Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Department of the Blindingly Obvious

Friday, 22nd February 2008

She said there was a danger that for some childminders, the fee may be simply too much and they may decide to break the law and not register with Ofsted, or simply give up.

That people might decide to break the law when said law is clearly an ass should be blindingly obvious to even the most retarded bureaucrat. However, this seems not, unfortunately, to be the case, it isn't obvious to them.

Childminders face being driven out of business by a sevenfold increase in registration fees, children’s charities and industry leaders warn the Government today in a letter to The Times.

Ofsted intends to impose a sharp rise in annual charges for nurseries and other daycare providers, which must be registered with the regulator. Among the hardest hit will be childminders, who care for more than a quarter of a million children.

Their registration fees are expected to rise in September from £15 to £103.

What seems to have escaped the notice of the (well paid and with gold plated pensions, you can be certain) twits infesting Ofsted is that childminding is not a particularly profitable enterprise. My stepdaughter raises in the £100-£150 a week range by doing it. She should now pay one week's income to the State just to be allowed to continue to do so? The fees, by the way, largely being spent upon checking that people have said licences, the cost of which will go up as more people try to evade the fee.

How did it happen that we came to be ruled by morons?