Clause 8 - Powers of local authority in relation to the provision of childcare
Childcare Bill
10:45 am
Justine Greening (Putney, Conservative)
When we considered clause 6 last week, we were identifying the destination we wanted to reach with regard to provision of child care in any local authority area. Clauses 8 and 9 deal with the route by which local authorities should get there and stay there. Our amendments would enhance that process—it is a process that local authorities go through—to ensure that they take the necessary steps and have checks and balances in place to ensure that the process is robust and helps us to the final destination that we all want to reach.
Amendment No. 104 deals with the fact that a local authority must consider spare capacity within existing providers. It would engender a good process by which a local authority should consider existing unmet need through spare capacity in an existing market. The amendment would provide some safeguards against the crowding out of a growing number of child care providers, which is a subject we debated last week.
Enabling local authorities to analyse existing spare capacity would force and encourage them to understand why the spare capacity exists in the first place. The amendment would help them understand locational challenges, perhaps with a nursery in the wrong place. Critically, it would force them to consider the quality and type of child care that is evolving in the area in which they seek to ensure that child care provision is sufficient. It would force them also to consider the different ranges of child care provision on offer: which ones parents are keen to take up, which ones are growing, and which ones they are less keen for their children to engage with.
The final aspect of the amendment is that child care provision is an evolving market. Owing to demographic changes, far more women go out to work and family circumstances are changing, with more single-parent families. The market is evolving, and it is important that local authorities take that on board when they consider the sufficiency of provision, how it is represented today and how it is changing.
Considering existing spare capacity would force local authorities to understand which nurseries have plans to grow and which ones are unsuccessful. It would force them to confront the dynamics of the market and whether it meets certain needs. Amendment No. 104 would strengthen clause 6.
Similarly, amendment No. 92 touches on the fact that the market is evolving. Having done an assessment of spare capacity and unmet need for child care provision, there may be a gap, but it may be that it will be filled. The local authority should not only consider how the provision stands, but take on board any plans in place to meet unmet need in child care provision locally. That is important, because it could be a waste of taxpayers’ money for a local authority to provide child care when perfectly adequate and perhaps better quality plans in a better location are already in place to meet that need through other providers.