Children: Day Care

(asked on 9th April 2019) - View Source

Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the number and proportion of families who will access tax-free childcare in each year up to 2025.


Answered by
Elizabeth Truss Portrait
Elizabeth Truss
This question was answered on 23rd April 2019

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.

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