Childcare Bill [HL]

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

First, I thank the Minister for his letter, which raised a number of issues in my mind but which was at least helpful in resolving some others, and say that I support Amendment 1. I believe that I heard the Minister say in his introduction that he had had useful discussions with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and that some of the issues that he outlined in his introduction were going to come forward in any event. Despite all the difficulties that have gone before—I am glad I am not taking a political view—this gives us a really good opportunity to take a strategic view of childcare at the moment. I want to be absolutely clear about the who, the how and the what as we go through the amendments. We have a number of amendments, which we will discuss later, about what a working parent is, who in a range of other groups, such as disabled groups, might qualify for extra childcare and how that will be delivered. Will it be on an educational or a childcare basis? The Sutherland report pointed out clearly that there are differences in those two things. What will it be? Who will deliver it? Will it be delivered by childminders as well as within that educational framework?

If we could understand, through these reports, the answers to some of the issues that the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, raises, we would have a good opportunity to settle funding, cost and consistency issues. Those are among the main difficulties across the country for those trying to access childcare—you only have to move across a county border to find you pay twice as much for childcare as you did in the previous county, which can cause great difficulties, particularly with a mobile workforce. I hope that as we go through the amendments we will get answers to these questions and that we will stop, if you like, the procedural issues—we have made enough of those. We now have some baseline information from the Minister, and maybe we can move forward and get further information so that, by October, we know which parents will qualify and can understand what they will get and where they will get it from.

[Lord Storey]

First, I apologise to your Lordships for not being able to speak at Second Reading. I will speak to Amendments 1, 29 and 38A. I very much agree with the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Howarth, but am very nervous of phrases such as “value for money” and “best value” in local government. It has to be about what is best in terms of provision. We have seen early years childcare grow over the last two decades. We have seen the Labour Government, the coalition Government and now the Conservative Government all doing something about early years, but we have not really thought about how it is going to look and how we want it to work. I find it concerning, for example, that three-quarters of our nurseries are, as we know, independent. There is nothing wrong with that, but we know that of those independent nurseries only half have a qualified teacher on the staff. We also know that, when there is a qualified teacher, the learning experience for those children is far greater than otherwise. So it has to be about the quality of the provision, for me.

I wonder about the effects of having those extra 15 hours. It might be great for working parents, but how do they affect the child? I will give an example. Schools will have nurseries, where children will go for part-time provision for three hours a day, Monday to Friday. So you can see a system arising now whereby the working parent will take the child to the childminder and the childminder will then take the child to the school nursery for three hours. With the extra 15 hours, they cannot use the school again, because it is a different set of children in the afternoon—not in every case but in most cases—so they will look for a different provider for the afternoon session. Then the child will go back to the childminder to be taken home to the parent. So there will be four different regimes or experiences of childcare, and I really wonder what the effect will be on those children. We need to look closely and calmly not just at the extra resource and provision, which we all welcome, but at how we ensure that there is quality.

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I add just one final thought before ending wearying your Lordships: please let us not overregulate. I wholly endorse everything that was said about quality. But by making more and more graduates in nursing, have we guaranteed that everyone in our hospitals is cared for? There are some things that are instinctive. By making every teacher in every maintained school have qualified teacher status, have we guaranteed axiomatically that all teaching that goes on in our schools is good? As we aspire to quality, I ask that we do not rush to regulation uniformity, which may not answer some of the deeper questions about how we deliver true quality in providing child-centred care for the future.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I will be, as I usually am, brief. I am not going to make the speech that I was going to make as I think that it has already been made by other noble Lords I just want to make some points that I think have not been made and, if possible, take up one or two points with the noble Lord, Lord True.

I primarily want to support the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in ensuring that, whatever we decide in this Bill, the child’s needs are paramount. Having heard him on previous occasions, I am quite sure that the Minister will agree that the child’s needs must be paramount. The problem is how to implement that. Listening to some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord True, I felt that there was a conflict between the suggestion that there should be universal provision for every child and the need to meet the needs of children who have more deprivation or disability than the general population. I am quite sure, even on my poor economics maths, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will not have the funding for universal provision. I therefore hope that, when we get to some kind of pilots, we do not just look at the employment issues.

I know that this is a manifesto commitment and absolutely understand how it has to be met by the Government. However, I think that there is a risk of making things worse for some groups of children. If some families who are earning good funds—I think that the noble Lord, Lord True, was right on this—take up the 30 hours and are already paying for half of it, that means that there will be less finance available for those young people and children, two year-olds and upwards, who are not yet getting proper provision. Knowing some of the parents in those groups as I do, I appreciate that they do not always even know how to access that provision. I know that the Government are keen to improve information so that they can access it.

