Draft Carer's Assistance (Carer Support Payment) (Scotland) Regulations 2023 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2023
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to appear before you, Mrs Harris.
I have some questions for the Minister on the operation of the scheme. First, however, it is worth reflecting on the fact that we are dealing with quite a complex set of regulations that arises entirely from devolution. I suppose it illustrates to the people of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom the significant complexity that is being introduced into our legal system and benefit system by devolution. I was surprised that the Minister said he was pleased to see the order arrive because, to me, it represents an unnecessary complexity in the United Kingdom, which we could all do without.
Like the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, and having worked at DWP, I am also concerned by the devolution of what is quite a complicated and difficult administrative task to the Scottish Government—not necessarily the SNP—who have not covered themselves in glory with the administration of various schemes and various ideas they have had over the last couple of years. Given the delay and the failure to institute a new system—it has been on the cards for some years—[Interruption.]
Kit Malthouse
What confidence does the Minister have that the Scottish Government will be able to administer benefits to the extent that they get to the people who need them and the system will not collapse, as so many other things seem to have done? I wonder whether the Minister has any sense of the deadweight cost of having a separate organisation called Social Security Scotland on the budget. Obviously, it has to maintain its own back office, its own personnel and its own administrative burden, and there must be an extra cost, which is therefore being denied to the recipients of welfare payments because it is going into the hands of unnecessary administrators.
I also had a question about age limits. I am the patron of Andover Young Carers, an organisation that supports young people who are in full-time education and who look after an adult in their family living with a disability. Although I know that carer’s allowance is constrained for those who are under 16 or in full-time education, I have never quite understood why we do not look at the particular case of a young person who might be caring for a parent with a severe disability where there is no other carer available. They do so with a burden that no other adult carer broadly shares, yet we exclude them from such schemes. I would be interested in the Minister’s comments on that.
My second point is about the operation of the scheme. On reading the statutory instrument, there seems to be an unnecessarily complicated administrative task in the case where there are effectively two people caring for one individual. Could the Minister confirm that they will have to make daily elections—the SI talks about elections in a prescribed form—as to who is to receive the carer’s allowance on that day? What form is that election to take? Is it a letter, a phone call or a text? Who will decide?
The SI then says that in the situation where both carers claim, it will effectively be for the Secretary of State to decide who gets the allowance. Will the Secretary of State be showered with thousands of competing claims for carer’s allowance on an almost daily basis? If there is an election, how long will that endure? If there is a dispute between two carers about who gets the allowance the Secretary of State is given the discretion to make a decision, but what will be the process of appeal? How will carer B make a claim over carer A? What if there is carer C, who is not referred to in the legislation? In my experience, people with significant disabilities often have multiple carers who may work together as a team to support them. How will that be dealt with?
Finally, on the effect on the border, I am sure we will have a small number of cross-border carers—those resident in England who care for those resident in Scotland and vice versa. Who will pay them and where will the care be claimed? There is no reference to that in the legislation. Someone claiming carer support payment in Scotland will have to ordinarily be resident in Scotland. If I am ordinarily resident in Northumberland but care for somebody over the border, who will support me and how will I be supported in that care?
On the same theme, what happens if I am a family unit of a carer plus a disabled individual who move from Scotland to England or vice versa? How seamless will the transition be? Will there be a gap in payment? Will I have to apply before I move to have my domicile for the carer’s payment moved, or will I have to apply when I arrive? Do I have to be ordinarily resident before I apply and if so, how long do I have to wait until that kicks in? Will it be six, 12 or nine months before I receive a payment? If I do receive a payment on moving to lovely Scotland, will it be backdated to the date of my arrival, or will England persist in paying me beyond my arrival until the Scottish Government cover the gap? None of those issues, which might only affect a small number of people but will nevertheless be critical to their welfare and survival, seem to be addressed in this SI. I should be grateful if the Minister would answer those questions.
Kit Malthouse
On a point of order, Mrs Harris. This is legislation being presented to the UK Parliament. We are Members of Parliament; our job is to scrutinise and ask questions of the legislation. I understand that it is common practice in Delegated Legislation Committees for people not to bother to read the legislation before coming into the room, but I happen to think that it is my duty, if I am presented with something that I am approving, to examine and ask what I believe are perfectly reasonable and relevant questions. If there is an answer, fine, but the fact that I am an English, not a Scottish, MP should have no bearing on the matter. This is UK legislation to enable the Scottish Government to do something.
