Nursery World - Tax-Free Childcare: only a fifth of predicted number of families sign up

New figures on the take-up of Tax-Free Childcare from HMRC show that just a fifth of the number of parents the Government expected to have signed up to Tax-Free Childcare have done so.

According to HMRC’s first quarterly statistics on the scheme, just 91,000 families were using Tax-Free Childcare by December 2018.

The Government had forecast that 415,000 families would be using TFC by October 2017.

In October, Nursery World revealed that just 7 per cent of families eligible for Tax-Free Childcare were using the scheme.

The IT system for Tax-Free Childcare has also been plagued with problems.

In November, analysis by the Labour Party revealed that projected Government spending on TFC would be £600 million lower than expected in the next four years, due to low take-up of the scheme.

Moreover, this money that had been earmarked for the scheme would be returned to the Treasury, to the dismay of early years organisations who had called for the funding to be re-allocated to childcare, given the underfunding crisis in the sector.

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