When is an entitlement not an entitlement? When it's 30 hours childcare!

A previous election manifesto addition was to promise parents 30 hours of free childcare. This is an annual increase from 570 to 1140 hours, whether 30 hours term time or 22 hours stretched across 51 weeks of the year. If you are one of the many parents struggling to pay for childcare, "free" is an overstatement or I should simply state, it is misleading.

It is worth noting that when a manifesto declares childcare ‘free', they're counting on a lot of hardworking citizens in a climate of stagnating living standards and wages to lurch for anything called "free" without much thought about what free really means. Since we now seem to live in an alternative fact, post-truth world, I can unreservedly tell you: Someone else pays.

Childcare is a subsidised offer funded by the tax payer and the sector.

Childcare, like schools, cost. The majority of the costs (approximately 77 per cent) pay for staff and the rest is used to pay the rent, rates, buildings, food, resources, business costs and contingencies. Therefore, someone needs to pay the costs of this. Up until now the local authorities allocate a proportion of their government funding to childcare and the sector picks up the rest. So we can be given anything between £3.60 and £6.00 to fund a child's place which may cost much more per hour especially in London. Just as an example, the National Living Wage is £7.20 and the London living wage is £9.40 so that gives an indication of some of the baseline costs. The National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA) calculated that on average the sector lost £900 per place per year.

The second word used was "entitlement". People generally translate this to mean they can access this because they are entitled. This is not the case. Parents may be entitled to apply for a funded place for 30 hours childcare but that is only going to happen if the childcare sector provides sufficient places. More recent guidance uses the term eligibility which is broad and covers most parents whether working a weekly minimum equivalent of 16 hours at national minimum or living wage to earning up to £100,000. The issue is availability. According to the recent Pre-School Learning Alliance report, only 44 per cent of providers were considering providing the offer. The DfE itself published a report that said they anticipated a shortfall of 10,000 places. 4 in 10's report ‘At what cost: The 30 hours ‘free' childcare promise in London' has identified that: