Imposing a £30 cap on the subsidy to child care providers taking part in the pan-London Childcare Affordability Programme will discriminate against disabled children, campaigners have warned.
Speaking at the annual Sure Start children’s centre conference, Sophie Ugle, a nurse and a single mother of a child with learning difficulties, said the limited subsidy would make “no difference at all for children with disabilities”.
The affordability programme, announced in December in the government’s 10-year child care strategy, is a pilot set to go live in the autumn to provide 10,000 affordable child care places over three years for lower income families in London by subsidising locally approved providers.
However, London Development Agency senior child care manager Denise Freeland told the conference the subsidy to providers – calculated according to the difference between £175 per week and the actual cost of the child care place – would be capped at £30 per week.
Ugle insisted the sums on offer were totally inadequate and that children with disabilities and their families had been forced to wait too long for proper support. “The child care strategy has failed our families and failed our children miserably,” she said.
Francine Bates, chief executive of disability charity Contact a Family, said research indicated that suitable child care for children with disabilities cost double that of child care for other children.
Freeland promised that the issue of services for children with disabilities and special educational needs would be looked at as part of a series of smaller pilots to be launched in April 2006 under the wider affordability programme.
