The Live Wire



Press Release

FSB warns of crisis in nursery care

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) today warned that nursery providers face severe hardship or even closure because of inadequate government funding for free nursery places. This could deny many families much-needed childcare.

Under the 2006 Code of Practice on the Provision of Free Nursery Education for Three and Four year olds, nurseries are obliged to provide 12.5 hours of free nursery education.

The FSB has sought legal opinion and has warned that the Government urgently needs to measure the impact of the Code on nursery providers.

The Code obliges nurseries to provide the education at rates set by their local authority. However, those rates are frequently falling way below the cost of provision, pushing many nurseries towards closure.

Colin Willman, FSB Education Chairman, said:

“Both central and local government is failing to recognise the true cost of this Code for nurseries and they appear to be blaming each other for the consequences. This is unacceptable. They should carry out an urgent impact assessment to review the growing hardship this system is causing.

“In the meantime we will provide the Government with our own evidence of the negative impacts of this scheme.

“What we are seeing time and time again is small businesses being compelled to subsidise Government social policy and act as an extension of government departments. At the very least small businesses deserve to be adequately compensated. The fact that many nurseries are having to consider closure in the wake of this policy is disgraceful.”



Press releases, papers and documents published on this page are the intellectual property of an organisation unrelated to Central Lobby. We promote their parliamentary and political campaigning activities as they are subscribers to the Central Lobby service.

As such, Central Lobby does not edit, endorse, or attempt to balance the opinions expressed on this page. The content of press releases and other such types of content are the responsibility of the originating organisation.

Federation of Small Businesses

Federation of Small Businesses

More from Dods

© Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd