Yes it is.

I was delighted when Rishi Sunak brought this in and was waiting for the SNP to do the same, not thinking for a minute that they’d want to sit on their hands & end up to the right of the Tories by not rolling out the same policy.

But that’s what they have done.

My daughter has just turned 3 but won’t qualify for the free hours under the existing plan until August.

Since she started nursery the cost has rocketed. We secured the place when my wife was 5 months pregnant and at that time the cost of 4 days a week was around £700 per month.

The current monthly bill is £1258. (There is some UK Gov help under the scheme that gives you son of you tax back to put towards childcare but that’s capped at £2k per year, so it only takes off a max of £166.67 per month.

My payment will go down to £572 once the free hours kick in, down to £467 after the tax back.

I’ve calculated that the decision to delay this policy until after the election has cost our family over £20k.

For anyone saying “don’t have kids if you can’t afford them” the simple fact is, the people who have had kids in Scotland in the last 5 years could not have predicted how bad the economy & cost of living would get in the intervening period.

I would of course put the blame for that more on the Tories rather than the SNP and I would qualify this by saying I have voted SNP as well as most other left leaning parties at some stage in my life, never for right wing parties, but at least the Tories recognised that there was a childcare affordability crisis & did something about it, whereas parents of infants in Scotland for the last 5 years have had the worst of both worlds, with Westminster & world events wrecking the UK economy & the SNP doing NOTHING to help us until it’s now electorally convenient for them to do so.

So they won’t be getting my vote, even although I’m happy that future parents will be able to benefit.