[Quangocracy] Please sir, may we have some more?

Nursery places in the UK are, as we know, very expensive and are getting more expensive all the time, even though the prices quoted in The Daily Mail don't seem to be significantly higher than what we were paying for our lass when she finished nursery five years ago. It seems fair to assume that these high costs are because of the enormous barriers to entry, separate topic.

And as we know, but as is commonly airbrushed out of the picture, the Tories introduced a great nursery voucher scheme back in the 1990s, which is officially described as 15 hours a week free childcare but by and large, what parents do is fill in a form which the (private) nursery gives them, and the local council then pays the nursery directly for the cost of the first 15 hours of fees, I remember this working out at about £70 a week, I don't know how much it is now (perhaps it varies from council to council?).

These vouchers are non-means tested and administratively no hassle whatsoever, you get the monthly or quarterly bill from the nursery and then they just knock off the value of the vouchers, which gets the cost down to something affordable and/or reduces the break even point where it's worthwhile for Mum to go back to work.

To completely muddy the waters, there are also the Childcare Tax Credits, which are heinously complicated and by and large self-defeating because the upper limit on qualifying costs is artificially low, they are reduced by the vouchers you get and are means-tested, so once you've done the numbers, you end up with £10 or £20 a week at an adminstrative cost of about £10 or £20 a week.

But let us reserve today's ire for the third kind of subsidy. Take it away, rent-seekers:

One of the ways in which the Government helps parents with childcare costs is a voucher scheme which is available through employers and allows mothers and fathers to pay for childcare out of their pre-tax wages. Basic rate tax payers can pay for up to £243 of childcare a month with the vouchers.

Julian Foster, managing director of one of the voucher schemes, named Computershare Voucher Services, called for the limits on childcare vouchers to be increased and said the scheme should be extended to help the self-employed. He said: "(This) would show to this country's working families that Government "gets it". They get that support needs to be widely accessible, they get that household budgets are becoming increasingly strained, and they get that working mothers and fathers - part of the lifeblood of the British economy - need adequate support to raise their families and this country's future."

You do NOT magically get £243 a month in vouchers, it is a salary sacrifice thing, so you are only saving the PAYE on that £243 (which is restricted for higher rate taxpayers according to some tortuous formula), i.e. about £100 a month, taking employee and employer together. And a whole private bureacracy has been built up around these, businesses which actually issue bits of approved paper to employers who enclose them with their employees' pay packets, and then the employee has to remember to keep them somewhere safe until the next bill from the nursery arrives (I'm bloody sure I found some unused ones after the lass had started school, then the nursery accepts the vouchers, recalculates the bill and takes the paper vouchers and sends them back to the scheme adminstrator for the actual cash payment etc etc etc.

What sort of mark-up do these private bureacrats make per voucher? It must be a couple of quid, money which is completely wasted, as are the Childcare Tax Credits and associated administration costs (and grief for parents).

Why not just scrap the employer vouchers and the Childcare Tax Credits and increase the number of "free" hours qualifying for the vouchers to 20 or 25 or something? That way we only have one layer of bureaucracy, being the simplest and easiest one which has stood the test of time and actually gets nursery bills down? And which illustrate that education vouchers are just as do-able, if not more so.