Child Care

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

Part of Labour’s programme for schools includes creativity and innovation, and that was an extraordinarily creative way of moving from child care to separatism. I will not follow the hon. Gentleman down that route because we are looking at the Conservative party’s past on this issue.

What did the Education Secretary say while grubbing around for votes before the last general election? He said:

“I personally believe we need to do more to provide affordable childcare”—

by which, of course, he meant less. On a Mumsnet webchat, he told “Singalong mum and others”,

“gotta go in a second but on surestart we won’t cut funding”.

No wonder the Government wanted to wipe all records off the internet. No wonder the Education Secretary is too frit to come to this Chamber to defend his appalling record.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

When the Education Secretary talked about more child care, did he perhaps just mean more cheaper, lower quality child care, rather than the quality child care that we support?

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We are not interested in the warehousing of children. We are interested in the growth, the creativity and the education that comes from high-quality child care provision. Unfortunately, with this Government, it is a record of broken promises, misinformation and double speak. Thankfully, the memory of the British people is longer than that of the Tory party’s web server, and they will not forget such a shoddy past.

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

I am afraid that after three years in opposition, Labour Members seem to have learned nothing. First, they have learned nothing about how they got the country into a financial mess, as they seem to think that the answer is more spending and more borrowing; and secondly, they seem to have learned nothing about child care and how nurseries work. Despite the highfalutin’ rhetoric by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), he seems to have failed to grasp the numbers behind child care. I will say more on that in a moment. First, let me remind hon. Members how we got here.

The Labour party left the biggest budget deficit among advanced economies and we were borrowing £1 for every £4 we spent. When we came into office, we were spending £110 million just servicing the interest on Labour’s debt. Despite that terrible inheritance, we have successfully cut the deficit by a third, and prioritised families and children. Total spending on child care and early education is increasing from almost £5 billion to more than £6 billion. We have increased the number of hours of free early education for every three-year-old and four-year-old, from 12.5 hours to 15 hours a week. We have extended support to two-year-olds from low-income families, with 92,000 two-year-olds already benefiting. From 2015, tax free child care worth up to £1,200 per child will be available to working parents. We are providing real help for hard-working families in tough times, not empty promises and unfunded spending commitments from Labour. That is what this coalition is delivering.

[Meg Hillier]

Childminders in my constituency would like to take on more two-year-olds, but the funding provided by the Government does not cover their costs. Does the Minister expect them and other providers to subsidise Government policy?

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are funding the two-year-old offer at an average of £5.09 an hour, and the average rate paid for that age group is £4.23 an hour. We are therefore funding at considerably above the market rate, and we have been very successful at getting places for two-year-olds. [Interruption] It is an average.

Let me now turn to some of the spurious claims made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. Labour claims that more than 500 children’s centres have closed. That is simply not true. Forty-five centres have closed since 2010—just 1% of the total—and some new centres have opened, including one in Ipswich. Centres are joining networks so that they can be run more efficiently, but the same buildings are open to the same parents to use services. We are seeing a record number of parents and children using children’s centres—more than 1 million. I do not understand why the hon. Gentleman does not want to celebrate the success of children’s centres, rather than constantly talking them down week after week. Children’s centres are doing a better job than ever under this Government. Let us not confuse children’s centres and child care providers. Children’s centres provide less than 1% of child care places.

Labour claims that costs have risen by 30%. That is based on figures from the Family and Childcare Trust. Despite the impression given by the Opposition, those figures were published before 2010. If the Opposition used the pre-2010 data, they would have found that the previous Labour Government were a catastrophe. Between 2002 and 2010, the cost of a nursery place rose by 46%. That is £1,200 a year more for a part-time nursery place for a child over the age of two, but we did not see the hon. Gentleman jumping around then, did we? Labour has, not for the first time, been cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the research. On 30 September 2013, Laing and Buisson published an in-depth report on the child care nurseries market in the UK. The report said that 2012-13 was the second successive year in which the price of full-day care in nurseries had been flat in real terms. In 2012-13, average nursery fees rose by 2.6%, which was the same as inflation. In 2011-12, average fees rose by 2.7%, compared with 3% inflation. In June 2013, the National Day Nurseries Association published the UK nursery insight report, which said: “58% were freezing fees”.

