Labour has pledged to extend the free places for threeand four-year-olds from 15 to 25 hours a week for working parents if the party comes to power. How would the additional hours be funded?
The offer is a fully costed Labour commitment, which will make a real difference to parents for meeting childcare costs. It would save the average family around £1,500 a year per child.
We intend to fund the additional hours by using tax raised from the bank levy, which is money we have identified from a stream of money the Chancellor George Osborne said he would raise. Mr Osborne said he would raise £2.6bn in the bank's levy every year, but he hasn't been raising it properly and has only achieved £1.6bn a year. It's a shortfall that would pay for the £800m this scheme would cost a year. The Government's argument - that this is money we have spent elsewhere - is simply not true.
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