Prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg yesterday confirmed that working parents who each earn less than £150,000 will qualify for childcare tax breaks worth up to £1,200 a year for each of their children from 2015, while their stay-at-home counterparts will get nothing.
That means that couples with a joint income of up to £300,000 will qualify for the tax break, receiving 20 per cent (i.e. the equivalent of the basic rate of tax) their childcare costs. This will be up to a total of £6,000 per child, per year. This will save a typical working family with two children less than 12 years old up to £2,400 a year.
Single parents who are employed and earn less than £150,000 will also be eligible.
However, couples with only one working parent will not qualify, and here begins the debate on who needs the money most, mothers who work or stay-at-home mums. One could argue that if a couple can afford for one parent to stay at home and look after the children then they don’t need the tax break.
Of the new budget announcement, David Cameron said: “For many families the cost of childcare is not one issue among many, it is the issue – it really matters.
“We want to help people who work hard and want to get on, and so effectively this is some tax relief on childcare.”
Children’s minister Elizabeth Truss whose recent childcare ratio proposal has been slammed by childcare providers and unsafe denied that the government was deliberately trying to make mothers go back to work.