Those are the points that I wanted to make in seeking the Minister’s assurance that, despite the manifesto commitment that this is about employment and getting more women into work, the child’s needs will be paramount. I agree that quality is not always about qualifications. Having interviewed many staff down the years, I know that some of the best qualified have probably been some of the least caring. Then again, some of the most caring have not had the skills to actually implement the caring. It is about having an understanding of the two. I think that we could get more for less with a more strategic approach across the whole. I hope that the Minister will, in some of the reviews that are being undertaken, take that overview of it all. The way in which funding is given and the range of different funding—for example through tax credits and universal credit—is such a jigsaw for families. Just to rationalise that would make a difference both to access for families and to finances generally.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I want to focus briefly on one word in the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Massey—the word “paramount”. It will make a huge difference as to how choices are made when it comes to implementing this Bill. There will be hard choices of a financial nature about commitments to manifestos and about the kind of care provided. As a principle, it may read like motherhood and apple pie, but it is not. “Paramount” is saying where the final commitment will be. For example, is it the case that paramount considerations will lead to children in deprived areas or children with special needs being favoured if there is a shortage of money? The word “paramount” begins to put an edge on this and that is why I support this amendment.

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The fifth category I should like to see added to the definition of working parents is those who do voluntary work. If someone has left school at the earliest possible moment with limited qualifications and has never gone into work but has had a family, one route back into gaining skills and learning what it is like to go to work is via voluntary work. There are many bodies around this country that encourage people, particularly those in less advantaged areas, to work in local charity shops or luncheon clubs to help them get a feel for what it means to go out to work. Again, we can encourage that if we include it within the definition of a working parent. That would focus our care on those most disadvantaged families in the most deprived areas and would show the degree of care and compassion that I hope we can achieve through the Bill and its implementation. I hope the Minister will seriously consider those aspects and broaden the definition to include some of the things that we have raised this evening.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I have a very straightforward and simple question for the Minister. When I first read the Bill, I was struck by the phrase “working parents”. Do the Government really mean working parents or do they mean those with parental responsibility? One of the things the Minister will know about family construction in this country is that nuclear families, with two parents and two children, are at a minimum. I spent my life in the children’s court system looking at extraordinarily complex types of families. People with parental responsibility might be kin such as grandparents, aunts or other relatives, or they might not be directly related but have been given some sort of kinship care prior to adoption. There is a whole range there and I hope that the Bill, at some point, will make it clear that this is about those with parental responsibility. That would end the debate about a whole range of the issues that have just been raised.

[Lord True]

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a very interesting point. I will intervene on a slightly different tack. I have tried to present myself as friendly and caring so far, and I hope I am, but we have of course just heard a debate which has lasted half an hour with a range of different aspirations. Some are very worthy, including those on behalf of the homeless, grandparents and people with wider parental responsibilities, and some relate to whether different types of things are work or not. I have not counted how many categories have been suggested by your Lordships, but there are probably 10 and maybe 12, each of which has to be assessed and policed by somebody. I do not want to try my noble friend again, but this problem of defining the frontier and policing the entitlement arises from what I called earlier the net curtain between the so-called working and the so-called non-working—although there are wider issues in relation to broader parental responsibility.

At the moment we have a beautifully simple system: someone comes with a child of three or four; the providers simply tell the local authorities the numbers; a return is made; and money is given to the providers and paid over. Each one of these aspirations requires a different sort of assessment, probably by a different part of the public sector. It may even touch people who do not touch the public sector—there are sad cases of people who are deeply involved in caring but very hard to reach. I venture to say to the Committee that trying to get everything into one bottle will be extremely difficult. If the Minister wishes to keep the net curtain as he goes forward, there may be wisdom in trying to find different types of authority with the entitlement to do the assessment rather than putting it through.

I would prefer to keep it simple. Universal benefits are much simpler, although a means test can be applied if it is wanted. But I recoil with some fear, not particularly from the point of view of the local authority but from thinking about public administration, the ethical doubts and challenges, the frontiers that have to be defended, the rows and the unintended injustices that will occur from having too complex a system where it is hard to define the frontiers between working and non-working in a way that is perceived as “fair” and therefore sustainable. I believe that this debate illustrates the point I have been trying to make about public policy: good intentions, unless we are very careful in framing the regulations, will lead us into some very difficult places—and I hope that they never become dark ones.