Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, should childcare providers be unable to meet the costs of providing the 30 hours free OFSTED-approved childcare service from September 2017, what plans there are to ensure that alternative services are available.

The Government is making a record-level of investment in early years to ensure that childcare providers receive sufficient funding to deliver the 30-hour entitlement. This includes increasing spending on the free entitlements by over £1 billion per year by 2019-20 and providing £300 million per year from 2017-18 for a significant increase to the rate paid for the two, three- and four-year-old entitlements.

We believe that the childcare market will respond to meet the additional demand for places generated by the extension of the free entitlement. The market has already demonstrated that it is able to respond through the roll-out of the entitlement for disadvantaged two-year-olds introduced in the last Parliament. In January 2016, over 166,000 two-year-olds benefitted from the funded early education, with over 20,000 providers delivering it.