Tories dodge a bullet on childcare

In the past year the government has proven good at cauterising self-inflicted wounds. This morning’s announcement from Iain Duncan Smith on childcare stems another potential bleeder. His department have found an extra £300 million to prevent further cuts to childcare support. It’s a welcome reversal of an ill-advised plan and a narrowly averted political foul-up.

The extra money is needed because of IDS’s big welfare reform project, the Universal Credit. One of the big advantages of the UC is that it will smooth out all those ugly ‘cliff-edges’ in the benefit system, particularly rules that say you don’t get help if you work fewer than 16 hours a week. In the case of childcare, the UC will mean 80,000 parents working ‘mini-jobs’ will become eligible for support. Previously, IDS had been trying to make this move on the cheap, by spreading out existing spending more thinly. Today he’s found an extra £300m from the departments ‘Universal Credit implementation fund’ so that he can avoid this Scrooge approach.