Childcare vouchers - anyone had exp?

[runtus]

Hello, quick question from an employers point of view regarding childcare vouchers. Are they a) helpful to a working parent or would you prefer a chas pay rise? a)do most nurseries accept them? c) Has it had any impact on benefits/family tax credits?

Any advice would be very welcome!

Cheers Pamina3, all a bit unknown to me (coming from the ttc#1 thread personally) but need to get something organised for an employee

hi runtus - I get these from my employer, and at the moment they are NI free, which saves about 10%. From next year they will be TAX and NI free, but limited to £50 per week (although that's still a bigger saving). Provided your employee earns enough to be paying NI (now) and/or tax (next year) they are definately worth having.

a) as Pamina says you can't really do a pay rise for 1 person, owing to "equal pay for equal work" rules, etc, let alone the risk of making others feel they are being treated unfairly.

b) We haven't found it a problem - just asked the nursery and they agreed. Under the current scheme they can also be used for registered childminders and family member who you pay for childcare. That's changing next year to include nannies in the home, as long as they go thorugh a type of registration scheme, but it will exclude the unregistered family memebers.

c) Doesn't affect us as we don't get either, but I did see something once on the Inland Revenue site which said that childcare vouchers were NOT considered income for the purposes of calculating Child Tax Credit, but that childcare costs paid for by vouchers were also disregarded. So it would depend upon your employee's family circumstances (whether they would get the childcare element of CTC if they were paid normally, and then paid the nursery, etc) whether it was worthwhile having the vouchers.

Thanks LunarSea, I'll refer to the Inland revenue and see what they say.......

Thanks, the employee I have in mind has already had her baby and has a nursery lined up. I was planning on giving her the option of vouchers instead of the normal pay rise, if worked out better for her. So we will have to see if her nursery accepts them I guess.....thanks for all your help!