Childcare Payments Bill

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Commons Chamber

Both those issues must be addressed if the barriers to social inclusion are to be removed and parents are to be helped to work. The discrepancies in support for parents of disabled children are abundantly clear. Supporting amendment 1, and taking steps to align the maximum age of eligibility for the tax-free child care scheme and the child care element of universal credit with the Childcare Act 2006, would ensure that older disabled children benefited from financial support, and would help to remedy the poor provision for that age group. Failing to adopt the amendment would effectively mean that disabled children as young as 16 lost out. We all know that it would greatly improve the well-being of young people and benefit their families if support continued until after their 18th birthdays.

[Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying, because it accords with my experience in my constituency, but does he not think that local authorities have an obligation to ensure that there is sufficient care for disabled children? KIDS nursery in my constituency is a specialist nursery for disabled children. Should not local authorities be thinking about providing such services as well?

[Alex Cunningham]

I have been fighting the ending of specialist nursing provision at my local hospital, because it meets the specific needs of parents of disabled children. There has been a considerable reduction in the amount of money that enables local authorities to meet the demand for essential services—if they were given more means, they might well be able to expand provision—but I agree with the right hon. Lady that someone should take responsibility, and I think that my amendment goes some way towards ensuring that that happens.

In Committee, the Minister said:

“It is right that we make the new scheme consistent with the current framework.”––[Official Report, Child care Payments Public Bill Committee, 23 October 2014; c. 192.]

I urge her to reconsider her decision not to increase support for parents of disabled children. She can help today by increasing the maximum age at which disabled children become eligible for the tax-free child care scheme—and, in future, for the child care element of universal credit —to 18, to align the scheme with the prescriptions of the Childcare Act sufficiency duty, and to give the families of disabled children the support that they need and deserve.

At the same time, the Government should aim to establish a framework that would include all children with disabilities in child care in order to fulfil the basic principles of equality and inclusion. Equitable access to affordable, flexible, high-quality child care would be hugely valuable to children’s social and educational development, not to mention parents’ well-being and long-term economic prospects. In its present form, however, the tax-free child care scheme will not effectively remove the additional affordability barriers from parents with disabled children. To address that inequality, the Government should provide the additional top-up payments for disabled children through the tax-free child care scheme that amendment 2 would provide. I hope that the Minister will consider that proposal.

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This is not meant to be a complex scheme. It is meant to be as user-friendly for parents as possible, which is why we are listening and consulting, because it is all about the design and making sure that those who need to access the scheme can do so.

[Maria Miller]

The Minister will have provided a great deal of clarity today for parents who might have been concerned about some of the reports they had read in the papers. I thank her on behalf of my constituents for what she has said.

The Minister mentioned the communication she is having with stakeholder groups. Is she also communicating with employers to make sure they are aware of the way the new system will work, especially those who may want to make their own contributions to their staff’s child care costs?

[Priti Patel]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention and comments. She is absolutely right; as she will know from discussions in Committee, this scheme has been designed to be parent-focused—parent-friendly is, I think, the term to use—and to work with employers, because this is about engaging both parties to communicate, educate and inform. Employers have an important role to play—we must not forget that—so working with employers on the scheme design is key.

The introduction of this new scheme sits alongside strong early-education entitlement for pre-schoolers to support families and hard-pressed families with their child care costs and support parents to work more if they want to do so.

As I said in Committee and we have touched on again today, we have already committed to reviewing the impact of this new scheme after two years, and it is hard to see what purpose would be served by a review only three months after Royal Assent, given the Government’s clear commitment to reviewing the scheme.

I shall now move on to the points made about amendments 2 and 1 and the comments of the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham). I welcome his comments and I followed his remarks with interest, and we discussed these matters in Committee. We fully accept that child care costs are higher for parents with disabled children; there is no disagreement here at all. The families and parents of disabled children struggle with the challenges of raising and looking after their children. We had a very fluid debate about this in Committee.

The effect of amendment 2 is straightforward. It would increase the level at which the Government top-up payments are paid to parents of disabled children from 20% to 40%. This would mean in practice that for every £10 spent on child care, the Government would contribute £4 and the parent the remaining £6. This contrasts with the position set out in the Bill, which is that the Government would contribute £2 of every £10 spent on child care.

I am very well aware of the keen interest the hon. Gentleman takes in families with disabled children. He spoke with great eloquence in Committee and I thank him for his contribution on this point. As he rightly pointed out, families with disabled children face significant costs, and that fact ought to be reflected in the scheme. A number of witnesses who gave evidence to the Committee made similar points. I have already put on the record that I fully understand the arguments the hon. Gentleman and others have made and it is absolutely right that parents of disabled children are properly supported, which brings me to why I will ask him not to press his amendments.

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[Maria Miller]

It has been a privilege to have served on the Bill Committee, and I pay tribute to the two hon. Ladies who have led the debate. My hon. Friend the Minister has navigated us through the Bill with incredible style. She has listened to the arguments, acted on what she has heard and understood the importance of flexibility for parents in this scheme.

The Minister also listened closely to the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and his powerful arguments, both today and in Committee, about the particular needs of disabled children. None of us could have anything but admiration for the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who obviously has her own interest in child care issues. She has led from the Opposition Benches incredibly well.

My hon. Friend the Minister is right to say that child care costs should not be a barrier to work for parents, and the Bill goes further than ever before to help achieve what we all want—for parents to have the opportunity to go back to work after they have had children, or to continue in employment when they have children of a young age. I am glad that the Opposition will support this important Bill tonight, because child care costs are not a problem only for those on very low wages; they are a problem for almost all the parents I have talked to, and it is right for the Government to consider how to address it.

Under this Government, more women are in work than ever before and, interestingly, the cost of child care for parents is falling—perhaps those two issues are not entirely separate. The Government have set the standard when it comes to enhancements to child care, not only by taking on what the Labour Government put in place, but frankly by going a great deal further: free entitlement to 15 hours a week of early-years care for four and five-year-olds and 40% of two-year-olds; new support under universal credit; and tax-free child care, which will mean that for the first time ever, people who are self-employed can get access to important child care help and support when running their own businesses.

I disagree with comments made by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North about the Prime Minister and the families test, because I think the Bill passes that test with flying colours. It shows that we have been listening to parents and families, and that the Government have acted.

Parents want choice on child care—the Minister knows that, as do the Government. We all want child care that will fit around our children’s lives and needs and our family life. I believe that the Bill takes us one step further towards giving freedom to parents to choose the child care they want and need for their children. That will provide an enduring framework for changes to child care in the future. I hope the Minister will come back to the Dispatch Box when the Bill becomes an Act, and say how we can use it as a framework to provide further support in the future. I am sure she will.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.