Anaïs Comot wants to bring her child up in London, despite childcare being much cheaper in France
Back home in Brittany, France, Anaïs Comot would be paying around €500 a month (around £433) to send her 1.5-year-old son to full-time nursery.
In London, the cost of nursery is currently setting Anaïs and her husband back £884 a month – or more than double – for just three days a week.
The prospect of a second child in the near future means there will also be a period where Anaïs, 33, and her husband will be paying two lots of nursery fees at once, offset only slightly by a sibling discount and the 30 free hours government subsidy for her son, which applies from September this year.
Anaïs and her husband also pay for private health insurance, so they aren’t fully reliant on the NHS, despite her view that public healthcare comes at a lower cost for a higher standard in France. Food, she says, is also cheaper and fresher in France than in the UK.
Anaïs’s husband is also French, so living in France would mean being closer to both sets of grandparents, too. And in France, children start school at the age of three, compared to the age of four in the UK, relieving French parents of a year of nursery fees.
But despite all these benefits, Anaïs, who has been living in the UK since 2015, says London is where she is choosing to raise her family because of its vibrance, cultural diversity and the way the city embraces different personalities and lifestyles.
“Technically, the very first time I came to the UK was 16 years ago, when I was around 17 for a one-month internship, and I just fell in love with London. I had been to Paris multiple times but London felt completely different.
“London is just iconic with its double decker red buses and places like Piccadilly Circus. You’ve got the buzz of the city but at the same time, everybody is doing their own thing – they ‘keep calm and carry on’,” Anais said.
“Paris, and France in general, feels a lot more judgmental. If I’m on the Metro in Paris and my son starts crying, we will get stares, whereas in London, it doesn’t matter. I also feel like in London, you can be whatever you fancy. There is that feeling of ‘the sky is the limit’ that I don’t think you get anywhere else. Living here just feels natural – we feel the friction every time we go back to France.”
London was once famous for being France’s “sixth biggest city”, due to the large population of French expats living in the UK capital. But the numbers have been declining since Brexit came into effect in 2020, making Anaïs and her husband more of a rarity these days, with the number of French people living in the UK declining by over 40,000.
France might offer Anaïs and her family a more financially favourable lifestyle, but she believes that embedding a culturally open mindset in her children is priceless.
“Every month we are on a budget because it is a financial investment and sacrifice. But the UK’s multiculturalism beats that sacrifice. We would be less exposed to that if we’d stayed in France. We do visit up to eight times a year, so we have the best of both worlds,” she says.
Another reason Anaïs feels her young family is thriving in the UK is the work-life balance they have established. Her husband’s company operates on a four-day week, and she runs her own business flexibly and remotely, as a women’s careers coach at HerCode.
This means that despite only being able to afford three days a week of childcare in London, the couple aren’t juggling to cover the other two days, as they are able to take care of their son for a day a week each.
In France, even though a maximum 35 hour work week is enshrined in labour laws, a four-day work week has been less widely adopted there than in the UK.
Anaïs adds that when they receive their 30 hours free childcare funding in September, her son will attend a fourth day of nursery for essentially no extra cost. She will move her non-working day to Friday, which her husband will continue to have free, so the family will enjoy a three-day weekend.
“I’m raising a kid completely 50 per cent with my husband – he is equally as committed, and we’re really raising our son together, which is so important to us,” says Anaïs.
Healthcare does weigh heavily on Anaïs’s mind, and for that reason, she and her husband have agreed that their senior years may actually be best spent in France.
“I would be worried about growing old over here, especially if one of us developed a condition or complications with ageing,” she says. “I want to grow old by the sea, near my home town in Brittany.”