Nurseries and Early Years Settings

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Ali. I add my congratulations to my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), on securing this important debate this afternoon.

Hampshire is reasonably well represented here this afternoon, but I do not want colleagues to think that that is because there is a particular problem in Hampshire with early years provision. I can assure everybody that there is not. Indeed, we have some of the highest quality early years provision in the entire country.

Over the last eight months or so, providers have been keen to emphasise to me the challenges that they have faced during the pandemic, and the challenges that they have risen to: making their premises covid-secure and ensuring that they are open for the children of key workers. In the regular Zoom calls that I have had with providers, they have been keen to emphasise the significant financial impact on the sector.

I was struck by the comments that I heard from one provider, who said that each and every month, with the number of reduced places that he could provide allowing for social distancing, he would be running his premises at a loss of £1,000 per month, which is simply unsustainable. When faced with those sorts of economics, providers take very difficult decisions and decide to no longer open their doors, which causes a reduction in the overall spaces available.

I do not intend to do a march around every childcare provider in my constituency this afternoon, but it is fair to say that they are very varied. As constituency Members of Parliament and, in many instances, as parents, we want to make sure that there is variety, whether it be the small village pre-school of the type I attended back in the 1970s or the larger more formal childcare settings, the individual childminders, those attached to schools or the maintained sector. It is absolutely right that there is variety, so that there is choice for parents and so that those facilities can be conveniently located.

I want to pay particular tribute to Lou Simmons of Abbotswood Day Nursery, who has provided me not only with the facts and figures about her business and the challenge it faces, but also a commentary on the wider sector. As she pointed out to me, the costs faced by her setting will not be identical to every setting, precisely because there is such a variety; but they are probably not atypical.

The stark reality is that with staff costs, pension costs, increases in utility costs and personal protective equipment costs all going up, the funding for childcare has not kept pace with the pressures faced. The £4.55 per funded hour per child over the age of three does not meet her operating costs of £6.80, and they have no choice but to make a charge for consumables, which parents do not necessarily understand, having listened very clearly to the Government’s mantra that it is 30 free hours per week. She will still run at a loss for every hour, every child. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister, who is working hard on this, is going to talk about the £44 million early years injection, but that is simply not enough to begin to cover the 75p per child per hour average loss made by providers such as Lou.

There is a stark reality to this. Just like the village pre-schools that have already closed, we will see the loss of childcare provision at a time when we know that women need to be able to access quality childcare to make sure that they do not lose out further in the employment market. Statistics provided by Mumsnet earlier this week, from a survey it conducted post pandemic, show that a significant proportion of mothers who use childcare—70%—were emphasising that they were struggling to balance the requirements of work and childcare at home.

These businesses, as we have heard, are run by women, employing women and providing opportunities for other women to go out to work. As my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester said, there is a social cost, which my hon. Friend Minister needs to step up and address.