Government considering vouchers for mumpreneurs

The Government is reported to be considering introducing childcare vouchers for parents who start up their own businesses.

According to reports in the press, the Chancellor George Osborne is looking to extend vouchers to self-employed parents after lobbying by the MPs and MEPs on the Conservative Women's Forum.

The vouchers could allow working mums who set up their own businesses to claim back up to £900 a year in childcare costs.

The move to include the tax break in the March Budget is thought to be intended to head off criticism about the decision to stop child benefit from 2013 for couples where one partner is on higher rate taxation.

The Government is also said to be considering extending childcare vouchers to grandparents who help with childcare and diluting Ofsted regulations on childminders to get more people into childminding and to drive down costs.

The Independent says the Childcare Voucher Providers Association has drawn up a model of how the childcare vouchers would work for the self-employed. They would be presented with a certificate at the end of the tax year showing how much they had paid in childcare voucher costs and then claim that back as an expense as part of their self-assessment. If they paid the maximum £243 a month, they could claim back around £933 a year.

Conservative MEP Marina Yannakoudakis, a former businesswoman who has campaigned for more support for women in business and a member of the Conservative Women's Forum, says: "Women need the flexibility to organise their lives to allow them the choice and opportunity to go into business for themselves. I welcome this new initiative and hope that there will be similar possibilities to unleash the entrepreneurial potential of British women." 

Cara Sayer, founder of Snoozeshade and a campaigner for childcare tax breaks for self-employed parents, says that giving childcare vouchers to self-employed parents "is certainly a start in acknowledging that without assistance with the cost of childcare parents who want to work for themselves will struggle if the system remains unchanged". However, she would like to see the small print since she says many new business owners can't afford to pay themselves so would not have any salary, as such, from which to pay childcare vouchers.