Conservative leader defends plan to extend free childcare to high earners, as Tory conference begins in Birmingham today

When Laura Kuenssberg asked Badenoch whether it was a good use of public money to spend it on subsidising childcare for “incredibly wealthy” people, Badenoch switched the subject to the amount spent on benefits for people not working She replied:

This policy is about people at that cliff edge. What is not a good use of taxpayers money is paying thousands and thousands of people who can work, not to work.

What we want to see is that people who work harder don’t get punished for doing so. If you earn £100 a pound over £100,000, you could lose £10,000, £20,000 worth of childcare. And we don’t want people to stop working because of that.

The kind of people that we’re really targeting [might be] a deputy headteacher who wants to become a head teacher. She goes from £85,000 to £110,000. She’s got three kids. All of a sudden she’s losing tens of thousands of pounds.

I believe that the number of people who have very small children who are earning tens of millions of pounds is negligible.

We want everyone in this country to know that if you are out there working, the Conservative party has got a plan for you.