Child Care

Lord Walney Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow that at times very personal speech from the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), but I want to pick up on one thing she said, which I think caused a little concern on the Opposition Benches. She talked about regulation of childminders in a way that gave us—and people watching on television, I suspect—the impression that all such regulation is a bad thing. Surely she is not suggesting that, for example, CRB checks should not be done. I caution Members on the Government Benches about the language they sometimes use in talking about regulation, as it can give a wholly misleading impression.

[Fiona Bruce]

Speaking as someone who has started and who runs a small business, I can tell the hon. Gentleman that it is often extremely difficult to know what the regulations are. The fear of non-compliance can deter many people from starting a business in the first place. The agencies will give childminders reassurance that they are complying with the regulations. That is the big difference.

[John Woodcock]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I am sure that everyone on both sides of the House agrees on the need to cut unnecessary regulation, but I stand by the point I made.

It is a pleasure for me to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), who marked his return to the House with an impassioned speech. The increased relaxation that being in the House of Commons can provide to someone who is the father of two very young children has immediately given him a boost, and he brought that into his speech today.

When the cost of child care rockets, something has to give. For some, it is the opportunity to work, but those mums and dads who choose to stay in work try hard to ensure that they are the ones who bear the brunt of the cuts. They often stop going out, and they hold off from buying things for themselves that, in happier times, they would not think twice about buying. I should like Members to listen to one of the testimonies given to the Furness Poverty Commission, a body that I set up to look into the increasing deprivation in Barrow-in-Furness. A 34-year-old mother from my constituency told the commissioners that she was

“constantly worrying if the bills are all going to be paid, sometimes not having money for food, not ever being able to afford to get away anywhere, not being able to afford to secure your home, broken locks, no insurance…having to sell things to afford Christmas and not to be able to afford heating.”

Stories such as hers are all too common in Furness and right across the country.

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. The evidence is not only anecdotal; it is very real when we look at the figures. Is he aware that the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that, at the current rate, there will be more than 1 million additional children in poverty by 2020? Does it not appear that the country is going in the wrong direction for our children and our future?

[John Woodcock]

It does; my hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is a striking, damning figure that sits alongside the human stories of difficulty and suffering that we all experience in our constituencies almost daily.

[Harriett Baldwin]

The hon. Gentleman is making some powerful points about poverty. Does he accept that work is one of the best ways out of poverty? Does he also welcome the fact that, when universal credit is rolled out in his constituency, child care will be supported for the first hour of work for the individual whom he so eloquently described?

[John Woodcock]

Work is important in many ways, not simply as a means of getting an income. There are some real questions about universal credit, but if the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will not go into that now.

Privately, my constituents sometimes share with me their sense of guilt and frustration when the strain is so great that they just cannot shield their children from the cuts they are having to make. Swimming lessons go, trips to the zoo are put off, and when nothing beyond the bare nutritional minimum goes into their child’s lunchbox, they worry that their child is not going to eat enough because they are not giving them what they really like or want. These are working people. They have made the choice to go out and hold down a job, and to juggle work and family life. They do not expect handouts. They know that life will not be easy when they choose to bring up kids, but they just ask for a bit of help with what can seem like the suffocating burden of rising living costs. Child care should be one of the things that lift the strain on families and give them a way out of poverty; it should not add to the burden.

One of key recommendations of the Furness Poverty Commission on dealing with social and economic exclusion in Barrow and Furness was to close the gap that local people had identified in affordable and flexible child care. It is great that the number of children under the age of four in England is increasing, and I am pleased to have been able to do my bit on that front in recent years. So I am delighted by Labour’s plans, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) has set out, to increase the availability of affordable child care. I am especially pleased that the extra entitlement will come in the form of wraparound care from 8 am to 6 pm.

Increasing child care from 15 to 25 hours a week could make a real difference to many families in my constituency. For many parents, it would make the difference between being able to work and not being able to do so. The provision of 12.5 or 15 hours has been a help but it has often not provided a trigger given the way in which the need for child care is spread out if parents rearrange their lives to go back to work. I believe that this wraparound care, aligning child care with the standard working day, will be revolutionary in helping parents to get back to work.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South, I have a great deal of respect for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss). I was therefore disappointed to hear her dismiss the wraparound child care guarantee in the way she did. She did not want to take my intervention earlier, but I have to tell her that one of the main problems is that there is often no provision at all for families—

[Elizabeth Truss]

indicated dissent.

[John Woodcock]

The Minister shakes her head and says that that is not true, but I invite her to come to my constituency and see the problems that many people face when trying to arrange that kind of wraparound child care.

Working parents in my constituency—and in those of many of my hon. Friends—know how hard it can be to find affordable child care, or indeed any form of child care, to cover the period before the beginning of the formal school day and the hour or so at the end of it. Effectively, they are trying to find someone to care for their children and walk them to and from school. That might comprise only an hour of care, but an inability to find it can present an impenetrable barrier to getting back to work. This is why our plans could make a real difference. If we are serious about a sustained recovery that is shared by everyone across the country, we need to tackle the child care crisis head on. If this Government will not do that effectively, the next Labour Government will.