Early Years Childcare

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) on securing this important debate. At the outset, I should declare that two of my three children are below school age. We are very lucky that we have found an exceptional childminder and a superb pre-school that my two sons enjoy every day of the school week. However, from talking to many mums and dads around my constituency, I know it is not always easy to find the right childminder, nursery, pre-school or whichever setting they want and is right for their child. When they do find it, it is even more difficult to pay for it and to meet the high costs of childcare.

I warmly congratulate the Government on the massive increase in spending on subsidised childcare that will apply from 2025 to children as young as nine months old, and when the Chancellor announced it, I welcomed it. However, whenever there is a great announcement such as that, there needs to be significant scrutiny of the detail. We need to iron out any of the gremlins that might be in there. In the limited time we have, I want principally to outline two points through the lens of a wonderful childcare setting in my constituency, Big Top Nursery in the village of Waddesdon, which I visited earlier this year.

The first point relates to the funding rates that we have as of this academic year. I would really appreciate it if the Minister could meet me at some point to go through the detail further. However, I inform the House that, on the current rate the Government will pay, compared with what it costs Big Top Nursery to provide childcare, it is currently losing £1.40 an hour on a three-year-old, which equates to £14 a day. For a child who goes to Big Top for 22 hours a week, which is a standard placement for that setting, the nursery is making a loss of £30.80 per week, which across those 22 hours-a-week children adds up to a loss of £1,500 every single year. That amount of money is not sustainable if that private nursery is going to remain in business and provide the excellent childcare that it does in the long term. Either we need to find a way to ensure that nurseries can charge a top-up, with the “free hours”, as they are badged, actually rebadged as subsidised childcare—not creating the expectation that everything is free, welcome though the funding is—or there needs to be another model that recognises that such a gap exists across thousands of settings across the country.

The other point I wish to mention very briefly is the way Ofsted treats pre-school and childcare settings. Big Top Nursery was subject to a report from Ofsted that it deems deeply unfair. Questions to staff were so unclear that staff had to ask the meaning of them, and the inspector then gave them a report that was not fitting for the setting, which had parents up in arms. My challenge to the Minister is to find a way to fix that when every single parent wants the setting to remain open and to be where their children go. As yet, there is no mechanism for parents to feed into such a process.