Could redundancies lead to less choice with childcare vouchers?

One of the many knock-on effects of mass redunancies could be that parents who keep their jobs have less choice on where they can spend their childcare vouchers.

Charity the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) said that people who lose their jobs are likely to take their offspring out of nurseries.

As a result, many childcare providers may find that their reduced headcount is unsustainable, meaning kids whose parents are still employed will be forced to leave too.

With the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted that the jobless rate will remain at almost eight per cent until the end of 2011, the CPAG is predicting that unemployment could have a "destabilising effect" on many nurseries.

"You could see some childcare providers finding that so much business is taken away from them that they can no longer afford to operate," press officer CPAG Tim Nichols explained.

A recent report by the Family and Parenting Institute calculated that raising a child from birth to the age of 21 costs £200,000.

However, employers which offer childcare voucher schemes can ease the burden on working parents during a youngster''s early years. Back