Universal Credit and Child Tax Credit: Two-child Limit

Debate between Ruth George and Rupa Huq

Tuesday 27th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

I have to declare an interest as the mother of four children, albeit spread out over a period of 17 years. I can personally testify that large families have close and deep relationships, and the benefits of having a larger number of siblings are many and varied. However, this Government are seeking to punish families who have had three or more children. With only three children, those families will be losing £2,500 a year from their child element, on top of the cuts to universal credit that mean that 3 million families are set to lose over £2,000 a year. Families with four or more children will lose an average of £7,000 a year. Those families are already on a low income: they have already experienced cuts to tax credits of £1,500 on average, and a further £2,000 under universal credit.

This is not just an issue of child poverty. This is an issue of families facing destitution, with rising numbers of families with three or more children going to food banks. Families do not go to food banks unless their children are hungry. Can the Minister look not just those families in the eye, but look those children in the eye, or the parents who are trying to get their children to sleep at night when they do not have enough food in their stomach? It is absolutely inhumane. The policy will have a similar impact on large families as the benefit cap has on families in households with no work, but large families cannot escape that impact through work. In the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, we have heard of children in families to whom the benefit cap applies being taken into care because, given their levels of income, their parents cannot give those children the basic, decent standard of living that they need to survive. Is that a danger for all large families? It seems to be a return to Victorian times, with families punished for having more children and for not being able to earn enough.

Child tax credit and the child element of universal credit, which stands at £2,780 a year, is paid because successive Governments have recognised that doing so goes some way towards meeting the costs of a child, and have signed up to the ambition of reducing child poverty and increasing children’s life chances. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation produced a study that showed the impact of reducing incomes on children’s outcomes. Having reviewed over 34 studies, it concluded that increases in income appear to have an impact on cognitive outcomes comparable to the impacts of spending on early childhood programmes or education. However, income influences many different outcomes at the same time, including maternal mental health and children’s anxiety levels and behaviour. Few other policies are likely to affect such a range of outcomes at once. It is sad that the Government did not see fit to do an impact assessment on this policy, or to publish that assessment, before they went ahead.

[Dr Huq]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work of the all-party parliamentary group on universal credit, which she chairs. Is she aware of the figures that show that 60% of Muslim children and 52% of Jewish children live in families with three or more children? My hon. Friend is doing a great demolition job on this Government, who balance their books on the backs of the poor.

[Ruth George]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. The policy will certainly have a disproportionate impact on some faith groups, but also on anyone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to have three or more children—people like my constituent who posted on my Facebook page comments regarding this policy. She wrote that her husband died when she had three children and he was just 40. Why are the Government seeking to punish those children even more? They have already suffered the death of their father, and can now expect to see their income reduced as well. This policy simply does not make sense for the long-term economy of this country, which needs to invest in our children’s future in order to grow its way out of the economic mess that the past eight years have left us in. This country also needs to look at the interests of those children, and the impact of poverty and destitution on the 3 million children who will be affected by this policy. Please do not roll this out next February.

Free Childcare

Debate between Ruth George and Rupa Huq

Thursday 12th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effects of 30 hours free childcare.

I am here now, Mr Rosindell—thank you.

We are all here because we want all our children to get the best possible start in life and to be as ready for school as they can be, and because we want working parents to know that they can rely on high-quality childcare in a fun, friendly and caring setting that is nearby. Those factors are important to ensure not just that our children are school-ready, but that they are happy and relaxed and make friends.

I have four children, aged between eight and 25. As a mum who has worked all my adult life, I can vouch for how important it is for a child to be happy with their nursery or childminder. There is nothing worse than having to leave a child when they are crying or unhappy. That happens with almost all young children in the first few days, but they soon settle down, trust the staff, make friends and have a great time. The only thing worse than leaving a crying child is getting back at the end of the day and finding that they have been unhappy all day.