The Chair
John Lamont
I will start with an apology: I should have said at the start of my contribution what a great privilege it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris.
I thank Members for their various remarks and welcome the support of Labour and SNP Members. On the various points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire, the broader point is that we have to recognise that this Parliament legislated for additional welfare powers to be delivered to the Scottish Government, which I and the current Government fully support. Others have said that a consequence of that will be differing types of system, including social security, being delivered on either side of the border. That is something which I also support and which we have to recognise is in the nature of devolution. That is how devolution in these islands works. The key for us is making sure that it works well.
As other Members have said, there have been delays in terms of the Scottish Government’s capacity to take up these additional welfare powers. We have worked with them to delay, transfer, or ensure that their delivery has been done in a practical way to make sure that the people in need of those benefits are receiving them in a timely and straightforward manner. I do not necessarily agree with the thrust of some of the remarks by the hon. Member for Glasgow East. As I said at the start, it is important for us to recognise that devolution results in these variations, and this Government have to ensure that we work with the Scottish Government to deliver these benefits effectively.
My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire raised a number of points and questions, which I will try to answer. For example, what will happen if the claimant is a recipient of the UK Government’s carer’s benefit and then moves from England to Scotland? There will be a case transfer process from carer’s allowance to the carer support payment. When a carer who is getting an equivalent benefit in England moves to Scotland, the reward will transfer automatically—there is no need to apply, and the DWP will continue to pay that for 13 weeks from the date of their move. Following the completion of that case transfer, alternative arrangements will be made to minimise the risk of claimants who are continuing to provide care experiencing a break in payments when they move.
My right hon. Friend asked a number of other questions. We will write to him on those, if that is okay, rather than go into some of the granular detail. However, at the interministerial level, the interministerial group on welfare, on which I sit, deals with many of those points and has dealt with many of them in readiness for this order. That includes work on the sharing of data and ensuring that both the new social security system in Scotland and the DWP are working in partnership to ensure that the types of points that my right hon. Friend raised are addressed properly. That will ensure that nobody is left without the benefits that they are entitled to or the support that they need, and that people are not claiming wrongly when they should not be.
I am confident that the working relationships that we have, at both the official and ministerial levels, will deal with those concerns and questions raised by my right hon. Friend. However, I do undertake to write to him on the detail.
Kit Malthouse
I wonder how much the Minister is willing to wager that he will not be back at some point in the future to correct anomalies in this legislation. If, as he is saying, the approach is, “Well, we’ll try it and see, and we’ll talk about the problems that may emerge and try and tease them out,” is he saying that the legislation is likely to change, and therefore is not comprehensive for some of the anomalies that may occur?
I know that I raised a number of questions about the operation of the scheme, but could the Minister just answer the question about cross-border carers? There will be a number of cross-border carers who, as we speak, will be wondering where they sit and would be grateful to have some clarity on that pretty quickly.
John Lamont
I am not a betting man, so I will not enter into a wager with my right hon. Friend. However, as I alluded to earlier, there will be differences between how the social security system works in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. That is simply a reflection of the devolution settlement. I do not doubt that there will be anomalies that will have to be fixed and addressed, regarding both social security and other devolved policy areas. Again, that is just the nature of the constitutional settlement that we live with, and that is something that I just think we have to accept will be a reality, moving forward.
Oral Answers to Questions
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
No; but I would say that my approach to reaching net zero is not one that requires people to give up doing the things that they want to do and enjoy, such as flying. The right thing to be doing is as we are doing: investing in and funding new technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuel, because that is how we will decarbonise aviation during the transition to net zero, rather than forcing people to give everything up.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I thank my right hon. Friend for all of his work and attention in this area; it was good to work with him on Project Adder in particular. He is right to highlight the fact that drugs destroy lives and families, hitting the most vulnerable in our society the hardest. The 10-year drug strategy, which he helped put in place, is ambitious and backed with a record £3 billion of funding. As he highlighted, we have consulted on a new drug possession offences framework, and I assure him that Ministers will keep him and this House updated on future plans.
