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The Scottish Government reached an agreement with the Greens to get the budget spending plans through for the coming year. Council tax payers across Scotland are set to face higher bills from April 2019. Local authorities will be able to raise council tax by almost 5 per cent, levy new fees on businesses who offer parking to employees and introduce a “tourist tax” on visitors to their area.

Councils across the country will be able to increase people’s bills by 4.79 per cent this year instead of the 3 per cent cap that was originally proposed. This will result in occupants of an average band D property seeing their annual bill rise by almost £58 if their council chooses to raise taxes in line with the new cap.

People who park at work may also face extra costs after the announcement of plans to introduce a Workplace Parking Levy, which charges businesses a fee for every parking space they provide. Similar schemes already in operation in cities in England see businesses charged more than £400 per space. Rather than meeting the cost themselves, they can pass this onto the workers using them.

The 5p charge on plastic bags given out at shops across Scotland will also be doubled to a minimum of 10p “at the earliest opportunity”, with a charge for disposable cups also set to be brought in.

Any private childcare facility that offers parking spaces to staff may have a considerable annual bill to pay the local authority in Scotland. It’s not known if some local authority council run childcare nurseries would levy this parking tax on public staff employees.

Many small business owners now use a pension scheme for eligible employees. We operate the government scheme NEST for our childcare clients with their monthly payroll commitments.

Any small childcare business that started trading between April 2012 and September 2017 will have implementation dates ranging from 1st May 2017 to 1st February 2018. Those starting out in business  from October 2017 onwards must implement auto enrolment immediately.

Please contact us if you wish us to implement your pension provision.

Many small childcare business owners may be worrying  about the imminent introduction of auto enrolment.

The Pension Regulator has started sending out letters to employers who have at least one member of staff and must automatically enrol those who are eligible into a workplace pension scheme. The staging date for business owners with fewer than 30 staff is between the 1st April 2016 and the 1st April 2017.

To manage the employer responsibilities the employees are allocated into categories. All eligible workers, that is employees who earn over £10,000 per annum or £833 per month are automatically enrolled into the pension scheme.  The employee may wish to opt out and inform the employer and  pension provider but the employee must be opted in first.

The other categories which you may be unfamiliar with  are entitled worker and non eligible jobholder and they also have the right to join the pension scheme. These categories  are below the trigger for automatic enrolment but employees may still join the scheme.

The entitled worker may join the pension scheme but the employer is under no obligation to make a contribution. The non eligible job holder has a bigger incentive if they join as the employer must make contributions similar to eligible workers.

The government has introduced  minimum contribution rates. The starting point is 1% employer and 1% employee contribution until 30th September 2017. These rates gradually increase to a maximum employer contribution of 3% and an employee contribution of 5% from 2018 onwards.

Any childcare business who is struggling to understand the law or would like us to mange their delegated pension provision with NEST should contact us urgently. If  you require childcare auto enrolment, nursery auto enrolment, nanny auto enrolment  or childminder auto enrolment then we can set everything up for you.

At an early stage we decided to operate the government scheme NEST with our integrated payroll software. The pension is managed with low fees and the contributions are diversified into a balanced portfolio for the employee.

To set your pension up successfully all employers must plan ahead. Are you ready?

The tax free childcare voucher scheme which was set to be launched in September has been delayed until 2017 following a legal challenge from the companies providing the vouchers. Under the system parents would pay into the online account and the government would top up 20% of the costs.

The government election pledge that it would offer 30 hours of free childcare a week to three and four year olds in England from September 2016 is under scrutiny following questions about funding availabilty. This entitlement will only be implemented once a full funding analysis has passed through parliament causing delays and continued monetary  problems with childcare fees.

In London it is not uncommom for a full time nursery fee to cost £15,000 per annum.

In Scotland all three and four year olds are entitled to 600 hours of free childcare per year.

Statistics show that most families need two people bringing home a wage and that the number of stay-at-home mothers is at its lowest level in more than twenty years.

Many families rely on grandparents and friends for support as well as childminders and nursery childcare. It was thought by many that friends were not allowed to offer each other reciprocal childcare without Ofsted approval and whoever was watching the children would have to register as a childminder. Fortunately, this ambiguity no longer exists.