People love free stuff. Why wouldn’t they? Free healthcare, free education, free childcare – what’s not to like?
Expanding free childcare hours doesn’t change the fact that a full-time nursery place costs around £15,000 a year
Of course, government provides nothing for free. When the economist Milton Friedman appropriated the adage ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ for his 1975 text of the same name, he was describing in layman terms the concept of opportunity cost. For every choice made, there is another which cannot be.
When ‘our’ NHS absorbs nearly half of day-to-day public service spending, it is money that could have been deployed elsewhere. And when the Chancellor massively expands the ‘free’ childcare entitlement, he is reducing costs for parents, but limiting his ability to spend on defence or social care (or, indeed, cut taxes). All readers will understand this. How peculiar that our politicians don’t.
The government seems to have a muddled view of what it is attempting to achieve in childcare, and even less of a clue for how to measure it.
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