MADRID – Parents in Britain often find it hard to combine careers with raising a family because of the sky-high cost of childcare.

Some have even gone so far as to leave the country to live somewhere with more affordable choices for working parents.

One couple told The i Paper they made the move to Spain after finding it difficult juggling their jobs with bringing up their son and daughter in the UK.

Jonathan Langridge and his wife, Sara Bustillo de Castro, both 36, swapped Cambridge for Madrid in September 2023. Inspired by their experience, Bustillo de Castro wrote a book comparing the best – and worst – places to raise children while both parents continue to work.

Where Parents Thrive: How Culture and Policies Impact Dual Career Parents’ Lives Worldwide, which was published in 2023, compares experiences from countries including the US and Singapore with the UK.

“Childcare costs were very high [in the UK] but it was not the only reason we moved,” she told The i Paper.

She said they wanted to be in a country where both parents could have a career. “That was really complicated in the UK because it is really expensive.”

In comparison, she said, her native Spain was “amazing” because nannies were affordable and social security cover was provided by employers.

She pays €1,900 (£1,672) per month to a woman who looks after her children, Emma, five, and Tom, three.

“In the UK, we had nursery for both children who were aged one and three, £2,800 in total per month.”

In Spain, the couple have one child in a private nursery costing €520 (£458) per month, though Bustillo de Castro notes that public nurseries are available for some. “On top of that, we have a helper 40 hours per week. Total cost for us is roughly €1,900 per month, but she’s not just taking care of the kids in the evenings, she’s with them during the school holidays, when they’re at home because they’re ill, when there are school strikes. Otherwise she takes care of shopping, cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing buttons that have fallen off, laundry… everything. She’s a rockstar.”

The couple looked for this kind of arrangement in Britain “but the closest thing was an au pair and it’s absolutely not the same level of commitment or maturity”, Bustillo de Castro added.

The Bubble childcare app puts the average cost of a full-time nanny working a 45-hour week in the UK at £3,450-£4,500 per month, or starting from £2,400 for a live-in nanny.

Bustillo de Castro conceded that September’s childcare reforms in Britain, which grant 30 hours free nursery care per week to parents during term time, would make combining career and family life easier.

But critics say that even parents eligible for this scheme still face some of the highest childcare fees in the world.

The latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), from 2023, showed that families in the UK spent an average of 25 per cent of household wage on childcare (for one parent on the average wage and the second on 67 per cent of the average wage).

This was the highest proportion of any country in Europe and the third highest globally after the US, where 40 per cent of household wage went on childcare, and New Zealand, on 27 per cent.

Ireland also ranked highly at 22 per cent, while Spain was only 8 per cent and German families spent just 1 per cent of household income on childcare. The latest UK government subsidy – which is expected to come alongside an increase in nursery fees and in the cost of extras such as food – is thought to be unlikely to dramatically alter the UK’s position relative to other OECD nations.

The OECD report on the annual cost to the average family with two children aged two and three at public nurseries was £11,848 in the UK while in Spain it was £2,152. The lowest figure among European countries was in Germany at £377, while the highest was Switzerland at £17,754.

The more recent 2025 annual childcare survey by children’s charity Coram put the average cost of a full-time nursery place in England at £12,425 per year for an under two-year-old, £11,736 for a two-year-old, and £6,600 for a three- or four-year-old.

“I was trying to understand why it is more difficult in some countries than others to have children and balance it all,” said Bustillo de Castro. “I concluded that it is a mix of culture and policy.

“Because of writing the book, we moved to Spain.”

Langridge, who is British but was born in Cape Town, is a commercial director for an industrial printer company, while Bustillo de Castro works as vice-president for expansion for an airport ground handling company. They lived together in the UK for two years.

Bustillo de Castro noted that in Britain many mothers stopped working or returned to work part time after taking the average nine months of maternity leave. In comparison, in Spain most women go back to work after four months of maternity leave (paid at 100 per cent of the employee’s salary).

“Maybe that is because our work market is less mature than the UK and there is a culture in Spain of grandparents helping,” she said.

Her book compared childcare for working couples in the UK, US, the Nordics, Spain, France, Switzerland, Japan, Singapore and Kenya.

Help for working couples was best in Kenya and Singapore, she said, but this was often because migrants offered childcare at a low price. The same happened in Spain, where many childminders come from Latin America.

Bustillo de Castro noted that some Nordic countries were better at helping parents to look after children and have a job because there was typically a culture where work was not the only thing in life.

She added that, despite the National Health Service, access to a GP in the UK was “really tough”. The I Paper

  STV News

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