German parents are to be allowed sue local authorities if they are unable to obtain a creche for their children, 
effective from today.
However, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led Coalition has also introduced a new subsidy for parents who mind their children at home, which also takes effect from today.
This allows those parents who do not put their child in daycare between the ages of one to three to claim €100 a month this year and €150 a month from 2014.
The Christian Democrats and their coalition partners, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, argue their plans give parents a fair choice.
However the opposition Socialists and Greens have said they will scrap the subsidy if they win next month’s elections and use the money to fund crèches.
Under the new scheme, parents can choose between taking up a guaranteed nursery place for their child or receiving a payment of €100 a month for each young child parents do not send to state-run day care. From August 2014, this will go up to €150 a month.
The payment will only be for children born after August 2012 and will be set up for a maximum of 22 months. The money kicks in only after parental benefits (Elterngeld) have finished – when the child reaches the age of 15 months.
To get their cash, parents must apply to regional offices, usually the same ones as give out parental benefit. But, so far, very few parents have applied for the money, Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday.
The central German state of Thuringia, for instance, has not yet received one application for the payment, the magazine said, whereas in Mecklenburg-Pommerania there have been just 44 applications.
One reason for the slow take-up is that the Social Democrat Party (SPD), which runs the majority of regional governments, have not publicised the scheme – not least because the party bitterly opposed it from the beginning.
“It’s not our pet project,” a spokesperson from the Thuringia Social Affairs Ministry told Der Spiegel, “but the federal government’s. Why should we advertise a thing we’re sceptical about?”
Meanwhile in Bavaria, where the sister party of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) the Christian Social Union (CSU) is in power, the social affairs ministry has sent out flyers to 55,000 households advertising the payment.
However, even here the take up of the scheme has been slow, according to Der Speigel.
Meanwhile, Family Minister Kristina Schröder has said that there will be nearly enough places in creches available throughout Germany. “The regional and local administrations have made a tremendous effort to meet the deadline,” she said.
She said there will be around 813,000 places for the under-threes this year, but 90,000 of those have not been finalized yet.
The German Association of Cities, which represents local councils at the federal level, says its members had made a “massive effort” to meet demand and that there will continue to be shortages in bigger cities.
“Regarding childcare, we cannot afford to put our feet up and pretend we’re done with this,” its president, Ulrich Maly, said on Wednesday.
The government’s plans have been contentious since being launched in 2007. Opposition politicians, unions and education experts point to the lack of qualified childminders in Germany, which means that many creches need to take on more children with the same number of staff.
Germany’s Federal Labor Office estimates that an additional 20,000 childminders are needed by 2016 to meet the government’s quota.