Childcare subsidy scheme cut back as boroughs drop out

The London Childcare Affordability Programme - which is run by the London Development Agency (LDA) - has had its funding reduced to £8m, down by a third from the originally planned £12m budget.

The programme aims to make childcare in the capital more affordable by subsidising day care places, while assisting out-of-work parents - who had a household income of less than £20,000 in the past 12 months - to stay in, or return to, full or part-time employment.

But instead of running in 10 London boroughs, as proposed in August this year, the programme will now run in just eight boroughs.

It will contribute to the cost of childcare for families in Brent, Ealing, Hackney, Southwark and Westminster. The programme will also fund training, employment and childcare advice for parents in three other boroughs: Barking & Dagenham, Islington and Harrow.

Each of the eight boroughs will receive £1m under the scheme.

Under the original plans for the scheme, Wandsworth (under the subsidised childcare part of the programme) and Enfield, Lewisham and Merton (under the parental support strand) would have received funding. But those four boroughs have been replaced by just two - Westminster and Harrow - in the scaled back programme.

An LDA spokeswoman said: "When the initial announcement on the Childcare Affordability Programme was made we were in advance negotiations with the councils who had expressed an interest in being involved in the programme and the LDA is disappointed that five of these boroughs have subsequently been unable to take this forward.

"The recession and resourcing issues have had an impact on some of their decisions. As the LDA was committed to ensuring parents in the capital received support as quickly as possible it was decided that the programme would go ahead with the eight partners who had committed to deliver the pilots and that it would be implemented from 1 December 2009."