"Up to" of the week

From the BBC:

More than 300,000 families use them to save up to £2,400 a year through tax relief on the cost of childcare...

It involves parents sacrificing up to £243 of their salary - before tax and national insurance are taken off - in exchange for electronic "vouchers" which are then paid to Ofsted-registered child carers, from au pairs to nurseries. The Treasury wants to phase out this tax break, which is equivalent to a 31% saving on the first £243 spent on childcare costs each month for basic rate taxpayers, or 51% for those paying the higher rate.

So that really was lazy journalism - all the facts are there in the second paragraph, so you don't need to be a maths genius to work out that the absolute maximum tax/Employee's NI saving is 51% x £243 x 12 = £1,487 a year, and for a basic rate taxpayer it's £904, so saying "up to £2,400 a year" is either downright laziness or deliberately misleading.

The rest of the article is the usually blah, whine, moan special pleading - you must realise that a whole industry has grown up around administering the vouchers, which is exactly what was intended. Wouldn't it be far simpler to just stick an extra £20 a week on the cash-equivalent "nursery vouchers" (that are officially called something else, of course) and have done with it?