Childcare and Early Years
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Mr Walker
My hon. Friend, on whose Select Committee—the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee—I am happy to serve, is absolutely right. I have learned a huge amount as a result of having children in childcare and early years settings and talking to the brilliant people who look after them. It is absolutely true that the people who work in this space provide that support. I also think that the Government’s family hubs intervention will be very welcome, particularly if there is outreach and support in the community.
When we take into account the stimulation for young minds, the benefits for parents and the impact on schools, the case for investment in early years becomes a win-win-win—and that is not all. We all know about the rising tide of demand for specialist and high needs support; the Minister was very frank about it in her statement on Monday. We all know that the early identification of need is vital to children’s life chances. Picking up challenges such as autism, speech and language difficulties and hearing or visual impairments early in a child’s life enormously increases their chances of managing their condition, getting the right specialist support in place and being able to engage with mainstream education.
If the Treasury ever wants to reduce the high needs deficits that beset our local authority budgets and simultaneously unleash the potential of more young people with special needs, it needs to understand that investment in early years and in the professions that can support, identify and meet needs in the early years is a must. Investment in the early years and childcare should therefore be a win to the power of four. There can be few sectors of the economy in which there is such obvious and compelling payback.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
My hon. Friend is quite right to use the word “investment” in this context. Has he ever come across the Tangelo Park project in the United States, which has fascinated me for many years? A local philanthropist took over a neighbourhood in Florida that was plagued by crime and low achievement—what one would refer to as a rough neighbourhood. He made two offers to the population: he said that he would pay for universal, high-quality pre-school childcare and that anybody who got into college would get it free. Obviously people normally have to pay for college there, so that created an incentive. The project has been going for 20 years and has completely transformed the neighbourhood, which has become prosperous, crime-free and a lovely place to live. If we are interested in regeneration and levelling up across everything we do, investment is about not just the individual child and their family, but the area in which they live and their community’s sense of aspiration and purpose.
Mr Walker
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We had a very interesting debate on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill about childcare as an infrastructural issue, which I think reflected those benefits. I agree that we need social entrepreneurs to invest and play a role in this space. The private, voluntary and independent sector, which currently dominates provision, is so vital. It is important for us to work with the sector and support it rather than placing it under the pressures that unfortunately we are seeing today.
This is a debate about departmental estimates, but I am first to recognise that not all spending on childcare and early years comes or needs to come from the Department for Education’s budget. Within that budget, however, we have seen welcome commitments to review and increase the local spending on funded hours. I am proud of this Government’s record of delivering both the targeted two-year-old offer for disadvantaged children and the 30 free hours for some working parents.
Evidence given to the Education Committee makes it all too clear, however, that those welcome steps are coming under real pressure from rising costs. Helen Donohoe of PACEY, the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years, told us:
“The number of childminders has halved in 20 years. We project that by 2035 we will have only about 1,000 childminders left in the country. That is from 60,000 20 years ago”.
Dr Grenier, a nursery school headteacher, told us that
“roughly 10% of nursery schools have closed in the last 10 years and more are due to close soon.”
Kara Jewell, a nursery director, told us:
“In 2003 when I registered as a childminder our funding rate was £3.02 per hour. It is now set to go to £4.69, so our funding rate has gone up 55.3% in 20 years while the minimum wage has risen by 131.56%.”
Emma Gardner, who is quality manager for early years and childcare at Spring by Action for Children, told us:
“I certainly think that funded places in settings that take funded children will reduce dramatically because it is just not sustainable.”
Much of the potential for real investment in this space comes through the Treasury’s so-called tax-free childcare offer and the Department for Work and Pensions’ substantial contribution through universal credit. However, our Committee has heard that neither is working as effectively as it should, and that both need reform to meet the needs of parents today. The Early Years Alliance has suggested to our Committee that the tax-free childcare policy should be stopped and that the theoretical billions set aside for it should be invested in meeting the full costs of the so-called free hours. We have heard from others that the money could be better invested in extending the scope of the subsidised offers from three and four-year-olds down to one and two-year-olds.
