Child Care (London)

Baroness Jowell Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

You will have had my apologies for arriving late at this debate, Mr Dobbin—I was detained at a Delegated Legislation Committee. It is a great pleasure to be here to support the initiative of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander). She and other Opposition Members present have given much of their political lives to identifying, recognising and campaigning for improved standards in child care, but I do not want this to become a competition about the monopoly of good intention. I also welcome yesterday’s announcement, in particular because it is in London that children from a range of backgrounds are more likely to grow up together. It is a function of gentrification and of the mixed nature of the communities we represent. It is a good thing that young children grow up understanding the differences in life and family circumstances between them and other children.

Has the Minister studied the experience in Australia in the 1990s? A similar way of funding child care led, as is often the risk in such circumstances, to a multiple increase in the costs of supply. An intervention in the market on cost tends to rig things in the suppliers’ favour and against the interests of parents. I am happy to supply her with the information if she has not yet had the chance to see it.

Different solutions, fiscal or otherwise, are right for different situations. Child tax credits, with the element that recognised the cost of child care, were just that. In the financial life of a family, the period when children are small and when both parents may be working is one of exceptional call on family resources, to which tax credits are a response. I agree that we might come up with different solutions now, but it is important to understand the response in the context of the time.

I will not repeat the point about the extraordinary financial burden that good child care places on family finances, particularly in London, but let us remember that, on average, £1 in every £3 of disposable income in London is spent on child care and that the cost is rising exponentially. I am sure that all Members present have received letters from mothers who doubt whether it is worth going back to work. I recently received such a letter from a mother who took home £2,000 a month when she was working. She wanted to return to work after maternity leave and found that child care for her two-and-a-half-year-old and her relatively small baby was going to cost her £1,870 a month, so she wondered whether it was worth going back. Mothers care most of all about the quality of care that their babies receive, but let us remember that the under-employment of women who wish to work, or who wish to work more, has a substantial economic cost.

Quality is important, and for most mothers quality is assured by their children being looked after by a member of their family, for which they are then rewarded, whether by tax credit or some other means. We must consider family care and remunerated family care, particularly since grandparents are becoming so fundamentally important to the care of small children. I will always remember the horror I felt when, while visiting an extremely prestigious nursery a couple of years ago, I greeted a nursery nurse who had two one-year-olds, one on each knee, and asked what their names were. She replied, “I don’t know.” I would not leave a child with somebody who did not know their name or their little habits and ways. That is the pretty basic thing that we mean when we speak of quality.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) referred to Sure Start, and I want to make two points. First, when I, with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), designed the Sure Start programme, it was as a nurture programme, not a welfare to work programme. We now know so much more about the critical 1,000 days that shape a child’s long-term development, and the design of nursery care must take account of that. Secondly, it is just not good for children to be woken up too early when their mothers are doing sequential jobs in order to meet the cost of child care. We need to consider having more flexibility in how nursery staff are deployed. As the economy becomes 24-hour, so must child care.

It is important that we learn from mothers. Last week, I visited an excellent nursery in Croydon and spent the afternoon talking to mothers. I met one group, a number of whom were poorly educated but wanted to be good mothers, and the greatest benefit for them had been the combination of education and child care. One mother, who had four little girls, said that being able to read to her three-year-old was the most important thing that she had ever done, and that she had never thought she would be able to do it.

My final point is on flexibility in pricing sessions of child care, so that people who do not want their child looked after for a whole session might have the possibility of buying part of a session. We should therefore listen to mothers in the grand design, to ensure that child care is as important for the healthy, safe development of children and support of families as it is for our economy.