Fakecharity, Blulabour miss the point

The BBC informs us that Childcare fees continue to rise. "Many parents in Britain are paying in excess of £8,000 a year for a full-time nursery place, a survey suggests", which is probably factually correct.

What strikes me is that £8,000 (which is on the high side, see comment from Beverley Hughes, below) is more than typical school fees at better-value private schools. So, if parents can afford to pay for nursery places, is it unreasonable to assume that most of them could also afford to pay for private schools?

As I have discussed before, there are loads of overlapping schemes to subsidise nursery care, which average out at about £70 per child per week (which is what makes nursery places affordable for most). To save all the admin and faff and distortions, I think they should be replaced with flat rate vouchers of £70 per child per week, but hey.

To summarise, the vouchers system 'works' for private nurseries (although with flat rate vouchers it would work much better). The obvious conclusion is that we could replace the whole State education system with vouchers as well - £3,500 per child per year seems a good place to start, which would halve the cost to the taxpayer - the education budget plus Teachers' Pensions is about £70 billion and there are ten million school age kids in the UK. That's a handsome £1,000 tax cut for each taxpayer, so a working couple would have £2,000 a year extra to pay towards the cost of nurseries or school places.

That's how we see things on Planet Wadsworth.
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But what does the BBC do? They turn straight to fakecharity number 327279 The Daycare Trust. Their spokeswoman spouts the inevitable:

"It is crucial that parents claim all the help they are entitled to, and that the government increase the free childcare entitlement to include all two-years-olds. The current review of tax credits should increase the maximum proportion of childcare costs the poorest parents can claim from 80% to 100%."

A quick glance at Note 3 to their accounts shows that they receive £600,000 a year from The Department for Children, Schools and Families for 'Policy, research and other projects'. They can get their policies for free from this 'blog. What do they do with the rest of it?
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Bizarrely, Nulabour Children's Minister Beverley Hughes seems to more up to speed than her Blulabour counterpart.

Beverly Hughes points out "the survey was based on parents requiring 50 hours of childcare all year round for under-fives, which was "more than most parents take up or want" [and] the survey did not acknowledge the tax credit system for working parents or childcare vouchers offered through employers. The early years grants, available for children in the term after their third birthday, was also ignored...".

You might expect Blulabour to favour vouchers, but no, they just want more complications and more means-testing ....

Shadow families minister Maria Miller said: "The government must do more to make sure more families who are eligible for childcare support through the tax credit system actually receive it. At the moment, the system is overly complicated and that means only one in four families who are eligible are actually claiming the credit."
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UPDATE. Re NC's comment that regulations are driving up prices. Nulab love regulations as it creates jobs for The Righteous. There's very little need for this of course - when you choose a school or a nursery, you talk mainly to other parents about experiences they've had - as long as your child sets off happily and comes back happily, the nursery is probably doing the right thing. Further, if a nursery were involved in some gross negligence, it would be all over the newspapers and people would take their children elsewhere, so simple information sharing makes most regulations unnecesary.

But the real force for increasing regulation is economics. The nursery cartel likes subsidies of course, because it enables them to put up prices. However, in the absence of barriers to entry/restrictions on supply, these super-profits would be competed away by new entrants. So for existing murseries to benefit disproportionately, they need subsidies AND barriers to entry, which they cunningly dress up as being "for the chi-i-ildren".