Nick de Bois
Main Page: Nick de Bois (Conservative - Enfield North)Department Debates - View all Nick de Bois's debates with the Department for Education
(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mr Dobbin.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this debate. Recently, I have found myself on the same side as her on certain issues; that probably comes as a disappointment to her and it certainly comes as a surprise to me. However, in common with her in this debate, I also profess a limited knowledge of this issue, although at one point my wife and I had four children under the age of five. I rightly stand charged of perhaps not doing enough at that time to learn about this subject; I should know more. However, I am pleased that we are having this debate, not just because it is in the context of London, but because it gives us time to reflect on the challenge and on what the Government are trying to do. It also gives us a chance to reflect on the supply side, which is behind many of the challenges we face. I think that hon. Members would agree that, for too long, it has been difficult for many families to find good, affordable child care.
Without going into detail, I shall touch on why child care services and facilities are so important. They help to nurture the child, enhance their education prospects and support families that want to return to work. Given what I have seen in some parts of my constituency, they also help to support the provision of a safe social environment, including the boundaries that children are sometimes, sadly, missing in an increasing number of dysfunctional family situations. Child care can make a massive contribution.
Particularly in relation to my latter point, I am pleased that the Government are seeking to address the welfare of children from less advantaged families, through a cross-Department—almost holistic—response. Part of that, of course, is access to child care facilities, which is an important part of the jigsaw that I have just put together. Having said that, it is inevitable that as the cost of child care increases, the Government’s response has to focus both on supporting and widening the supply side and on mitigating the costs that we face. Whatever we call the policy, I suspect that all hon. Members can agree that Government financial interventions will be mitigating something. The supply side will be fundamental, long-lasting and will hopefully achieve more.
In fairness, I should say that I am struck by the rather candid comments of Labour’s former Minister for Children, Beverley Hughes, who admitted that they got it wrong, saying that Labour’s approach of pouring money into tax credits
“was probably wrong. We were so keen to stimulate demand from parents”
with fiscal interventions,
“but in retrospect that was such a mammoth task. We ought to have focused on the supply side…then we could have done more and quicker.”
Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The former Minister for Children was making the point that we should have put more emphasis on supply-side funding and less on the demand side. Can he explain why the Government are not learning those lessons and are instead focusing much more on the demand side with their tax-free child care announcement yesterday?
Nick de Bois
I think the hon. Lady will find that we are learning those lessons. I am dealing with that point: my two themes are the supply side and fiscal interventions. However, I will concede that the supply-side challenge in London is particularly difficult. I will also bring to the Minister’s attention some weaknesses in the fiscal interventions that I am experiencing in my constituency now.
It is a current problem. In the interests of fairness, Opposition Members would recognise that the number of child minders halved under their Government, reducing choice and flexibility for parents. There were 98,000 child minders in 1997 and the number fell to 58,000 in 2010. Westminster Hall is generally a constructive environment for debates, but my main point is that this is not a new problem. Costs have been rising above inflation, consistently, since 2003, and since 2009 they have been rising above wages.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
As the hon. Gentleman is comparing Labour’s policies with the current Government’s, can he say whether any child care centres in his constituency have closed since this Government came in?
Nick de Bois
I will, as I said, come on to the issues that we are facing in my constituency. However, the work force, on the supply side, is equally as important as the facilities. If the numbers halve, the problem of servicing good quality child care provision will be increased.
I suspect that we would also agree that the quality of the work force is important. That is unquestionable. We do not want to create places just to dump a child in, so that people can go off and have some free hours; no one is into that. We need good quality care. I am sure that the Government’s aims and attentions in this regard would draw cross-party support, because Opposition Members would have said, and tried to do, the same.
We can do things to open up the supply side. I do not generally like to intervene in markets, but we should try to work up constructive ways for the Government to apply leverage to encourage schools to admit younger children. We have to deregulate the process of allowing schools to admit younger children. We made it easier for schools to teach children under three by removing requirements to register separately with Ofsted, a move that was well intentioned, but we do not want to make it difficult. So often, by liberating certain elements of the market, we can free it up and increase the supply side.
On helping schools to offer affordable after school and holiday care, I want primary schools to be open for more hours each day—so does the hon. Member for Lewisham East—and for more weeks a year, to better match the working family’s time table. That can be done locally and I am all for empowering people locally to take those decisions—and, boy, are they needed in my constituency.
We should also be helping good nurseries expand, not stopping them. I would be interested to know whether the Minister is working with councils to explore ways that we can expand the supply side in the boroughs, particularly those that are challenged.
Heidi Alexander
The hon. Gentleman is talking about the need to expand nurseries, some of which will, of course, be co-located with schools. Does he recognise that the crisis in primary school places in London, which we discussed earlier, means that the physical expansion of nurseries is even more difficult now than it may have been in the past, because sites are taken up with temporary classrooms and the space does not exist?
Nick de Bois
The hon. Lady takes me down a path that I am quite interested in, because we have faced an expansion in primary schools, which unfortunately was not planned in advance. I know that London has transition problems, so it is more difficult to plan in London than elsewhere, but some of the planning that we have done has been to meet an urgent, immediate need for the next year, and we could have used the space much better in some primary schools in my area. We need to free up the planning regulations to make sustainable expansion that much easier. We have seen that done actively in schools. The hon. Lady may have encountered the same problem that I have—that temporary expansion encourages complaints from residents—when we try to meet extra demand in our area.
I often feel that we have missed out on long-term planning. If we could free up planning regulations and look ahead, a strategic plan would allow us to expand provision for both the younger child and the schoolchild. I should add that the problem is not just with primary; we are now passing it on to secondary, and that will be the next challenge.
