Some parents in England spending 80% of pay on childcare, study says

theguardian.com:

The scale of the childcare crisis in England has been exposed by new data showing some parents face spending as much as 80% of their take-home pay on childcare while others struggle to find a provider because of supply gaps in large parts of the country.

A study by the thinktank Nesta, seen by the Guardian, shows how hard it is for families in different parts of England to afford to pay for someone to look after their children while they work. Meanwhile, two other studies – one by the children’s charity Coram and one by the Labour party – show there are insufficient places in half of the country’s local authorities, with demand now more than double the country’s supply.

Labour will pledge to overhaul the government’s flagship scheme on Thursday, promising parents of young children 30 hours of free childcare a week if the party is elected at the next election. The overhaul will come as part of a wider reform of the childcare subsidy regime, which Labour says is “broken”.

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, will say in a speech on Thursday: “The childcare model the Conservatives have built fails everyone, denying parents the ability to work the jobs they’d like, to give their children the opportunities they’d like, and is not of the quality that staff want to provide.

“In the Britain the Conservatives will leave behind, tweaking the system we have will not deliver the ambition or scale of reform we are going to need.”

UK childcare costs have been rising for years and are now double the OECD average, with a two-earner family now paying a third of their post-tax income on securing a place for their child. For a single-parent family on the minimum wage, that figure is over two-thirds.

The problem has triggered alarm