A thousand nurseries close, free childcare collapses, and a Tory promise unravels as a con At the 2015 election, David Cameron pledged to double free childcare from 15 hours a week to 30. It is […]

At the 2015 election, David Cameron pledged to double free childcare from 15 hours a week to 30.

It is not difficult to see why this was, for many families, a deal-maker.

Cameron on doubling free childcare:

At 15 free hours, it was often not worth a parent – normally the mother – going back to work because the prohibitive cost of a nursery or childminder outside those free hours was more than she could earn in her job.

With wages gradually squeezed for all households, it was more cost-effective to stay at home.

At 30 hours, returning to work would suddenly become affordable – a liberating moment for many low-paid mothers.

There is no question that this populist pledge was part of the reason why Cameron secured the first Conservative majority in 20 years .

A badly underfunded pledge

Two years on, that election giveaway has been exposed as hollow.

New figures from Ofsted show that more than 1,000 nurseries and childminders have gone out of business since the 2015 Tory manifesto was published.

Many of these childcare providers have been unable to sustain their business model because the 30 hour pledge has been underfunded by the very government that devised the policy.

For every £5 it costs a nursery or childminder to deliver childcare, a provider receives only £3.80 in funding from the government. What may be affordable childcare to families has become unaffordable for nurseries.

According to the figures, uncovered by the shadow early years minister Tracy Brabin, four fifths of those who have closed their childcare business were rated good or outstanding. Some nurseries that have stayed open have resorted to imposing surcharges on parents to balance their books.

£40 a day for lunch and extracurricular activities

In the case of Little Darling Childcare in Harrow, as reported in The Observer, parents are asked to pay £15 a day for their child’s lunch – or else they must come and collect the infant and take them home for the lunch hour.

I don’t know any parent who would be able to drop their child off at nursery, commute to work for an hour or two, commute back to the nursery for their child’s lunch, and go through the whole rigmarole again for the afternoon.

The Abacus Ark chain of nurseries charges £40 a day for lunch and extracurricular activities for those qualifying for the 30-hour scheme.

This daily rate is eye-watering for all but the richest families. If a family cannot afford the charges, but finds that the next nearest nursery has closed, what happens then? It is not exactly family-friendly politics.

An election promise, or a con?

Given Philip Hammond has little room for spending in this week’s Budget, it is unlikely this funding gap is going to be met.

But it is not just a problem for the Chancellor.

How are voters supposed to ever believe in an election pledge again if this childcare giveaway is shown, within just two years, to be demonstrably a con?

How are politicians able to keep a straight face by perpetuating the lie that they are “funding” 30 hours of “free” childcare?

It is not the first time a government has been unable to fulfil a manifesto pledge, and it won’t be the last. After all, the nation voted for Brexit on the lie that it would deliver £350m a week for the NHS.