Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what guidance her Department provides on the level of fees a local authority may charge to administer the per nursery pupil payment for the provision of 30 hours free childcare.

Local authorities are permitted to make deductions for administration costs from their Dedicated Schools Grant early years allocations. We expect local authorities to keep these costs to a minimum and are clear, in our Early Education and Childcare statutory guidance, that they should maximise the funding that is passed to providers. The rates of funding that local authorities pay to providers, as well as the amounts they retain centrally, are published in our early years funding benchmarking tool which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-benchmarking-tool.