Against that, it is worth bearing in mind that the tax-free childcare offer is currently the only part of the system that offers parents any support for children under two or over four, so cutting it off completely would come at the expense of many who use it. I also think that it is worth exploring the true potential of actual tax-free childcare. We could make it much more attractive for parents by allowing childcare costs to be claimed against taxation for the household, as many European countries do, rather than offering a 20% subsidy on cash placed in an account from post-tax income.
There are other ways for the Treasury to help the sector that I believe are worthy of immediate consideration. It could remove business rates from the PVI sector, which provides approximately 80% of childcare in this country. It could remove the unfair burden of VAT, which holds back investment. I know that such moves would come at a cost and that the Chancellor has a hugely difficult challenge in balancing the books after all the challenges of the pandemic, but I plead that he consider the huge benefit of supporting investment in this space and the enormous upsides of better stimulated children and of more parents returning to work.
If such reforms prove a bridge too far, I hope that the Chancellor will look urgently at the massive increases in rates facing many in the sector. The NDNA told our Committee:
“Business rate property revaluation from April 2023 has seen providers report bill increases of 40-50%”.
I received clear evidence of that last week from a passionate early years advocate in my constituency who has been made an MBE for her services to the sector. She is despairing at the proposed increase of 35% in the rates for her outstanding-rated Worcester provision, which is compounded by the fact that the local funding rate has increased by just 1% for two-year-olds and 5% for three and four-year-olds while the national living wage on which many of her staff are working has increased by 9.2%.
I will conclude my speech not by pre-empting the findings of our Committee’s inquiry further than I have done already, but by quoting directly from my constituent. In a recent letter to me, Alice Bennett MBE—the founder of the Worcester Early Years Centre and the recipient of an honour in recognition of her outstanding work in the early years sector—wrote:
“I appeal to you and your Government once again for urgent reform in this nation’s early years sector. We are facing the most challenging time in decades with settings closing and talented staff leaving in droves…We all know that 90% of a child’s brain development happens before the age of 5. The research and evidence for this is utterly convincing.”
She described investing in the sector as
“morally and ethically the right way forward, thereby ensuring that every child can realise their rights and entitlements to develop their full potential and to thrive and enjoy a meaningful existence in this world. Our sector is indeed very dedicated and hardworking but we cannot continue to work for peanuts and be subject to such punitive taxation. Our lifetime legacies of outstanding and irreplaceable nurseries will be forced to close without some form of sensible revision and financial interaction.”
There is a real case for responding to that call for help.
On International Women’s Day, we should celebrate the enormous contribution to this sector of female entrepreneurs—people who have invested a lifetime of learning and labour in supporting children’s development.
I believe that we have a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who recognise the case for education and early intervention, and I know that we have a Children’s Minister who is passionate about the value of childcare and early education. I am hopeful that next time we debate the departmental estimates, they will have enabled the Department of Education to deliver a sustained uplift in investment in early years, and to build on the Government’s overall record in this regard.
Dame Andrea Leadsom
That is lovely, and I pay tribute to the thousands of volunteers who provide breastfeeding support. My hon. Friend highlights perfectly one of the great challenges of becoming a new parent. When we are really struggling, there is a high correlation with mental health issues. When there is not enough support for women who want to breastfeed their babies but find they cannot do so, they suffer from feelings of guilt and feeling that they have failed and they are not good enough, and that lends itself to the problems of postnatal depression that are only too prevalent right across England.
So, to recap: midwifery, health visiting, mental health support, breastfeeding support, safeguarding support and disability support will be universally available in family hubs to help every family to give their baby the best start in life. Not only that, there will be universal-plus support for the most tricky and challenging issues such as the prospect of domestic violence. We know that up to 30% of domestic violence starts in pregnancy because of the partner’s feeling, “This person is going to love the baby more than they love me.” All these challenges that are brought out by pregnancy are quite desperate to be solved. We know that if we can get the hang of giving every baby the best start for life, that will transform our society.
