Childcare Entitlements

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend is right. Our key focus is on ensuring that places and staff are available in every area of the country, as we have shown in April with 200,000 benefiting from the new entitlement. We are pulling every lever, in time for the roll-out next September and the September after, to up recruitment, up rates, encourage more people into the sector and help expansion to ensure that provision is there.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I will start on a consensual point: it is not a bad thing that the Government want to extend early years childcare provision. We all want to see that and we want it to work. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), the Minister said, however, that not a single local authority is telling him that there are not sufficient places, yet Coram says that 35% of local authorities—a decrease of 29% since last year—reported that there was sufficient childcare for children under two. Both statements cannot be correct, so why does Coram think that in some local authorities there are insufficient places?

[David Johnston]

I have seen those figures. Many of these surveys are based on a measure of confidence taken at some point before the roll-out; all I can tell the hon. Gentleman is that we worked with those local authorities all the way up to that roll-out, to ensure that they had those places. Sometimes, when people say they are not confident, they turn out to be able to provide all those places. My point to the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), and now to the hon. Gentleman, is that since the expansion for April, no local authority is reporting that it does not have sufficient places. We will now work with them on the next stage of that expansion for September—the first 15 hours for nine-month-olds and upwards—to ensure that that is the case again.