There we have it: the figures Labour cite actually show how the previous Government drove up costs with their confused funding and complex regulation, while independent research shows that costs have stabilised under this Government.

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[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank my hon. Friend for her points and I note her consistent support for home-based child care and the important help it can offer.

[Meg Hillier]

Childminders in my constituency are very pro what they do and also pro the fact that they provide good-quality child care. They tell me that the bad childminders were run out of town so that parents such as me can rely on a childminder to look after their children, as I do for my daughter, and be sure that there are good-quality, properly inspected childminders. That puts my mind at rest as a working mum, as it does those of other working mums in my constituency.

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[Fiona Bruce]

That is absolutely right, and I am glad to have this chance to put on record that it is a profession that deserves respect. Many childminders do not want the burdens of having to set up and run their own business. They do not want to have the burdens of complying with regulations and training requirements; they simply want to care for children. Let us release them and set them free to do that by supporting this new initiative of childminder agencies that the Government are setting up.

[Meg Hillier]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fiona Bruce]

I am going to make some progress now; I have taken several interventions.

The Government’s childminder agency initiative is an excellent step, not least because it will mean that families will have a local resource that they can access to find a childminder they can have confidence in—a childminder who has been through the appropriate training, and who is from an agency that they know is maintaining proper standards. The agencies will also provide for occasions when the childminder falls ill, which can cause a great deal of stress to parents; there will be additional cover to provide someone else at short notice when they need that.

The Government’s provisions to build up the number of childminders should be supported, therefore, and the agencies will also help to promote take-up of Government funding for two to four-year-olds. At present fewer than 10% of childminders are funded through Government funding. I am sure that a lot of early-year place provision is being missed out as a result of that.

I support the Government’s proposals. They will enable childminders to concentrate on delivering high-quality education and care, which is what they want to do, and not be driven out of their profession simply because they do not want to face the regulations and red tape they have had to deal with until now. They will be able to benchmark themselves against the highest standards. They will be able to access the new framework of training and support and ongoing improvement, and concentrate on giving the best provision to families.

We should remind ourselves of the support that the Government are giving families in meeting the costs of child care. Some 70% of the child care costs of those on tax credits are covered by the Government and an additional £200 million of support for lower-income families will be available within universal credit from April 2016, to take the proportion to 85%. Parents of all three and four-year-olds can access free child care. As we have heard, the Government have increased early education for three and four-year-olds from 12.5 hours a week to 15 hours a week so that what amounted to 475 hours a year of free child care in September 2010 now increases to 570 hours a year. I certainly would have greatly appreciated that when my boys were younger.

The Government are extending the offer of 15 hours a week of early education to two-year-olds from low-income families, which will benefit about 260,000 two-year-olds from September 2014, costing £760 million a year by the end of this Parliament. Just four weeks into this Government’s scheme that offers free child care to the most disadvantaged two-year-olds, 92,000 children are already benefiting, which is a huge increase on the 20,000 two-year-olds who accessed early education in 2010. Looking at share of GDP, this Government are spending £5 billion on early-years child care and are spending more than 40% above the OECD average on child care for children under three.

The early-intervention grant replaces a number of centrally directed grants in supporting services for children and young people and families. It has allowed local authorities greater flexibility and freedom at the local level. I want to highlight some of the ways the local authorities in my area have used that funding to support a wide range of services for children, young people and families. There is targeted mental health support for young children through the charity Visyon in my constituency, of which I am a patron, and additional support is being given for fostering and adoption—and I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), my constituency neighbour, who has done excellent work in increasing take-up in Cheshire. There is also the funding for such projects as Let’s Stick Together run by Care For The Family.

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[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

For me, as for many people in the Chamber and up and down the country, child care is not an academic issue but something we grapple with every single day of the year, including today. I believe that child care is an area of public policy that, if we get it right, can transform the lives of millions and build a stronger economy. I think that so far I would have cross-party agreement.

