Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)

I beg to move amendment No. 108, in page 6, line 40, after ‘provision’, insert

‘, affordability, sustainability and quality’.

David Amess (Southend West, Conservative)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 177, in page 6, line 40, at end insert—

‘(aa)examples of the potential implications for young children of unregulated childcare;

(ab)parenting classes available in the area of the local authority;’.

No. 191, in page 7, line 2, at end insert—

‘(d)any other services or facilities, or any publications, which may be of benefit to parents of disabled children in their area;

(e)any other services or facilities, or any publications, which may be of benefit to disabled children or young persons in their area.’.

No. 197, in page 7, line 2, at end insert—

‘(d)parental support for their children’s learning.’.

Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)

Again, these are probing amendments. Amendment No. 108 reflects an earlier discussion, so I shall not go into great detail about it.

Clause 12 relates to the duty of the local authority to provide information, advice and assistance on types of child care provision locally. I can predict what the Minister will tell us from echoes of previous debates. It is important that rather than just list what is available in the area, such as what nursery providers there are and what their capacity is, there is some qualitative assessment. Affordability is also a key factor. Certain nurseries will find that they are less popular with certain providers if they are not as affordable, whatever that is defined as in certain areas.

It is also useful to have some cognisance of their sustainability—by which I mean, how long have the child care providers been in place? Have they just sprung up? If so, one would want to ask rather more penetrating questions about their long-term viability and the viability of their business plans. The last thing that parents want is to get their children settled with one child care provider only to find that that provider has gone out of business and they have to move their children, which is damaging for all involved.

We are just trying to include a marker in the Bill. It is not clear how the information will be provided, but we presume that that will be taken up in regulations, hopefully sooner rather than later. Again we hope that it will be as extensive as possible, particularly in the light of the most disadvantaged families, who need to have things teased out that much more thoroughly.

Ann Coffey (PPS (Rt Hon Alistair Darling, Secretary of State), Scotland Office; Stockport, Labour)

How could a local authority provide information to a parent on how long a particular private provider will last? I do not know on what basis it would be able to do that.

Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)

That is not what I am asking for. That would be entirely theoretical and nobody is requiring that. However, one can make some reasonable assessments from looking at the track record and history of a nursery. For example, if a nursery is well established, is well used by its immediate area, is popular and has a history of being oversubscribed, those are good signs. If it has just sprung up and is being run by people who are newly qualified, it is worth knowing that information. That is the sort of information that I would wish to know as a parent when assessing a school for my child. I would want to know how long certain teachers had been there, their qualifications and what the ethos of the school was. It is not unreasonable to want that sort of information.

I am certainly not asking the local authority to make business assessments of the financial viability of nurseries, although I am concerned about that. We had a debate earlier about the longer-term sustainability from a financial point of view, particularly if the market becomes too overcrowded and if there is not a level playing field for existing private and voluntary independent providers that have to compete against new, publicly-funded providers where the capital up-front costs have been provided elsewhere and therefore the borrowing requirements are less onerous early on.

The requirements are reasonable and would provide more information than the Bill currently obliges the local authority to provide, although I have to say that subsection (2)(b) seems to be a rather wide-ranging requirement to provide parents with information about

“any other services or facilities, or any publications, which may be of benefit to parents or prospective parents in their area”.

People could argue long and hard about what that involves. It is crucial that some guidance is given to authorities about how their responsibilities could feasibly be discharged, otherwise parents will ask for all sorts of learned works on the operation of certain child care providers.

The second Conservative amendment in the group is amendment No. 191, which again harks back to an earlier argument. The amendment has been suggested by Mencap. It would include in the Bill reference to disabled children and services that are suitable for them. Obviously, all nurseries will have to comply with the specifications in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the more recent legislation. Nurseries that are housed in not-built-for-purpose older buildings will have gone through a greater number of hoops to adapt those premises so that they are suitable for disabled children. Newly built nurseries are obviously expected to be built with all those provisions in place.

