Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to his Answer of 16 April 2018 to Question 134639, on Children: Day Care, what the technical issues were that were experienced by parents when applying for tax-free childcare through the online service; and what caused those issues.

The majority of parents apply for Tax-Free Childcare without any issues. For the small number of parents that have a technical problem applying for Tax-Free Childcare the majority of these are caused by:

• delayed eligibility responses, caused by the application effectively becoming stuck at some point in the IT system;

• issues with children incorrectly duplicating on the system which is caused by the interaction between HMRC and NS&I IT systems; and

• parents seeing error screens during their application which have a number of root causes.

  Following work by HMRC to improve the childcare service and fix these problems, over 99% of parents now receive an eligibility response within 5 working days, only a small number of parents are experiencing a duplicate child issue and the number of parents seeing an error screen at some point through their application, has reduced to less than 2%.