Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I will leave the Latin to the Mayor of London, if that is all right, but I will certainly have a word with the Education Secretary. What I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that school capital budgets as a whole are equivalent to what the previous Labour Government did in their early terms. The money is there. In terms of the banks, evidence now shows that the funding for lending scheme from the Bank of England is having an effect on lowering interest rates. We are reforming PFI, but we are also offering infrastructure guarantees—something that the Treasury has never done before—to help projects go ahead.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Q7. Nothing is more important in early-years education than the caring people who deliver it. Does the Prime Minister agree that raising the bar and elevating their status will help to add prestige to the profession, support parents and give children the best possible start in life?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I pay tribute to the Department for Education, which yesterday published a series of proposals to expand the availability and affordability of child care while also ensuring that there is an offer of real quality.

When we look across Europe, we see countries that provide very good and very affordable child care, and there are lessons that we can learn from those countries. I suggest that the people who say that changing the ratios is wrong should look at the ratios in countries such as Denmark and France. We are coming into line with those countries: we too can provide more available, more affordable child care, so that people who want to go out to work are able to because they can find the child care that they need.