

yes it is your responsibility...that does sound a huge increase though so feel for you..

Do you get WTC..if so you can claim back 70% of childcare through that

Damn.

Oh god, just thinking about wtc makes me feel nauseous. I was claiming when I was part time, then had to update info with them quite frequently because of changes to childcare (poor DS has had 2 nurseries and 2 childminders for various unavoidable reasons. Which is why he's staying where he is no matter how much they put up the fees.) Everytime I contacted them it just seemed to be massive stress, taking ages to get through, language difficulties, having to correct their mistakes..

I got audited recently and thought, brilliant, now there will be no chance of them getting it wrong.... Then they sent me a rude letter implying I'd tried to challenge a decision and they'd found they'd overpaid me! I'm so cross about it and need to sit down and just write to them and straighten it all out. But with other things going on at the moment I've put it off and now I haven't even told them about the fees increase.

You're right, this isn't exH's problem.

Thank you for your reply, writing it all down has made me face up to it!