Today, the Social Market Foundation launches an innovative idea to help parents better afford the high cost of childcare. We’re proposing a National Childcare Contribution Scheme (NCCS) which will enable parents to spread their childcare costs over a longer period of time. Parents who opt into the scheme would be given financial support from government for their childcare costs, which they would then pay back through a small contribution from the main earner’s salary each month.
Childcare costs put an intense squeeze on families’ incomes for a relatively short period of time. Those high costs can mean that it’s simply not viable for parents to go to work. A quarter of parents in severe poverty report that, following the cut in the childcare element of the Working Tax Credit in April 2011, they have left work because the cost of childcare is too high. Polling by YouGov for this report found that 55 per cent of parents with children under the age of five think childcare is too expensive.
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