One Plus Just Tip Of Iceburg Warn Childcare Charity Chiefs

Voluntary sector childcare in Scotland is facing a cash crisis after the country’s largest pre-school care provider went into liquidation. One plus, one of the country’s largest charities, went into liquidation last Tuesday after funders failed to come up with a rescue package.

Over 600 staff have been issued with termination notices – the biggest ever mass redundancy in the Scottish voluntary sector. Now organisations working in the childcare sector are warning that One Plus’s loses are only the tip of the iceberg.

The Glasgow-based charity closed its doors after it had gone to the executive with a £2m refinancing proposal but was turned down after civil servants demanded to know how the charity found itself facing financial ruin.

Management are blaming delays in European funding for the crisis. It says One Plus is waiting for £2.5m of approved funds.

John Findlay, the former chief executive of One Plus ,who is credited with growing the organisation to become a major player in childcare provision, blamed government ministers for failing to back the charity.

He said: “The government’s childcare strategy is flawed. One Plus has been trying to balance the provision of quality childcare and paying decent wages against the problems of getting money from the government’s childcare strategy and from parents.

The problem is that One Plus works in areas of multiple deprivation where parents face stark financial choices: to feed their family or pay for childcare. One Plus needed more support to work in these areas but the executive turned a blind eye.”

And he denied claims by unions that One Plus’s management board were to blame for the crisis.

Rosemary Milne of SmileChildcare, speaking in TFN’s Podium column (p6) the accusations of mismanagement was merely a foil for the real issue of underfunding in the sector. “The point that needs to be made and that goes to the heart of these crises is that voluntary sector ‘subsidised’ childcare for poor families is a casualty of a deeply misguided funding regime,” she said.

“As grant funding is cut year on year, that regime is unravelling inside the very communities it is supposed to be supporting. Hundreds of jobs and literally thousands of childcare places for poor working families are being lost or put at risk.”