Dame Joan Ruddock
We might all support the hon. Gentleman and think this is a great way forward, but somebody has to provide the finance. It is impossible to build a new school and employ new teachers, in whatever way that is done, if the finance is not available from his Government.
Nick de Bois
If we expanded schools to take more students—putting in temporary accommodation--we could have more longer term planning, instead of what I call knee-jerk planning, and get better value, as well as the physical premises. We are providing the money to increase demand. Money is much less the issue when schools are being expanded—and we are expanding them—but I want that to be done more cleverly.
On fiscal intervention, the Government’s changes are designed to ease the burden on parents and those from the most vulnerable areas. Of course, that will help to sort out the immediate problems that people are facing now, but that should go hand in hand with a massive improvement in the supply side locally. I really welcome—I am not going to be shy about it—yesterday’s policy announcement. The Government’s new tax-free child care scheme will have a significant impact on child care costs, potentially providing support to up to 400,000 families in London. We should be proud of that, because it will help to ease the financial challenges parents face even in outer-London suburbs, where the costs are not as high as in some inner-London areas. Parents who want to go back to work will start to breathe a sigh of relief because they will feel that the measure is helping them to do so.
Dame Joan Ruddock
I have a brief question. Does he not appreciate what a difference it would make if that money was allocated to those who earn much less? Helping families with an income of £300,000 a year is one thing, but the benefit for families on average incomes is so much more significant. The measure would make a much greater difference to those who are less able to provide for themselves.
Nick de Bois
Few people in my constituency are on an income of £300,000. I ask the right hon. Lady to wait for the end of my speech, because I will point to how the specific targeting of those on very low incomes has had an unforeseen consequence for those on slightly higher, edging towards middle incomes. We need to be careful of the outcome of any intervention and I will address that shortly.
The hon. Member for Lewisham East touched on this point, but I think the most significant part of yesterday’s announcement was that more families will be helped to move off benefits and into employment. As part of that strategy, the Government announced that they will cover 85% of child care costs for some 300,000 families in receipt of universal credit. I would have expected that to be talked about more widely yesterday because it is a fine example of excellent joined-up thinking. In some ways, it answers the question that the right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) has just asked.
We have made money available to help child care providers to support disadvantaged children. Some £50 million will be invested in 2015-16 to offer 15 hours a week of free child care to all three and four-year-olds. That is another welcome intervention. We are helping schools to offer affordable after-school and holiday care. I want to see primary schools open for more hours each day and more weeks each year—I think that will work.
We are also extending free child care to just over 250,000 two-year-olds from low-income families, which kicks in this September, but I want to address the unintended consequences in my constituency. The extension of the scheme to two-year-olds is the pet project of the Deputy Prime Minister, and I would dearly love him to explain the scheme to my constituents who have children at Carterhatch children’s centre in Enfield. About a month ago, parents who have been doing the right thing by working and paying, in some cases for a number of years, for their children to be at Carterhatch children’s centre were, to be frank, brutally informed that their children are no longer welcome because they are fee-paying and the centre’s priority will be those who now qualify for the extended free places for two-year-olds, which from memory includes people on working tax credits of up to £16,900. The centre has said, “We don’t want you because you are paying your way. We are going to focus entirely on those individuals who are now covered by the new Government intervention.” I put it to Members that that is a perverse unintended consequence. People who are working, doing the right thing and paying to get their children into the centre have basically been told that their child can longer attend.
That brings me to the supply side, because being told to find somewhere else is not helpful as there is not much choice in our area. I tackled Enfield council on that, saying, “Look, this is your policy. Have you directed schools on how to implement the Government’s policy?” The council frankly admitted that what happened at Carterhatch is what it would like to see, but says that it is not directing any headmaster to do it; it is entirely the school’s free will. Schools are not working to Government directives, or so I was told by the council an hour ago, but the consequence of intervening in the marketplace is that we have distorted it at the expense of parents who are doing the right thing.
Lucy Powell
Does the hon. Gentleman realise that it is his Government who have taken away the local authority’s role in planning for places? The strategic local commissioning responsibility no longer exists. It is a free-for-all, and it is the Government who took it away.
Nick de Bois
Saying, “It’s your Government’s fault” is making a political point when, with all due respect, it is not the Government’s fault.
Nick de Bois
I will tackle the point. The choice has been made by the head of the school. He is not responding to a central directive from Whitehall or, it appears, from the local education authority. Although the LEA has expressed a preference, it is not a direction. I am highlighting that we now have a situation in which a head teacher finds it more attractive to follow the direction of the Deputy Prime Minister by disregarding parents, many of whom have used the child care centre for a considerable period of time.
Central direction is not the solution, because it is close to the market intervention that we are talking about and will create another dysfunctional consequence somewhere else. Even if we intervene with the best of intentions, it strikes me as odd that the education establishment thinks it is perfectly acceptable to remove some parents in favour of others. That touches on my supply-side argument: if I was a parent who was told that that was what the school had chosen to do, I would look for somewhere else to go because I would not value the school that had made that decision. We therefore have to accept that the weakness on the supply side, which goes back as far as 2003, is at the heart of our problems. That is what we should address, instead of making the wider interventions with which we seem to be obsessed. That is the ultimate solution to the problem.
I apologise for going on for far too long, but I think I have initiated a lively discussion.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jim Dobbin (in the Chair)
Order. I give notice that I intend to call the shadow Minister at 20 minutes to 4.