‘No postcode lottery’: Greens take Hackney childcare case to ministers

Hackney’s Green-led council has launched a borough-wide call for evidence on childcare, urging parents to set out the costs, gaps and scheduling problems they face so the Town Hall can lobby central government for a national overhaul.

The campaign, announced on Monday, asks any parent or carer who uses, has used or expects to use childcare in the borough to submit their experience through an online form — whether their child is at a council children’s centre, a private, voluntary or maintained nursery, with a childminder, or in an informal arrangement.

The call closes on 11 October, after which the council says it will anonymise the responses, compile them into a report to be published, and send it to government with a letter demanding change.

The move delivers on a Green manifesto commitment made ahead of May’s local elections, in which the party won a landslide majority in the borough, to campaign nationally for free childcare.

Cllr Soraya Adejare, cabinet member for children, young people and early intervention, said childcare “cannot be a postcode lottery”, nor a burden councils should be left to shoulder alone, and called on ministers to build a system that is affordable and works for every family.

The council’s own list of who the system fails is pointed: single parents unable to match nursery hours to work; families who miss out on government support because of their circumstances; frontline and shift workers paying a premium for cover outside standard hours; and parents with nobody nearby to call on when childcare falls through.

Fees rise five weeks before the call closes

The campaign lands at an awkward moment locally. Nursery fees at the council’s children’s centres and family hubs go up on 2 September, five weeks before the evidence window shuts, including a 3.8 per cent rise for families in bands 1 to 3 — households earning up to £70,000 a year.

That increase was agreed by the outgoing Labour administration at its budget meeting on 4 March, more than a month before the Greens took control. But it sits alongside a second manifesto pledge — to review recent fee rises and work with families and providers on alternative structures — which has yet to produce a result.

When the fee letter reached parents in June, the Citizen reported that the new administration was accused of “lying to parents” by Ella Whelan of the Protect Hackney Nurseries campaign, which was founded in April 2025 to oppose fee increases brought in under Labour and which Green councillors backed while in opposition. Whelan argued the Greens now run the council and hold the mayoralty, and could amend the budget if they chose.

Mayor Zoë Garbett said at the time that the increase had been set by her predecessors with no opportunity to change course, that parents had every right to be worried, and that officers had confirmed the promised fee review was being expedited.

Costs have fallen nationally — for some

The call for evidence arrives less than a year after the final stage of the government’s expansion of funded childcare in England. Since September 2025, eligible working parents of children from nine months to school age have been able to claim 30 funded hours a week, for 38 weeks of the year.

The effect on headline prices has been dramatic. Coram Family and Childcare’s annual survey, published in March, found that a part-time 25-hour nursery place for a child under two is now theoretically free during term time for families who qualify, while the cost of a full-time place has fallen by 39 per cent in a year.

But the same survey sets out the divide the council is pointing at. Families who do not qualify — because they are not working, do not earn enough, or fall outside other criteria — pay an average of £189 a week for that part-time place. The entitlement covers only 38 weeks, leaving bigger bills outside term time or higher weekly rates for parents who stretch their hours across the year. And for three- and four-year-olds, whose entitlement was unchanged, the cost of a full-time place in England rose by nine per cent.

Lydia Hodges, head of Coram Family and Childcare, has warned that children from the poorest households risk being priced out of early education altogether, receiving barely a third of the funded hours their peers from working families get before they start school. She has called on ministers to make the funded hours universal.

Inner London bottom of the table on SEND

The starkest figure for Hackney concerns children with special educational needs and disabilities. Across England, 44 per cent of councils reported having enough childcare for at least three-quarters of early years children with SEND in their area. In inner London, the figure was nine per cent. For school-aged children with SEND, not one inner London borough reported sufficient provision.

An inherited settlement

Hackney has long been unusual in subsidising childcare at its own children’s centres, a point the council makes in its announcement. But the terms of that subsidy were rewritten before the Greens arrived. Under Labour, from September 2025, the subsidy was restructured onto a sliding scale, raising fees for higher-earning households in a move expected to generate up to £1.1m, with the early years service asked to find around £4m in savings over three years against a children’s centre deficit of more than £1m. Earlier Labour proposals to reshape children’s centre provision drew a legal challenge and a subsequent lessons-learned review commissioned by the then mayor.

Ministers, for their part, argue that reform is already under way. The Best Start Family Hubs programme, backed by close to £1.5bn over three years, is opening hubs in every council area, with up to 1,000 planned by 2028, alongside hundreds of new school-based nurseries and additional Early Years Pupil Premium funding targeted at ten local authorities.

Parents can respond at consultation.hackney.gov.uk/children-families/fixing-childcare until 11 October.