Did your household earn around £22k last year?

[zebra]

And if you had 2 children, did you get any benefits to help with childcare, as part of child tax credit? £22k is not over the threshold for nil subsidy on childcare, is it?

Useless TCO has reset our childcare costs last year to zero, I need to make sure that it's worthwhile chasing them, because I'm fed up, really.

Hi Zebra. We earn slightly more than that, only have 1 child and we qualify for working family tax credit with the childcare element. So def worth chasing.

chase it!!!! we earn more, have one child and both work full time - dont get childcare element but do get working tax credit...

Each time we tell them our childcare costs are curently zero (since Febuary 2004), they reset our childcare costs 4 all last year (2003-04 tax year) to zero, too.

As computer programmers ourselves DH & I r baffled why big software packages written 4 the govt. are all so astoundingly bad. We know 4 a fact (they admitted 2 us on phone) that the CTC system can only take 1 change at a time. WHY?? What pillock came up with that clever idea? Now I realise that we r better off giving as our childcare costs this year, the cost we had last year, because the system seems 2 b set up 2 retrospectively backdate 2day's circumstamces 2 last year. It's incredibly clumsy computer programming. I could write a better system 4 them 1-handed, I swear it.

Apologies 4 the rant, but honestly they r so inept!!!!

No the threshold with 2, for 2003-4 was £42,527, assuming you qualified for the max childcare - i.e. were paying £200+ per for childcare week, and were both working 16+ hours per week. About £22k was the point when it droped to just £545 per year if you weren't paying any childcare. See here for more details.