I mentioned that the cost to our economy of late intervention is about £17 billion a year. The Maternal Mental Health Alliance’s study has shown a cost of around £8 billion a year for every new cohort of births as a direct result of the cost of poor maternal mental health in the perinatal period. The all-party parliamentary group on conception to age two—the 1,001 critical days—has demonstrated that school readiness results in a reduction in later problems such as the propensity of children to get into gangs, to have poor mental health and to fail to learn and do well at school. The 1970 cohort study showed, significantly later on, that only 18% of children in the bottom 25% academically at age five get one or more A-levels, compared with 60% of those in the top 25% at age five. What happens to a child in their earliest years follows them throughout their life, and the more we can do in that earliest period, the better, so the Government are totally on the right lines.
Kit Malthouse
I applaud my right hon. Friend’s work on the early years and, as she knows, I share her enthusiasm. We are talking today about the estimates for the Department for Education. What role does she think public health has to play in educating parents, particularly about our shared passion for attachment theory? We have been successful over the last few decades in educating parents about not smoking or drinking during pregnancy, about not smoking in the car with their children and about how to give them nutritious food. Much of that has been a huge success, but we have never really had a public health campaign based on the fundamental building block of emotional maturity in children, which comes from strong early attachments. When I was in the DFE, we were considering the idea of a big public health campaign to illustrate the importance of attachment, not just to women but to men as well. An attachment to a father is just as important as an attachment to a mother.
Dame Andrea Leadsom
My right hon. Friend is absolutely spot on.
That gives me the chance to mention the London School of Economics report in 2019, which illustrates the cost of insecure attachment. The cost is 50% higher if an infant is not securely attached to their mum than it is for a securely attached child, at around £4,000. If that baby is not securely attached to their dad, the cost can be four times higher than that, which obviously illustrates the importance of dads. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise not only the importance of secure attachment but, very specifically, the importance of dads. The provision of holistic support on fathering is crucial.
My best start for life project is commissioning different bits of training, nationally and free to all early years practitioners, including on reflective parenting, so that everyone working with families, whether as a volunteer or as a professional, understands how reflective parenting can contribute to secure attachment. There is also video interaction guidance that demonstrates to families the good and the not so good, in a way that has been clearly evaluated. A lot of work is being done in the best start for life project to skill up everyone who is volunteering or working in the early years sector and to roll out support for families.
If a family are expecting a baby, they go to their family hub. If they want a book, they go to the library. If they want a bottle of milk, they go to the supermarket. We want family hubs to be a household name where people go if they have a child, and particularly if they have a baby. They should go whether they are rich or not so rich, whether they are young or old, and whether they have other caring responsibilities or not. We know that learning from each other in a supportive environment can be transformative.
I finish on childcare because, although my role as early years healthy development adviser is about nurturing support in the early years, most babies find themselves in a childcare setting when they are still very young—six months to a year old. The 1,001 critical days, the period from conception to the age of two, are a continuum, and it is when the vast majority of the lifelong blocks for emotional and physical health are laid.
Babies may spend a lot of that time in a nursery setting, and it seems to me that there are two issues. The first is quality, and it must be about parental choice. We need good-quality nurseries, but we also need choice for parents. If they want their mum to look after their baby, and if their mum is able, we should be willing to say, “Thank you very much, granny. You will get some sort of payment.” The payment should not be as if they are a trained nanny or nursery worker, but there should be some form of carer’s allowance or attendance allowance for grandparents who go part time to care for their grandchildren.
Secondly, we have already heard that childminding has fallen off a cliff because the regulatory burden, which predates this Conservative Government, has been so great that it has taken a lot of people out of childminding. If I had a six-month-old, I would much rather they were in a home environment than a nursery environment or baby setting.
We need to go with the grain of what works for families, so we need to have choices, with quality nurseries, many more childminders and support for relatives, just as we have for people who look after their elderly husband or wife who has disabilities. People who go part time to look after their granddaughter, grandson, niece or nephew get nothing. It is a straight choice, and it has a significant financial cost. I urge the Minister to consider that.
The final thing is flexibility for parents. Families know best what works for them, and people tend not to have just one child. Child No. 1 can be very difficult, but when a family is faced with paying 50 quid a day for a tip-top nursery because they want to go back to work nine-to-five—they also need to get to work and get back to pick up their child—the nursery costs are huge. For an awful lot of women, having a second child means it simply is not worth going back to work.
