I’ve got two kids in nursery at the moment and saw this coming the day it was announced. There are 15 nurseries in our town with a 30k pop. and to get a space you have to book a year or more ahead, so before baby is born in lots of cases. This is so clearly a general election hook that can be abandoned afterwards.

The funded care was already a mess, adding more strain is only going to compound the issue. Biggest one for me is that the government don’t pay the nursery’s enough per child, so they’re forced to pass the costs onto parents.

Which might be fine if one set of parents are getting significantly cheaper childcare than they would have previously, but if you’re entitled to the 30 funded hours (like us) you end up in a spot where the hours are technically free, but the charges on top push it out of reach, which sort of defeats the purpose of the entire operation.

They can’t even keep the NHS or public transport services running smoothly, let alone take on this. They just need to go yesterday.