Children: Day Care

Treasury written question – answered at on 24 April 2018.

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Photo of Derek Twigg Derek Twigg Chair, Statutory Instruments (Select Committee), Chair, Statutory Instruments (Joint Committee), Chair, Statutory Instruments (Select Committee), Chair, Statutory Instruments (Joint Committee)

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to his Answer of 16 April 2018 to Question 134639, on Children: Day Care, what the technical issues were that were experienced by parents when applying for tax-free childcare through the online service; and what caused those issues.

Photo of Elizabeth Truss Elizabeth Truss The Chief Secretary to the Treasury

The majority of parents apply for Tax-Free Childcare without any issues. For the small number of parents that have a technical problem applying for Tax-Free Childcare the majority of these are caused by:

  • delayed eligibility responses, caused by the application effectively becoming stuck at some point in the IT system;

  • issues with children incorrectly duplicating on the system which is caused by the interaction between HMRC and NS&I IT systems; and

  • parents seeing error screens during their application which have a number of root causes.

    Following work by HMRC to improve the childcare service and fix these problems, over 99% of parents now receive an eligibility response within 5 working days, only a small number of parents are experiencing a duplicate child issue and the number of parents seeing an error screen at some point through their application, has reduced to less than 2%.

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