Children: Day Care
(asked on 9th April 2019) - View Source
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what forecast the Office of Budget responsibility has made for spending on tax-free childcare in each year since its introduction and until 2025.
The forecasts for spending on Tax-Free Childcare can be found in table 4.17 of the OBR’s Economic & Fiscal Outlook (https://cdn.obr.uk/March-2019_EFO_Web-Accessible.pdf) and are contained in table 1 below, along with forecasts of the number of families and the proportion of eligible families using Tax-Free Childcare.
Table 1
| Outturn | Forecast | |||||
2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | |
TFC Spending | £32m | £0.1bn | £0.3bn | £0.4bn | £0.6bn | £0.8bn | £1.0bn |
Number of Families Using TFC (at year end) | 47,000 | 0.1m | 0.3m | 0.4m | 0.5m | 0.6m | 0.8m |
Proportion of Eligible Families Using TFC | 3% | 8% | 16% | 24% | 32% | 41% | 49% |
Details on Tax-Free Childcare usage up to December 2018 can be found in the official statistics publication (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tax-free-childcare-statistics-december-2018).
The statistics show that 90,800 families used Tax-Free Childcare in December 2018. This represents around 5.8 per cent of eligible families.
The statistics also show that 256,900 families had an open Tax-Free Childcare account in December 2018, and that 35 per cent of these had been used during the month.