I know that it is fashionable for some members of my party to apologise for things that Labour did in office, but we should make no apology whatsoever for what Labour did on child care. Our record is incredibly strong. Labour introduced the free entitlement to 15 hours a week of child care for every three and four-year-old in the country and Labour introduced Sure Start. When I was out on the doorsteps as a candidate before 2005, Sure Start was a policy that mothers were talking to me about. It is very rare that voters talk to us about policies by name. It was exciting, it was progressive and it has made a difference.

The three and four-year-olds coming through the system at the millennium are today 16 and 17, a generation of young people whose lives were enhanced under a Labour Government but are now blighted by the prospect of unemployment under the coalition Government. The latest evaluation of Sure Start, published by the Department for Education in June last year, showed many positive impacts of Sure Start on young children and their parents. The one I want to highlight is the greater improvement in life satisfaction among lone parents and workless households. We know that being unemployed is tough, and being a lone parent is one of the toughest things in the world. This programme demonstrably improved life satisfaction among those groups in our community. That is why we should be angry that Sure Start centres are closing or being watered down. Our blood should be boiling with indignation; mine certainly is.

We should nail the myth about Sure Start centres. Some may still be open, but what range of services are they providing? Many are no longer providing child care. Others have been subsumed into their sponsoring school.

[Andrea Leadsom]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Meg Hillier]

I am sorry, I do not have time to take interventions.

The assault on Sure Start by this Government is surely their greatest act of vandalism—an assault on the future of the poorest and most vulnerable children and parents. We know that—

[Andrea Leadsom]

rose—

[Meg Hillier]

I regret not having the chance to debate, but I have three and a half minutes left—a very short time in what we thought would be a longer debate.

The “pile them high, teach them cheap” policy promoted by the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) is another example of the Government’s attitude to child care. I want to focus on three areas—first, that child care is not a peripheral issue, a soft issue or even a women’s issue. Quality child care goes to the heart of our society, our economy and our country’s prosperity. No policy matters more. As we see, with a squeeze on living standards throughout the country, people are looking at costs. We see the challenges.

For example, research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that the cost of necessities required to give a child a decent standard of living increased by 4% in the past year alone. A recent OECD report found that the UK has some of the most expensive child care in the world. I will not repeat the arguments that colleagues have made, but we know that a further 1.3 million women want to work more hours. If our employment rate for mothers moved up to the average of the world’s top five nations, 320,000 more women would have jobs, and crucially tax receipts would rise by £1.7 billion.

Secondly, we need to be bold. I urge those on my Front-Bench to be even bolder. We should be proud of our record, but in the past progress was sometimes slower than it should have been. It was sometimes piecemeal. I do not speak for my Front Bench, but I would like to see a child care Bill in the first Queen’s Speech, announcing our aim to move towards universal child care. The Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank has shown that a decent universal system of child care pays for itself in the long run. More parents working, paying taxes and not claiming tax credits and benefits more than pays for the state’s investment in child care. We know from Scandinavia that that increases women’s participation in the work force, so we need to be bold.

The third area that I have a brief moment to flag up, as I know we are running out of time, is the idea of sustainability and ownership. I am a proud co-operator, and there must be a greater role for co-op and mutual models when it comes to child care. Many of the original Sure Start centres were run by boards of parents. I worked among them as my own older children were growing up and saw the empowerment that that gave many of those women. These community assets should not be at the command of Ministers of any party. They remain under threat if Ministers do not care about child care. Parents know best. I would like to see more co-operative ownership, including childminding co-ops, rather than the agencies that the Government are promoting, which would cream off a profit and remove the parent relationship with their own childminder, which would be a great mistake.

In my final minute, I give way to the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom).

[Andrea Leadsom]

I just want to say that the hon. Lady is making a big mistake by turning child care into such a political issue. She knows as well as I do that Sure Start centres are doing brilliant work in our society. There is so much potential from the Sure Start movement. She should be proud that Labour introduced it and that this Government are building on it. Opposition Members should stop trying to frighten parents into thinking that it is all going pear-shaped.

