I've seen a trend of people moving away from this. If you have onsite then you need to think about brand too. What would happen if the nursery had a poor rating when assessed would that reglect on your brand? If you point them towards the government tax free savings this allows most people to get 20% put towards their fees and also covers a wider age range for school wrap round care so more inclusive.
I've been looking into this as employees can still save income tax and NI (like the now-retired Childcare Vouchers benefit) on their nursery fees, but strangely it doesn't seem to be very popular and I haven't found many providers offering the benefit for off-site nurseries. From what I gather you'll need to enter into a Workplace Nursery Partnership agreement with any eligible nursery in order for your staff to benefit. Regarding your question about the 200 staff, I don't think that matters too much as it seems that most providers will take care of the paperwork and you just make the deductions and pay a single invoice. As an employer you're effectively 'partnering' with nurseries by providing support for running costs (aka nursery fees) to any eligible nurseries used by your staff, which is why employees can make the tax savings. I might be being cynical but I'm not sure that this is in the spirit of the 1990 legislation, which I think is mainly geared towards on-site nurseries/creches specifically opened for the children of staff. I haven't pursued it any further on the basis of that suspicion. Happy to discuss further if you wanted to message me on LinkedIn
We (Microsoft) have a workplace nursery. Great benefit, but a tough one during COVID as it's located close to our offices in Reading and so isn't available for everyone across the UK. We have around 4k UK employees, and around 1,500 based at Reading. Plus you to have to pay to keep it going when it it's not at full capacity. If we were starting again today we wouldn't do it, and would likely instead subsidise childcare in a different form (reimbursement perhaps). Tim Robertson.
This great - thank you!
I've seen a trend of people moving away from this. If you have onsite then you need to think about brand too. What would happen if the nursery had a poor rating when assessed would that reglect on your brand? If you point them towards the government tax free savings this allows most people to get 20% put towards their fees and also covers a wider age range for school wrap round care so more inclusive.
Hi,
I've been looking into this as employees can still save income tax and NI (like the now-retired Childcare Vouchers benefit) on their nursery fees, but strangely it doesn't seem to be very popular and I haven't found many providers offering the benefit for off-site nurseries. From what I gather you'll need to enter into a Workplace Nursery Partnership agreement with any eligible nursery in order for your staff to benefit. Regarding your question about the 200 staff, I don't think that matters too much as it seems that most providers will take care of the paperwork and you just make the deductions and pay a single invoice. As an employer you're effectively 'partnering' with nurseries by providing support for running costs (aka nursery fees) to any eligible nurseries used by your staff, which is why employees can make the tax savings. I might be being cynical but I'm not sure that this is in the spirit of the 1990 legislation, which I think is mainly geared towards on-site nurseries/creches specifically opened for the children of staff. I haven't pursued it any further on the basis of that suspicion. Happy to discuss further if you wanted to message me on LinkedIn
We (Microsoft) have a workplace nursery. Great benefit, but a tough one during COVID as it's located close to our offices in Reading and so isn't available for everyone across the UK. We have around 4k UK employees, and around 1,500 based at Reading. Plus you to have to pay to keep it going when it it's not at full capacity. If we were starting again today we wouldn't do it, and would likely instead subsidise childcare in a different form (reimbursement perhaps). Tim Robertson.