We should allow parents to have their own childcare budget that they decide how to use. I wanted my first child to come out of childcare when my second child was born because I wanted them to be together. If a mother is home on maternity leave, why not have the two children together? It should be a choice for families, but if the first child is three years old, families do not want to lose their free hours of childcare, even if it would suit them to have both children at home. I urge the Government to consider giving parents that choice. Childcare is difficult enough without there being hurdles that make it unaffordable and inflexible for far too many families.
I am delighted with the Government’s work on rolling out the family hubs and best start for life, but childcare is part of it and we need to give families more choice.
David Simmonds
The hon. Member shakes her head; I appreciate that the Labour party and the previous Labour Government were enormously attached to that, but it is right that it has been subject to scrutiny. For something intended to be a flagship, it was clear that the Sure Start programme did not reach the parts that other programmes could not reach, which was the crucial and core purpose for which it was set up. That is backed up by research from the United States.
The right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) referred to the Early Intervention Foundation. I urge the Government to make the best possible use of the now merged What Works centres, whose chief executive, Dr Jo Casebourne, was previously chief executive of the Early Intervention Foundation. The use of randomised controlled trials was strongly advocated at the outset of Sure Start, and was resisted by the then Government. There was a lot of debate about why that was, and certainly an active suspicion among researchers that the Government did not want any of that research to come back and point out that some interventions were not very effective and not a good use of taxpayer money.
An emerging substantial evidence base demonstrates that although some of the things that we spent money on in Sure Start did not achieve any useful purpose for the children who were supposed to be the beneficiaries, other programmes were effective. Commissioners, whether in the Department or in the local authority, need that information so that, given a choice to spend a given amount of taxpayer money, they can spend it on what will make the biggest possible difference in the life of a child. Evidence week is coming up in Parliament soon, and I hope that the Department and Ministers will have the opportunity to celebrate the use of evidence in the distribution of the funding that we are debating.
Let me give a good example. Several hon. Members have mentioned ratios, which Governments in the past have addressed. There is an enormous amount of guidance for local authorities and providers about how things are to be done, and it is a dull but worthwhile exercise to read the Department’s guidance on calculating ratios. It makes it very clear that, depending on how we choose to calculate them, we can produce very different figures suggesting very different things about the ratio of children to staff at a given site.
A setting can arrive at a number by dividing the total number of staff, or the full-time equivalent, by the number of children on the roll. Ofsted would probably encourage it to think instead about how many appropriately qualified adults per child are in the room—a different figure. Both approaches are fine within the DFE guidance, however, so those who believe that changing the ratios can completely transform the early years landscape and resource spread are perhaps barking up the wrong tree. It may well be that adjusting the guidance would help to address the issue.
Kit Malthouse
To a certain extent I think my hon. Friend is right about ratios, but does he accept that they inject into the system an element of inflexibility and certainly an element of nervousness? As I understand it, most providers under-pitch on ratios for fear of accidentally being caught on the far side through illness, absence or whatever. The delineated hard lines may be subject to interpretation, but they nevertheless produce a rigidity that is not helpful for providers.
David Simmonds
My right hon. Friend is right to highlight that there will always be a degree of risk aversion. Frankly, as someone who entrusts his young children into the care of a nursery, I am quite keen for it to be reasonably risk-averse in its calculations. However, my right hon. Friend’s point demonstrates that in debates such as these we need to scrutinise not only the estimates setting out the financial headlines, but the real-world as well as the theoretical impact of the underlying calculations. This is a debate not just about the headlines, such as teaching unions arguing for more resources in one respect while the Government argue for different resources, but about the way in which we count these things, which can have an enormous impact on whether we achieve the policies that we set out.
I commend the Government for the estimates. Estimates debates are always interesting and worth while, because they teach us a great deal about the mechanics of what is going on. The UK has a relatively high spend on education and is a good payer of teachers in comparison with most other European countries—I say that as a former chair of the European Federation of Education Employers as well as the teachers’ employment body for the UK. This will always be a subject of ongoing debate, but it certainly seems to me that in agreeing today’s estimates we are making a clear statement of our commitment to provide strong baseline funding for our education system, particularly the childcare and early years element.