Rishi Sunak’s government has junked Liz Truss’s “big bang” childcare reforms. When she was prime minister, Truss reportedly considered increasing the “free” care for working parents of three and four-year-olds from 30 to 50 hours per week during school terms as a quid pro quo for abolishing mandated staff-child ratios on childcare providers. Getting more parents into work by reducing prices was to become the lodestar of policy, before Sunak intervened.

While some of Truss’s ideas were misguided, failures in this sector do necessitate a rethink. The state spends around £7 billion on free hours, universal credit support and the “tax-free childcare” subsidy. Yet care can still be expensive, costing a two-income family triple the relative cost faced by German parents, with a third of all parents reporting difficulties finding flexible care. Numerous goals — to improve child development, get women into work, ease the burden on parents — create tensions that often go unacknowledged. The resultant mess of policies satisfies nobody.

Tight staff/​child ratio regulations and early years’ foundation stage requirements for providers are supposed to improve the quality of childcare. Yet they also raise the cost of providing care, so reducing its availability. The number of childminders has plunged from 106,000 in 1992 to 29,625 today.

Subsidies ease the burden of high childcare costs on eligible families. By raising demand, they increase prices for the unsubsidised, who lobby for help. As programmes have expanded to cover all three and four-year-olds, as well as poorer two-year-olds, nurseries become dependent on government funding that is often below market rates. With the minimum wage rising, this has squeezed profits, so nurseries cut back on services or close.

Survey results and parental behaviour highlight how this damages families. If childcare were cheaper or more readily available, fewer families say they would have to delay births or lean on grandparents for care. The fact that half of parents of three and four-year-olds don’t use entitlements shows that existing support just doesn’t chime with many families’ wants, needs or circumstances.

The universal programmes are wasteful too, with resources flowing to those who don’t need them financially. Research has found that rolling out universal childcare to three-year-olds in England only increased employment of mothers in (often part-time) work by 12,000, at a huge cost of £65,000 per job.

Despite these failures, some believe one more government heave is needed. Former Tory adviser Sam Freedman wants to increase subsidy rates and expand free care for more weeks per year, while extending support to all children below school age. This “childcare guarantee”, he says, would deliver more women in work, better-educated children and higher GDP at low net cost.

Sounds too good to be true? It is. Most evidence of educational development benefits from “high-quality childcare” relates to intensive programmes targeted at disadvantaged children. Assessments of universal programmes find such results do not scale, with many kids worse off if cared for outside of the home.

Economists generally conclude that such subsidies harm GDP too, because the funds could be more effectively deployed elsewhere.

In a rational world, we’d rethink the paternalistic view that politicians are well placed to determine whether parents work and how kids are cared for. Yes, the costs of raising children should be recognised in the tax and benefit system. There’s a stronger case for supporting vulnerable families directly. Beyond that, we’d do better to junk this costly failing experiment for a simple guiding principle: let parents decide how their children are cared for and by whom.