Nursery World - Late payments: Running dry

What can providers do if faced with late payments from their local authority? Do they have any legal redress? Meredith Jones Russell reports

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Nursery owners around the country are struggling to pay their staff because of late 30 hours payments from local authorities.

On 30 April, Cherry Newnham, manager of Monkey Puzzle Day Nursery in Hampshire, was told that her summer payment of £32,000 would be late.

She says, ‘We are absolutely relying on that money landing in our account. We don’t receive all our fees from parents until the 12th of the month so there is a limited source of other revenue coming in.’

She adds, ‘My remittance says it will be three working days before I receive the money, so please tell me how do I pay a staff team of 20? We’ve only been open a couple of years so definitely don’t have a spare £25k lying around. How do they [Hampshire Council] not realise the implications of this?’

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