Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Karen Buck and Elizabeth Truss

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Elizabeth Truss)]

Despite having failed in his initial aims, Putin continues his barbaric war in Ukraine. The United Kingdom, together with our allies, has stepped up sanctions and lethal aid. We have put more sanctions on than any other nation, including on oligarchs and banks, and we have supplied everything from hundreds of Starstreak anti-air missiles to ammunition. This week, our ambassador, Melinda Simmons, is returning to our reopened embassy in Kyiv. We will continue to back Ukraine until it prevails and Putin fails.

[Ms Buck]

In addition to the devastating impact of the conflict in Ukraine itself, the International Monetary Fund report shows that this is now having an impact on world food prices, particularly affecting some of the world’s poorest communities. In Yemen alone, there is evidence that food prices have increased by 150%. Will the Secretary of State tell us what assessment her Department has made of the impact of rising food prices in some of the world’s conflict zones and what the Government’s response will be?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Karen Buck and Elizabeth Truss

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

There are huge opportunities for great Cornish seafood in Japan, Korea, and all of Asia. Our Japan deal will see tariffs reduced on salmon, and the Cornish sardine properly recognised. We are holding a webinar on 26 October to help seafood exporters, including crab exporters, crack the Japanese market.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I have had more representations on the overlapping issues of food safety and animal welfare in trade agreements than on almost any other issue for a long time. The Conservative party was keen to insert animal welfare provisions into EU trade agreements—indeed, the issue was in its 2015 manifesto. Why was the inclusion of animal welfare provisions in EU trade agreements good enough then, but not good enough to be written into UK legislation now?

[Elizabeth Truss]

In each individual trade agreement we consider key issues such as animal welfare. We are consulting closely with the farming industry, including the pig industry, which sees all the offers we put forward in individual deals. Each deal will be scrutinised by the International Trade Committee, and the implications for animal welfare will be independently verified. Parliament will have an opportunity to debate those issues. We take this matter seriously, and as the hon. Lady said, those issues come to light in each individual trade deal.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Karen Buck and Elizabeth Truss

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

Last year’s results from the progress in international reading literacy study—PIRLS—showed that the number of children in this country who are reading for enjoyment is going up; it has resumed considerably over the past few years. We have fantastic schemes to encourage students to read, such as the summer reading challenge. This year’s challenge is the mythical maze, which will challenge children to find their way around a labyrinth and introduce them to fantastical creatures from the world of legend and mythology.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

T4. Further to his somewhat unilluminating response to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), will the Secretary of State tell the House—and if necessary write to me—on how many occasions his former special adviser Dominic Cummings has visited the Department for Education since he left the Secretary of State’s employment, and whom he met on each occasion?

Child Care (London)

Debate between Karen Buck and Elizabeth Truss

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this important debate, and on laying out so clearly, as other Members have done, some of the issues to do with the high cost of child care in London. I am pleased with anything that secures additional resources for child care in London and goes towards meeting that child care gap, and one thing that can be said about the additional money going into the child care tax relief is that it will, to some extent, help those middle-to-higher earners facing extraordinary costs at the sharp end, particularly in such places as my constituency in central London.

That money is welcome, as is the Government’s recognition of the need to improve the child care offer within universal credit. The organisations campaigning on behalf of low earners were enthusiastic about that recognition. Will the Minister let us know the extent to which that welcome additional assistance for low earners will benefit Londoners proportionately? Historically, the child care tax credit—I am obviously a fan of that investment in tackling working poverty—never benefited London to anything like the same degree as it did other regions of the country. I need to be sure that the universal credit child care offer will benefit London as much as it should.

That speaks to the central point, which is that the investment in child care announced yesterday—welcome as every penny put into child care is—raises a question about whether that marginal pound is best spent in the way that the Government propose. As we know, £750 million of that offer is likely to go to higher earners, with only £200 million going to lower earners. I suggest that the balance of that investment probably does not meet the level of need. We have heard about the cost of child care in London, but it is also important to recognise that not only do we have a supply-side problem, but Londoners are disproportionately likely not to have networks of informal care, so they will need formal child care more than people outside London. Obviously, lower earners are disproportionately more likely than higher earners to rely on informal care. That needs to be addressed if we are to help parents into work, as well as provide an important child development experience, which is what investment in child care should always be about.

One thing that alarmed me—and, I think, a number of organisations—about the universal credit investment is that the money has been identified as coming from elsewhere in the universal credit budget, although as yet we do not know where. I am anxious to know the answer to that, because the one thing we do not want is for support for working parents within universal credit to be taken from the other ways of supporting low-income families. Universal credit is already likely to disadvantage London as the child care tax credit once did, because it does not properly reflect higher costs there, particularly the higher cost of housing. I think that Londoners will lose, proportionately, under universal credit, or will not gain to the same extent as people elsewhere. We need to ensure that the resources do not come from the individuals who are affected by that.

