uk-extended-childcare

Scoring the New Economics Foundation's Universal Family Childcare Promise with PolicyEngine UK.

🔗 Live dashboard: https://uk-extended-childcare.vercel.app

The reform has two components:

1. Universal 15-hour entitlement for every child from 9 months to 4 years, regardless of parental work status (in PolicyEngine: lowering the universal entitlement age floor from 3 to 0).
2. An earnings cost cap — the cost of childcare above the universal 15 hours is capped at a percentage of family earnings (5% preferred, 7.5% transitional) for working families; the government pays the rest.

Headline results (2025-26, static, no behavioural response)

Result	PolicyEngine UK
Universal 15h extension to under-3s (component 1)	£3.09bn/yr at benchmark take-up (£4.18bn ceiling at full take-up)
Earnings cost cap at 5% (component 2)	£1.71bn/yr (0.44m working families)
Combined additional cost	£4.80bn/yr at benchmark take-up (£5.89bn at full take-up)
Children newly on the universal offer	0.51m at benchmark take-up (0.69m at full; overwhelmingly under-3s)
Current total government childcare support	£13.58bn across 6 programs

What this analysis adds (and how it answers the obvious objections)

NEF publishes a single net headline for the whole package. Pricing it in PolicyEngine adds three things a headline can't:

1. Decomposition — it's the universal extension, not the cap, that costs. The universal under-3 extension is the bulk (£3–4bn depending on take-up); the working-family earnings cap adds only £1.71bn on top. The cap is not the driver.
2. Who is covered. The newly-covered children are almost entirely under-3s in non-working families — working families' under-3s already use the 30h offer. This makes the "childcare for people who aren't working" question explicit rather than buried in a net figure.
3. A take-up sensitivity band, not a point. The raw microsim assumes full take-up, but these children have a parent already at home, so real take-up is well below 100%. Because the whole component-1 cost sits in one program, cost is exactly linear in take-up. We benchmark against the closest existing offer — the disadvantaged 2-year-old entitlement, ~74% take-up (IFS) — and show a low case (~50%). The "£4bn for non-working families" figure is the ceiling; the take-up-adjusted headline is £3.09bn (low case £2.09bn).

NEF's headline £3–3.4bn is the net cost of the whole system (which also replaces Tax-Free Childcare and the UC childcare element); our static score prices each component additively on top of the current system — same order of magnitude, not like-for-like. See the dashboard's Methodology tab for the full mapping.

What it produces

A single data/uk_extended_childcare_results.json, consumed by the dashboard, with the baseline childcare system, the reform's fiscal score, distributional and poverty impacts, and a comparison with the figures NEF and the Mirror report.

Structure

src/uk_extended_childcare/
  worker.py      # runs ONE scenario in an isolated process, dumps arrays to .npz
  scenarios.py   # orchestrates the subprocess workers, caches snapshots
  impacts.py     # decile / poverty / Gini via microdf
  reform.py      # (see sources) universal extension + cost-cap definitions
  sources.py     # NEF/Mirror reported figures + methodology prose (with URLs)
  pipeline.py    # assembles the results JSON
  cli.py         # `uk-extended-childcare-build`
dashboard/       # Next.js dashboard (Reform / Baseline / Methodology tabs)

Each scenario runs in its own process so peak memory stays at a single microsimulation — the managed release dataset is multi-year and two simulations do not fit in a small machine's RAM.

Run

pip install -e ".[simulation]"
export HF_TOKEN=...            # for the managed dataset download
python -m uk_extended_childcare --year 2025
# reuses cached data/cache/*.npz; pass --force to recompute the microsims

Dashboard

cd dashboard
bun install     # or npm install
bun run dev

Three tabs: Reform (the UFCP score), Baseline (the current childcare system), and Methodology.

Sources

• NEF — The Universal Family Childcare Promise (July 2025)
• Daily Mirror — Free childcare could be extended