Nursery Fees

Nursery costs are leaving parents struggling to make ends meet…

Demands for places in Nurseries are fuelling a boom in the industry? But paying the fees is crippling, even for two-income families.
For many women the choice as to whether they return to work after having a baby or stay at home is a stark one. Sacrifice the career to bring up your baby, or sacrifice everything else to afford the fees so that other people can bring up your baby.

A current boom in new arrivals means that Nursery placements are hard to find and that waiting list for places are brimming with names, so much so that parents are paying up to £100 just to enrol for a nursery.

It is now known that the childcare business is now one of the fastest growing in the UK, worth a staggering £2bn a year, a five-fold increase in just a decade. It has made some entrepreneurs very rich and hundreds of thousands of parents increasingly poor.

The average fee for a childcare place is now £113 a week, rising to £151 in London – on average more expensive than private schools. Some nurseries are charging as much as £300 a week. The average cost a decade ago was just £65.
Childcare is definitely out of reach for most people. Parents have to make a choice on how much they want to spend. Often that's not even a decision they can afford to make.

Ten years ago, local councils charging subsidised fees ran one-third of nurseries; now their share of the market has fallen to just 6 per cent. Local authorities have sold off or closed down Nurseries while places provided by private Nurseries have more than quadrupled since 1990. The expansion has been prompted by a huge rise in demand for places. That has been caused in turn by a rise in women in work and an increase in the average age of women giving birth.

All this has made childcare a very big business.