[Meg Hillier]

But we know that services are being watered down. The great thing about Sure Start centres is that they were open to all and a range of services were provided. It was a one-stop shop. It will always be a challenge to decide what services should be provided when money is tight, but Sure Start was a great unifier, a great starting point, a great melting pot, a great mix. I am glad to hear from the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire that she is a champion of it on her Benches. It is a shame that the Government are not, and their funding cuts to local authorities are putting Sure Start under threat. I am not being partisan for the sake of it. Our record is strong, and parents and child carers in my constituency worry about their future under this Government.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

I follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) by agreeing with her about the cuts to Sure Start and the effect that that has had throughout the country. The Minister confirmed that the figures have fallen from 3,631 in 2010 to 3,053—a reduction of 578 in the number of Sure Start centres. That is the reality.

I take the Minister back to her evidence to the Education Committee in reply to a question from me on this subject. She did not deny that that was the situation. She claimed that, where the centres were still being used, they had moved to a hub and spoke model. We heard in evidence that sadly, far too often, instead of the delivery of the service, a part-time member of staff hands out leaflets, signposting parents to a service that may exist somewhere else. That is not the same thing as delivering the service that was there previously. That is what has happened with these closures. We have seen a drastic reduction in the quality of the service. When I asked about that in the Select Committee, the Minister ignored the point and moved on to something else. I have the transcript here if she wants to check what she said. She failed to give me an answer when I put that point to her. According to Government figures, 7,200 fewer staff work in Sure Start centres throughout the country. That has to mean a lower level and lower quality of service. I am sorry to say this, but that was the evidence given to the inquiry.

I am proud of our record on Sure Start. My son was three when he came to live with us, and we were fortunate in that the Sure Start centre where we used to live opened about a week before then. It was linked to a school, so there was a nursery, and he benefited from the brilliant staff working there. We as a family benefited from the support of Sure Start. Talking to other parents there and to parents who used other Sure Start facilities, it was clear that Sure Start transformed their lives and the lives of the children who benefited from those services. It made an enormous difference to their development and school readiness. That could be seen when looking at older children who had benefited from going through that system and the quality of child care and support for families that resulted from what the last Labour Government did. The Labour party is right to be proud of our record on Sure Start. I have confirmed that with the Sure Start centres in my constituency. Having children who are school ready makes all the difference. In the deprived areas that I serve in Crosby, children whose parents have benefited from Sure Start are school ready while others from the same estates are not. There is a marked difference in school readiness and the outcomes that schools can achieve for those children.

The Select Committee went to Denmark earlier this year and looked at the Danish experience. That is the quality of care to which we should aspire. We do not spend as much as they do in Denmark or in a number of other countries, particularly those in Scandinavia, and that explains the difference. The Minister shakes her head, but her Department has produced a report, which was evidenced in the Select Committee, in which a thorough analysis of the figures showed that spending levels here are not on a par with those in Denmark, and that explains the difference overall.

[Meg Hillier]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is real muddle from the Government about exactly what they do spend? They come up with different figures depending which Minister is asked at which time of year or day. Do we not need some clarity on this in order to inform the debate?

[Bill Esterson]

Absolutely. The Government should look at their own officials’ reports, as I was just saying in relation to the OECD comparisons.

The Government quite rightly want more women in the work force as a long-term driver of growth. In Denmark, 84% of working-age women are in work, whereas in the UK the figure is only 67.1%—we are rated 16th in the OECD in that regard. Denmark has wraparound care from 8 am to 5 pm, and from six months all the way up to age 10, and the maximum contribution an individual can make is 25%. There are highly qualified and well-trained professionals, mostly educated to relevant degree level, working in its child care settings. It is that massive level of support from the public purse that enables so many more women to go to work. They have a choice, of course, but many of them choose to take that opportunity. As a result, the system is supported by parents, politicians and the Danish equivalent of the CBI, so business likes that system.

My hon. Friends on the Front Bench are right to propose moving in that direction in the motion on the Order Paper, with wraparound care from 8 am to 6 pm. We certainly need to increase the number of hours in nurseries, so 25 hours is a great step in the right direction. We certainly need to follow the Danish system, and I hope that Members will support the motion.