Clause 6 - Duty to secure sufficient childcare for working parents
Childcare Bill
2:30 pm
Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Children, Young People and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
We have had an interesting debate on what is, as Members have noted, a complex arrangement of amendments to the clause. Given the size of the group—I have sympathy with Opposition Members for the task that they have faced; it has faced me, too—rather than deal with the amendments separately, as Opposition Members have attempted to, I will try to deal with them in relevant groupings based on the themes that they cover, if that is acceptable.
First, let me set the clause in context and outline what it is about. It is one of the main clauses at the heart of the Bill and it is crucial to what we seek to do in relation to child care. It is about giving all parents a real choice about how they balance work and family life. Within that overall objective, it is about enabling parents on the lowest incomes, and perhaps with the most difficult circumstances in terms of disabilities, to lift themselves out of poverty and give their children the best start in life.
By way of introduction, I will say a bit about why we are proposing the measures that we are in the way that we are and why I think that, broadly, they are right. As Members know, since 1997 we have invested heavily to increase significantly the number of child care places. As the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton noted, there has been a significant net increase of nearly 600,000 registered child care places. Now there is one available for one in four of all children under the age of eight. His point about the turnover in places was not well made. We know that the closure rate of small businesses in any part of the economy is about 10 per cent. As such, over a seven-year period, one would have expected to see a turnover in child care places, notwithstanding the large net increase. In fact, for his information, the closure rate of all child care businesses, as recorded by Ofsted, has fallen recently. That is because of the investment that the Government have put in. In opposition to the NDNA report, Ofsted’s statistics suggest that, since the publication of the 10-year strategy, closure rates for these small businesses—child care providers—have fallen dramatically. I might return to that point later.