Children and Families Bill

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Baroness Morgan of Ely

Monday 11th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morgan of Ely]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for addressing some of those issues. I would like to pick up on a number of them. First, he suggested that childminders working together makes sense. Yes, absolutely that makes sense, but informal networks exist already. Local authorities are doing a lot of this work already. It also seems very odd that we are still in the middle of a pilot and are putting something into the Bill when we have no idea whether it will work. Even if it does, the sample we have is just six private companies out of 20. When the whole point of this is the suggestion that we move to a private sector approach, having just six out of 20 does not seem to make much sense.

The Minister mentioned that Ofsted can inspect any of these childminders. The question is: will it? The cost of inspection according to Ofsted is £701 per childminder visit. That is quite a lot when Ofsted is already under pressure financially. I am very disappointed that the Minister did not address the issue of the conflict of interest, because that is absolutely fundamental. If a private provider inspects childminders who are paying it, there has to be a conflict of interest. At this time of austerity, when people are really up against it financially, to suggest that costs will come down is fairy-tale land. The assumption that the Minister makes is that a childminder does not have enough children, and that they can go to an agency that will have a whole pool of children they can pick up. That is unlikely to be the case because we know that there is already a shortage of childminders. The probability is that costs will increase for childminders and they will pass that cost directly on to parents. That concerns me but—

[The Earl of Listowel]

What would stop the Government from injecting funds into local authorities to enable them to build more networks? Rather than going down the agency route to bring these childminders together, what obstacles would there be to a push to enable more local authorities to build on the networks they already have? Why would that not meet the Government’s aim of building the capacity of childminders?