Government’s Childcare Expansion

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

One of the very last contributions that I made in the House of Commons before I came face to face with the electorate in Redditch was to suggest that I feared that a future Conservative Government might dismantle our Sure Start programme. I was jeered at the time, yet sadly I was right. In recent years we have seen, through some of the longitudinal analysis that was done on Sure Start, the impact that it had on children’s lives. I am afraid I cannot at this time undertake to reinstate the scale and significance of the last Labour Government’s Sure Start scheme, but I can say that recognising the way in which all those elements work in a child’s life—childcare, early years, health and family support—will be a very important way that, across this Government, we think about our future plans to support children to have the very best start in life.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned the creation of a children’s register —yet another register that we are creating when we have already set up so many over the years. If she casts her mind back to the previous Labour Government, one of the major initiatives we had was to create an identity system for each person and child in the country. We increasingly see that that need still has to be addressed, particularly for problems with immigration, yet we now have a different approach by the new Labour Government. Although I recognise that this is rather wide of her brief, I wonder whether she would care to bear in mind that there is a case to be made for a simple approach to this. We ought to be trying to create coalitions where we work together to create a system that will give us greater data about everyone, including children, and which would be far more efficient than the present system, where we create separate systems all the time.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend tempts me to relive my days developing the national identity scheme and, in fact, having one of the very first identity cards issued by the last Labour Government. However, I will not go down that route. I have some sympathy with his point about around the range of different ways in which we now ask people to prove their identity. The intention behind the register for those children who are out of school is very much about safeguarding and ensuring that children do not get lost to our system, as has sadly become increasingly the case over recent years and which was exacerbated by Covid. This has a very special and important child safeguarding intention, which is why it is a legitimate scheme in its own right.