However, we need to go beyond the fabric of the building to include information about the qualifications of the staff for dealing with heavily disabled children—both with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. Everyone acknowledges that the education and the early years provision for disabled children is inevitably that much more costly and complex.

Some parents may be looking to entrust their disabled children to such care, perhaps on a part-time basis rather than regularly. We discussed the fact that the parents of disabled children are not automatically consulted about the sort of provision that is being established. It is incumbent on local authorities to go that extra mile to ensure a full account of what is available for children with disabilities. It is essential. It can do nothing but help to include it in the Bill.

The amendment would not impose an enormous or onerous requirement on local authorities, but it would be enormously helpful to have that reference. The parents of children with disabilities would have a reference point should a local authority appear, for whatever reason, to provide only the most basic of   information, and certainly information below the threshold that parents would need to make an informed choice about what child care provision they should make for children with particular disabilities.

Amendment No. 191 is supported by Mencap. It would mean that disabled children were explicitly mentioned.

Annette Brooke (Shadow Minister, Education & Skills; Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)

I start by pledging the Liberal Democrats wholehearted support for amendment No. 191. In the light of our earlier discussions on the importance and the challenges of providing child care for children with severe disabilities, it is vital.

On amendments Nos. 177 and 197, I have to confess that the latter, which proposes new paragraph (aa), does not express exactly what I intended. I shall explain my purpose and I hope that the Minister will show some tolerance, because I have a genuine crusade—[Interruption.] I thought that if I made a speech on this amendment, I could be much briefer when speaking about other parts of the Bill.

On Second Reading, I outlined a constituency case in which a child could have suffered serious damage. It resulted from a crash that caused concussion. As a result of that incident, I have attempted to amend various parts of the Bill, but I have not asked for extra regulation; that is not the answer in what is already a heavily regulated area.

I have not got the wording of the amendment quite right, but my intentions are honourable. I promise not to run through that case again, but I shall simply refer to it as we progress through the Bill. Baroness Ashton of Upholland wrote to me several years ago about my concerns. She stated:

“As your constituent indicates in her letter, an OFSTED inspector visited the creche in question and found that it was operating illegally. I understand that the inspector raised a number of concerns with them and tried to persuade the manager of the centre to register ... with OFSTED. However, the manager opted to reduce the creche opening hours instead.”

The letter said that while the crèche remained outside the scope of Ofsted’s regulation scheme, no one could intervene. It continued:

“But it might be possible to bring pressure to bear locally on the manager concerned to improve the quality of this provision and extend the hours of operation so that it better serves parents’ needs and can be registered and inspected by OFSTED.”

If a crèche is unregulated, parents should know that, even if it is operating for less than two hours. My intention in paragraph (aa) is that we provide examples of unregulated child care and an explanation as to their implications, so that a parent leaving a child at an unregulated crèche would be aware of the situation and would know what questions to ask. The matter is dear to my heart because we should try to raise awareness about unregulated settings that parents might assume are regulated.

Paragraph (ab) touches on an equally important issue. I think we all want to make parenting classes mainstream, rather than their being seen as a punishment via a parenting order, or existing in some other circumstances in which parents feel stigmatised. An audit of parenting classes should be available, and   a full range of services should be offered, from videos to actual classes. That would be a helpful element of the information provided by the children’s information services.

I recognise that the Minister might say that that would be an additional burden. On the other hand, many information services will probably have partial information on such matters anyway, and it is of the utmost importance. Over and over again, when we reflect on the ills of our society, we say that it comes back to parenting. We should provide the information about where help is available—I have tabled an early-day motion on the matter—and encourage people to see it as a strength to seek help when they are having the sort of difficulties with parenting that I am sure all of us parents have had from time to time.