I have been lucky in the rural area where I live to have had excellent and friendly childcare nearby for all my children. We all welcome the consistent work to drive up standards in early years, so that 95% of providers are now judged by Ofsted to be good or outstanding. We all want good-quality, affordable and sufficient childcare. Although the policy of 30 hours of funded care for three and four-year-olds aims to increase the affordability of care, the lack of Government funding has raised doubts across the country about affordability, quality and sufficiency.

Why has that policy been so underfunded? At the Conservative party’s childcare campaign day on Monday 15 April 2015, in the run-up to the general election, David Cameron said that he would create an extra 600,000 free childcare places if he was returned to power. That was certainly a popular policy. The weekend before that announcement, the Conservatives had been behind Labour in every poll, but the day after the announcement—16 April—they were ahead in every poll, except one that was tied. At the time, the BBC reported that Labour described the policy as “another unfunded announcement”. BBC political correspondent Carole Walker said that Mr Cameron was “likely to face questions” about how the Conservatives would ensure that sufficient childcare places were available. She was right about the questions, but not about the person who would be questioned.

The Conservatives said that the 30-hour offer would result in more than 600,000 extra 15-hour childcare places every year from 2017, and that it would be funded by reducing tax relief on pension contributions. However, when those changes to tax relief were announced in the 2015 summer Budget, we were told that they would fund Conservative cuts to inheritance tax, not childcare, so the extra 15 hours of supposedly free childcare for 600,000 children were left without any specific funding. It is no wonder that the number of places has reduced to a third of what was promised in 2015 and that providers have been left wondering where all the money has gone.

Concerns were raised as soon as the projected funding levels were announced. Some 62% of all early years providers surveyed by the Pre-school Learning Alliance in March 2017 said that the funding they will receive in 2017-18 is less than the hourly rate they charge parents and less than the hourly cost of delivering a funded place. It is not surprising that more than half—58%—expected that the 30-hour offer would have a negative impact on their businesses, and just 17% predicted a positive impact.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned the Pre-school Learning Alliance. Some Government Members say that they have had enough of experts, but does she agree that they should listen more to groups on the ground, such as my constituent Jane Reddish and her group What About The Children? Its excellent report on the 30-hours policy raises many of the same concerns as my hon. Friend, specifically pertaining to the special developmental needs of nought to 36-month-olds. The Minister would be well advised to meet that group, as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), soon will.

[Ruth George]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.

A survey of local authorities by the Family and Childcare Trust in February 2017 found that only a third thought that there would be enough childcare for three and four-year-olds using the 30-hour offer, while a third did not know whether there would be a reduction in care quality as a result of the offer’s roll-out. Some 44% of those local authorities said that the 30-hour offer would reduce the financial sustainability of some settings, so some childcare providers would go out of business. The survey found that the extension of free hours could compromise things that parents thought were priorities for high-quality childcare. That is important, because only high-quality childcare helps to boost children’s attainment and close the gap between disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers.

It was good that the Government introduced pilot schemes in September 2016 to see what would happen. The Minister has claimed that those pilot schemes were a great success. In response to the urgent question on 6 September from my hon. Friend the shadow Minister, when we were finally given some figures on the number of children registered for places, the Minister said:

“If we look at the pilot areas that have been delivering for a year now…we can see that 100% of their providers are delivering and 100% of the parents who wanted a place found one, despite some reservations being put on the record…at the very beginning. The pilots have demonstrated that we can deliver and we are delivering.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2017; Vol. 628, c. 163.]

However, some nurseries that were involved in the pilot tell a very different tale. The owner of Polly Anna’s Nursery in York, the only area on the lowest level of local authority funding—£4.30 an hour, of which £4 went to providers—said that he wrote to the Minister to say that although he was in favour of any Government measure to reduce the cost to families of their child’s early education and care and of any improvement to quality and staff qualifications, £4 an hour would represent an increase of only 2% a year in the 10 years from 2010, at a time when costs will have increased disproportionately.