Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what estimate he has made of the number of children who will benefit from the expansion of the Wraparound Childcare Scheme.

Defence recognises the integral role of its Service personnel in meeting Defence outputs. It also acknowledges the importance of a robust childcare support system in enabling the mobility, recruitment and retention of a capable workforce of motivated personnel. A good childcare support system also benefits the social, emotional and educational development of Service children and young people.

The Wraparound Childcare (WAC) scheme is designed to help Service personnel with dependent primary school aged children by funding their WAC in order to mitigate the potential disruption that Service life can sometimes cause. The scheme will assist those who are most likely to be impacted by issues of mobility and deployment and is open to all UK based Armed Forces families where the Service person has either an assignment order to a UK based unit or is serving overseas unaccompanied (involuntarily) with the family resident in the UK.

Within the first year of a full UK rollout of the WAC scheme it is estimated that up to twenty thousand children could benefit from the scheme.