The vote turned on a distinction between extending free childcare and repairing the rule that withdraws it. No won comfortably, while the most-respected Yes case proposed a taper: “Taper it so it's always worth earning more” — explicitly stopping short of paying for £300,000 earners’ childcare.
Yes voters repeatedly argued that the £100,000 cut-off can penalise an extra pound of income and treat families unevenly. One well-respected case put it plainly: “It is the cliff edge which is the real problem here”; others pointed to the contrast between two parents just below the cap and a household with one earner over it.
The most-respected No case made a different claim: childcare support should be directed to those least able to afford it. Its bluntest line was “take it away and then discount my taxes the amount I'll be paying instead”; another No voter condensed the means-testing argument to “Rich people can pay for what they need. The poor cannot.” The Yes case for tapering did not settle how much support higher earners should receive, while No’s case for targeting the needy did not answer the charge that a hard threshold can make earning more financially perverse.
That leaves the debate less about whether childcare costs deserve public support than about where help should taper away, and how sharply. The clearest exchange was over whether unfairness lies in extending support upwards or cutting it off all at once.
On this question, the winning side rejected the extension; the losing side’s strongest argument was about changing the shape of the boundary.
44 Opinions
badly presented question
Honestly I’d just cut it all to zero unless you’re genuinely unemployed, or — better yet — fund state institutions to get aid to the kids directly instead of letting the parents pocket it and waste it on crap half the damn time.
If you cannot afford child care on £100,000! Of course you can. Childcare costs are for people who struggle to survive and afford it while trying to hold down a low paid living or worse still can't work at all.
Should stop the VAT on private schools though.
In an age where it’s too expensive to have a family, mainly because of mass migration, this is one thing I do think the government could do to help strengthen demographics of the indigenous population. Sending 10 million foreigners home would free up housing for our youths too!
It's got to be beneficial to be a tax payer
those earning the highest salaries often work the longest hours and incur the most childcare. why penalise those who work hard. childcare is expensive and families earning a little over 100k still can have little spare change if living in London and paying hefty mortgages.
All such cliff edges in the benefit system need tackling so that anyone earning a pound keeps at least 40p. There are several at the low end of income as well as this nasty at the higher end. Before becoming PM Starmer had a special bill passed so that his pension would not be docked in a similar way. Judges are not docked but Doctors are!!!!
The test should be family income otherwise a family with one high earner and one non-working parent misses out but a family where both parents earn just under £100k each, and so have a much higher income, will get the extra hours. Same with child benefit, it's just unfair.
Yes for two reasons - firstly preventing a cliff edge where marginal tax rates go >100% and secondly removing administrative burden of means testing will make the system cheaper to run