The Danes know best when it comes to bringing up baby

For many mothers. it’s a catch 22 situation.

Having survived on a single salary, once maternity leave runs out, there’s a financial pressure to go back to work. However, with childcare costs spiralling, many, particularly those who want to work part-time, find almost all their monthly salary is spent on nursery bills.

The Daycare Trust’s 2012 Childcare Costs Survey found that the average cost for a year’s childcare now stands at around £5,000 or about £100 for 25 hours a week at nursery, and £93 for the same amount of time at a childminders.

The trust, which is the national childcare charity, also found that in the last 12 months, nursery costs have gone up by 5.8 per cent and up to 3.9 per cent for childminders.

In fact, a report by Tory MP Elizabeth Truss found that childcare costs swallow up 27 per cent of UK parents’ net income.

“These figures show just how serious the impact of high childcare costs,” says Justine Roberts, co-founder of the parenting website Mumsnet. “As a nation we spend more on childcare than most other countries in western Europe, yet lots of parents are unable to work because childcare costs make it uneconomic.”

Many have accepted crippling childcare costs as a necessary evil, but it doesn’t have to be this way. In contrast to Britain’s spiralling bills, the average family in the Netherlands pays only 10 per cent of its income on nursery and childminders.

A similar picture emerges across much of the rest of Scandinavia, which many experts over here believes offers a model of how our own childcare services could and should be run.

In Denmark, there is no culture of stay at home mums, even looking back 20 or 30 years ago. Nearly all women go back to work and while many cite financial reasons, the trend is also down to the way the system is paid for.

In Denmark families pay up to 25 per cent of the cost of day care with those on low incomes paying between nothing and a quarter of the cost. The government foots the rest of the bill and there is also a discount for siblings.

As a result, Denmark is ranked fifth on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s list for female employment, while Britain comes in at 15. The UK government spends almost the same as that on Denmark, but a large proportion of the money goes towards tax credits more, while the Danes plough a greater amount into actual day care.

Currently, British parents are entitled to free childcare of up to 15 hours a week for three and four-year-olds. The policy was introduced 10 years ago, but many believe that it has not gone far enough to help those most in need.

“It is helping parents and things are better than they were,” says Anand Shukla, chief executive of the Daycare Trust. “The problem is that we’re nowhere near where we need to be. Free childcare isn’t for the whole year and often isn’t for as long as a working parent needs or exactly when they need it.

“These arrangements can be really difficult for parents to make work alongside their jobs and on top of that you have the highest childcare costs in the world.”

According to a study last year, the expense of childcare means it makes it more cost-effective for some parents to give up work altogether.

The research, based on evidence from 6,000 families, said that 32,000 women had left the workforce in the previous 12 months after their income was “eroded by the associated costs of working.”

The report concluded that the average woman with two children, aged one and seven-years-old, would be out of pocket by £98 a month if she worked part-time and better off by just £120 a month if she worked full time.

“If families can go out to work with their children in childcare, it means they can bring in money to support their own family, rather than having to give up work and potentially go on benefits,” says Shukla. “If people are having to give up work because they can’t get affordable childcare it’s a real waste of skills and talent.”

The trust is now calling for a reversal in cuts to the childcare element of Working Tax Credit, which has cost some families around £500, alongside the introduction of additional free childcare.

“High quality early education has a major impact,” says Shukla. “It should be available to all, not just those who have the money to pay for it.”