[Mr. Joe Benton in the Chair]
Childcare Bill
4:15 pm
Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Children, Young People and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
With great respect, the hon. Gentleman is talking nonsense. I cannot say it any more gently than that. He is returning to a point that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary dealt with. No one on the Labour Benches has ever said that we are happy for primary schools to drive out perfectly good providers. They are his words and no one else’s, as far as I can recall.
Local authorities have a role in relation to ongoing improvement, if that is what the hon. Gentleman means by quality assurance—he introduced the issue of schools, but this point relates to schools and child care providers. Many have their own quality assurance standards, and they work with providers to help them meet those standards. That is different from the process of regulation and inspection that we think should be the benchmark when the local authority goes through the comprehensive assessment, considering what parents need for the supply of child care, so that it can identify the gaps and work to fill them. The point at which it seeks to facilitate the market to provide more child care is not the ongoing improvement of practice. At that point, it wants to know whether the providers meet Ofsted standards, which is what they will have to do.