Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

I am happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss that issue in more detail. Every school must have a child protection policy and the new Ofsted multi-agency inspection that comes in later this year will be a strong way of ensuring that there is a much more co-ordinated response to safeguarding and child protection, not just within schools but right across all agencies.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

11. What plans he has for child care provision; and if he will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

Ensuring that children benefit from high-quality early education and child care is a key priority. This Government spend more than £5 billion per year. As a proportion of GDP, that is higher than Germany and as much as France, yet our parents pay some of the highest costs and child care workers in England receive lower salaries than those in comparable countries. There is much scope to reform our system to achieve higher quality and better value for money.

[Barbara Keeley]

As the Minister says, the UK has some of the most expensive child care in the OECD. The Resolution Foundation tells us that a woman second earner working full-time on the minimum wage would bring home only £4 extra from that second role in her family, after paying child care costs and losing tax credits, and the Government hardly helped by cutting the child care element of the working tax credit, which hit 400,000 families. Is it not time that the Government got on and did something to help parents with those high child care costs?

[Elizabeth Truss]

As we announced in the mid-term review, we will help hard-working families with the cost of child care and we will announce measures on that in due course. As a country we spend more than £5 billion a year, more than countries such as Germany and the same amount as France, and we are not yet getting value for money. My other aim is to make sure that we use the money in our system much better to ensure that more money goes to the front line and that our hard-working child care workers in nurseries and our child minders receive more of the money coming from parents and the Government.