Following my earlier post, there was one other area of immediate importance for Employee Benefits in the Chancellor’s speech today.
As we have covered on this blog previously, the introduction of Tax Free Childcare (the proposed replacement to Childcare Vouchers) has been pushed back to “early” 2017. Given the delay I was not really expecting any mention of the policy, yet this did feature briefly in the Chancellors speech. And having checked the Budget document there is a change to the proposed conditions of the new offering now in place. It now appears that “an upper income limit of £100,000 and a minimum weekly income level per parent equivalent to 16 hours (worked at the National Living Wage)”* will be the criteria to access this support.
This may add complexity to the issue - and in the final analysis may even result in yet more working parents being better off under the existing Childcare Vouchers regime rather than Tax Free Childcare. This is something we will only be able to analyse once the dust settles on these proposals.
We will watch this point with interest, and will report back when further detail is known.
Best regards
Steve
* HM Treasury; Spending review and autumn statement
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