http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26373725

Childcare was a total rip-off even ten years ago never mind now.

Interesting, given the people actually doing the childcare tend to get paid the square root of feck all.

+1, and treated like crap with it from what I've seen.

One of the girls at work does part times work. She's now quitting because she's better off on benefits and looking after the kids than working and spending money on childcare. The latter costs £900pcm.

It is cases like that which just show what a racket child care is.

A racket?
Try breaking down the costs of looking after kids and see where we end up.

Do your kids cost you £900 a month each? You are not allowed to include anything outside school hours. You could be extravagent and spend a fortune if you send them to a private or public school, but since many of those are well above the median wage it would be outside the realm of the ordinary person.

Ok. I don't have kids, so I can't really comment on how much they cost me to keep them alive. And outside school hours is precisely what's being talked about here, isn't it?
Let's look at this.
You've got kids who need care - you need somewhere appropriate to keep them. You need qualified staff to look after them. You need insurance. You need heat and light. You need materials to keep the horde amused. You might need to feed them too, and if that's the case, we can probably assume you'll need people with the appropriate qualifications, some form of food prep area and all the cost of getting that up to grade. I suspect though, that many don't.
And let's not forget, this isn't a public service or a charity, so there needs to be some mark up, and as we're all in this together, profits must be made.

If we were to put both of the boys into nursery for the working week, it would cost more than I take home in even the best of months (ie two weeks' on-call allowance), and I'm not on a minimum wage job or anything.

OK, let's do a back of the fag packet calculation.

900 quid per month. per child. of course it's not as if there'll be two or three children. In the place my brother took his son to before he was old enough for proper school, there were 2 groups of 12 children, with three staff per group. Thats.. £216,000 a month gross income. Say you're closed over Christmas, and you take in that * 11.5 a year, a total income of £2.48m a year

Say you pay each of the staff £25K a year - you don't, the job doesn't pay near that much, but say you did. Say you also have two kitchen staff who you pay £30,000 pounds a year. You don't, but anyway.. And as a rough estimate that each employee actually 'costs' twice what they earn, your total yearly staff costs are £420,000 a year. Say you buy a property to house your business that costs £400K - you could do that easily in Manchester, which is where the example I'm talking about is. And say you spend another 100K fitting it out in the correct way, buying furnishings and 'stuff'. You'll need to find £100K of that yourself for a commercial mortgage, but the monthly repayment on a £400K mortgage at commercial rates is about £2400 a month, or another £28.8K. let's call that £30K.

Add in food for each infant, say £4 per infant per day five days a week 50 weeks a year, or another £2400 per year.

So your rough major expenses are £(420K+30K+2.4K) or just over £450K a year. Tell you what, let's assume we massively underestimated all costs and double that and add a bit more, so your total business expenses are one million pounds a year. In that case your gross yearly profit is a measly £1.4 million pounds. On a £100K investment.

You're damn right there's a profit to be made.

the cost of child care was the main reason i worked late/night shift and my wife worked early shift
we used to wave to each as we passed, the wife going to work and me coming home

this went on for many years, its only since the kids have grown up that we now work similar hours ...

If your claim isn't hopelessly foolish, then there is a huge profit to be had by any chancer who can stump up a rather measly outlay. That should attract a lot of these chancers, which in turn should bring down profits until the least well funded are bankrupt and the market arrives at a set of reasonable prices.

If margins are that high (which assumes that the cost of regulatory compliance is surprisingly low for an outfit with children to look after), and if new entrants aren't being drawn into the fray to compete for those incredibly juicy profits, then an important mistake leading to over protection of incumbents has been made.

Fixing it should be politically popular and relatively easy. Unless you plan to further claim that all the politicians are in the pocket of Big Nursery

+1
A lot of the staff at the nursery we use offer baby sitting services to make more cash.

Nursery is bloody expensive, but I can see why when for the younger ages there's a three child per carer limit. That mean only three people paying for the staff, facility, food and profie etc.

It costs £1000 per month at the nursery my little one is at. 3 kids per adult makes that £3k per month income.
That covers the cost of the property, staff, food, nappies, trips out, materials, toys, books etc.

It's not a massive amount of profit (compared to other industries) but still a large amount of money to be spending every month.

It is subsidised? Surely when the amount spent to train someone to do a job is in excess of £1 million pound, having them stuck at home because they cannot afford to go back to work doesn't make sense and the country has a whole loses out.