In the couple of minutes that I have left, I want to talk about the extent to which the investment that the Government announced yesterday will help with supply. There is a risk that there will be the child care equivalent of Help to Buy, which helps with buying, not building. The risk is that the announcement will help to increase demand for child care, but do relatively little to increase supply, particularly because major child care providers’ costs are already squeezed. I know that the Minister is familiar with the London Early Years Foundation, which started as the Westminster Children’s Society, and which I hold in high regard. It tweeted about the child care offer for two-year-olds, which is a critical way of increasing supply:

“The challenge of expanding the two year old programme…is whether we can do this for £5.09 in London? How?”

It is a social entrepreneur project, providing child care at the lowest possible cost, yet it wants to know how it can provide that quality offer within the envelope.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

I wanted to point out that £5.09 is a national average. The average London rate is higher, because the offer for two-year-olds is adjusted for salaries in each area. It is more like £6 for London.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this debate on an extremely important topic. The Government’s various announcements this week, from three different Departments—the Treasury, the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions—show how seriously we take this issue. We have announced that parents will get up to £2,000 per child towards their child care costs. Parents on low incomes will get 85% of those costs paid.

I want to challenge some of the things that have been said in the debate. Under this Government, spending on child care and early intervention has gone from £4 billion to £4.5 billion. I am happy to supply hon. Members with statistics for their local authorities. It is worth making the point that we spend as much money on this, as a proportion of GDP, as countries such as France and Germany. We have to try to get better value from the money we spend. That is the intention of a lot of the Government’s work.

Many Members have pointed out that the problem has not arisen overnight. Child care costs have been rising steadily for the past 15 years. However, this year’s Family and Childcare Trust survey showed that costs in England are starting to come down for the first time in 12 years. In England, costs of nursery care are frozen in nominal terms and have fallen once inflation is taken into account. In Wales, the cost of equivalent nursery care has gone up by 13%, and in Scotland, by 8%.

The use of child care in deprived areas has gone up by 16% in the past year. We have also seen an increase in maternal employment rates and the number of women in work. That is because the Government have made an effort to streamline the complicated child care system we inherited. Whereas there were multiple bodies inspecting child care providers, Ofsted is now the sole arbiter of quality. We have also announced a single child care register that all child care providers should be on.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who is not in his place, made an important point about older children. The Secretary of State has recently announced that for our next manifesto the Conservatives are looking at the idea of enabling and funding schools to open for longer hours to give an integrated offer to parents. The issue is not just about child care but about education.

[Ms Buck]

I raised the fact that councillors are being asked to support our local nurseries and nursery classes, but are being told that they have to cut places from full time to part time because of the funding pressures of the offer. Does that meet the Minister’s objective of providing longer hours of care?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I am about to come on to the issues that are specific to London, and will address that point then.

We are absolutely passionate about quality and improving outcomes, which we know have previously been issues. There is an 18-month vocabulary gap between children from low-income and high-income backgrounds. That is a problem for all of us, because it means that children start school in different positions. We have improved the standards for early years teachers, so that they now have to meet the same standards as primary school teachers. We have seen a 25% increase in the number of early years teachers enrolling on courses in the past year. We are also raising the standards for early years educators. This week, we announced an early years pupil premium for three and four-year-olds, which means that there will be extra money for the most disadvantaged children aged three and four.

We have improved the Ofsted framework, so it now looks at the qualifications of staff in nurseries and is much more focused on outcomes. We have introduced Teach First for early years teaching, to make sure that we are getting the best and brightest graduates into that vital sector. Most importantly, we are working on a coherent framework for the teaching structure from the ages of two to 18, so that early years provision is not seen as an afterthought but as a core part of our education system.

I recognise that there is a greater challenge in London. That is why I launched an £8 million fund with the Mayor of London at the end of last year. That aims to unlock the £1 billion that the Department for Education spends on early years provision in London.

I very much agree with the comments on increasing flexibility. A lot of school nurseries offer parents three hours, five days a week. That does not fit with many people’s working patterns. It also does not use our school nursery resources very well. In London, 45% of early years places are in school nurseries, which are generally open only between 9 am and 3 pm. If those school nurseries were all open between 8 am and 6 pm, that would give 66% extra child care hours. It is not a question of building more facilities but of using our facilities better. Those nurseries could open for two five-hour sessions a day, offering multiple hours.