This week, we had a rare example of a family-friendly policy coming into effect: working parents of children aged 9 months or over will now have access to 30 hours of free childcare a week during term time. I should be elated by this news: I went back to work part-time after 11 months of maternity leave on Monday. My son is now at a childminder 3 days a week, and so this policy is saving me roughly £360 a week (a full-time nursery place in Oxford, where I live, will easily set you back £2,000 a month without any funding).

Yet my feelings are mixed at best. Partly this is because I know that the government has promised the moon but has in reality only paid for a small asteroid. Nurseries claim that the scheme is financially unsustainable because the funding was set before significant rises

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