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On October 27, 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held the second meeting of the Council for Designing 100-Year Life Society at the Prime Minister’s Office.

At the meeting, debate took place on eliminating or reducing tuition fees for preschool education and higher education.

Based on the discussion, the Prime Minister said,

“Today, there was a discussion on eliminating or reducing tuition fees for preschool education and higher education.

We need to make great strides in making preschool education free in order to support child-rearing households and fundamentally transform the social security system into one oriented to all generations. We will eliminate all tuition fees for kindergartens and childcare centers for three- to five-year-old children in which many children enroll. For children between the ages of zero and two as well, we will work to eliminate childcare waiting lists and eliminate fees for low-income households.

In order to avoid entrenching disparities, we will reform into a society in which everyone can go to a specialized vocational college or university if they have the ambition to do so, no matter how difficult their family financial circumstances are. We will realize free higher education for children from low-income households who are truly in need of support. Along with the expansion of tuition waiver measures, we will significantly increase the amount of fund-type scholarships to be able to cover all necessary daily life expenses.

We will bring forward the schedule for the Plan for Raising Children with Peace of Mind, which aims to achieve zero children on waiting lists, and further expand the capacity of childcare facilities by 320,000 children by FY2020. It means that we will have expanded the capacity of facilities by 590,000 children, which already greatly exceeds our target, before expanding the capacity further by an additional 320,000 children by FY2020.

To reduce to zero the number of people who leave employment to offer nursing care to their family members by securing the necessary number of caregiving personnel, we will further improve employment conditions so as to eliminate the gap in wages with other industries.

For these measures, we will compile bold policies that amount to two trillion yen by the end of the year. We will need a stable source of funding to carry out these policies. This funding will mainly come from tax revenue. For the most part we will make use of the added revenue from the increase in consumption tax by reviewing its usage. This is something that the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) committed to during this last election. I myself have explained at all times. I consider this as our promise to the people.

At the same time, based on the discussions of institutional reforms for a 100-year life society by the ruling parties, I would like the Council to make concrete considerations for how we can request a contribution of around 300 billion yen from the business community in this endeavor.”