Think of the number you started with and double it - that's the message from everyone in the childcare business to the Government.
In the week that the 800th children's centre was opened in a hard-pressed estate a couple of miles from Westminster, the people who will have to deliver the ten-year childcare plan told the Government that it will be 'utterly impossible' on present budgets.
The Treasury will have to more than double the funds projected if the ten-year plan is to be fulfilled by 2010.
Like the child poverty strategy, the easy bit has already been achieved.
The next four years will make or break the childcare plan, which is the most ambitious of Labour's legacy-seeking programmes.
But the sector is nervous, not to say quaking. The attraction of the plan is its sheer ambition, its attempt to address the historic failure of Britain's welfare state.
Apart from more money, it requires a guiding hand, power to the people who will have to deliver - local government, and a well-trained, well-paid workforce.
But coherent steering is palpably missing from the DfES. Local government, which has been given the duty to deliver co-ordination and co-operation in a sector that is defined by fragmentation and incoherence, is unloved by this Government.
The Government is insisting on a mixed economy. It could hardly do otherwise, since the majority of providers are in the private sector. But that mixed economy marketplace is a precarious place, made more so, ironically, by the ten-year plan, say the private providers.
The mantra of the ten-year plan, 'choice with confidence', does not refer to the providers but to parents' needs, says the Government. But the neediest parents are not managing to access Sure Start, that part of the programme that was supposed to target the parents and children who we are all supposed to 'fear and loathe'.
But if Downing Street gives up on them, then the investment in the holistic web of services envisaged in children's centres risks being jettisoned.
The workforce envisaged for these lovely centres, the Early Years Professionals, will be trained where, and how, and by whom? So, where will the newly-professionalised staff come from? Courses are supposed to be up and running by September. But where are they? It is April already! This, as they used to say, is no way to run a railroad.