Amendment No. 197 also concerns the provision of information about how parents can support their learning. By that, I do not mean reading cramming books from a major retailer on how to reach particular development goals, but seeking the good, practical advice that is available through a lot of organisations. It would be useful to signpost to people where they can get such information.

I accept that we could go on and on listing what the children’s information service should do, and that might be the Minister’s answer, but I have highlighted three important areas that merit being called to the attention of parents. At the same time, I entirely support amendment No. 191.

Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Children and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)

Clause 12 places a duty on local authorities to provide information on child care provision, services, facilities and publications to benefit parents and children in their area, and to provide advice and assistance to parents and prospective parents who are looking for child care. It is clear that we all want to ensure that parents can take advantage of a wide range of services to help them in their parenting role. The duties in clause 12 are designed to ensure that we can help local authorities to provide the information that parents need on a whole range of services that are available to them, and additional advice and assistance will be provided for parents who are looking for child care.

Amendment No. 108 would place in the Bill a requirement for local authorities to provide information on affordability, sustainability and quality of child care. I accept that cost is one of the most important considerations for parents when they are looking for child care, but my difficulty is that affordability is a relative concept. What is affordable for you, Mr. Benton, might not be affordable for the next person in line. It is difficult, and not particularly sensible, to require local authorities to make information available about affordability, which is a relative term. It would be different for each person using the information and for each set of circumstances.

It would be useful for parents to receive information about the child care costs in particular settings in their area, backed up, perhaps, by advice on how to get help with paying them. That is our idea of the sort of advice   that would be useful to parents. We do not want to place an obligation on local authorities to spend a lot of time and effort making variations and complicating the information to make it suitable for all the different types of people who might want to take advantage of it. We intend to use our regulation-making powers to deal with the approach to things, such as affordability, that I have described. Relevant topics might include how to get access to child care tax credit and the care to learn scheme for teenage parents. The regulations and statutory guidance will make that clear.

As for information about quality, we have debated quality and Ofsted, and whether local authorities should attempt to second-guess Ofsted or do the same job in a slightly different way. However, we intend to ensure, through regulations, that information services are required to direct parents to the reports that Ofsted produces to help them to make an informed choice, taking issues of quality into account. It is not particularly sensible to make the local authority go through a process of second-guessing or duplicating Ofsted’s work, which might be the effect of the amendment.

Sustainability is also a key issue for local authorities in the planning of child care and for parents when they decide what provision, in what setting, they want for their children. However, providing information on sustainability is not quite as easy as the amendment makes it sound. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport made that point when she accused the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham of future-gazing or attempting to make local authorities future-gaze. The amendment would require judgments to be made about circumstances in the future. The hon. Gentleman clearly said that he did not really mean that, but the wording could be taken in that way. There would therefore be a risk that local authorities would feel they had to make an assessment that could turn out to be misleading, and we would have created a difficult and burdensome duty for authorities. That is not the idea.

In speaking to amendment No. 177, the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole threw herself on the mercy of the Committee and said that she had worded it wrongly, disarming me of all the barbs that I had put in my speech to tell her that. In an attempt to be gracious, therefore, which is not always easy for me, I shall systematically remove those barbs. Her efforts to defend herself have worked.

I understand the point that the hon. Lady made, particularly with respect to the specific case that she raised, but she will understand, because the wording is wrong, that it would not be helpful for us to include in information a lurid tale of what might go wrong in an unregistered setting. We certainly need to create a balance that includes ensuring that parents receive comprehensive information about options, to enable them to choose the child care that suits them. They need to be able to judge whether a registered or unregistered setting is suitable for them and their child at the time, in their circumstances, instead of being pushed in one direction or the other by tales of what might go wrong. We can all think of things that could   go wrong in other, registered, settings, and things that have gone wrong in very highly regulated settings. I do not, therefore, think that that approach would be helpful.

Annette Brooke (Shadow Minister, Education & Skills; Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)

To be absolutely clear, I think that parents need to know when settings are unregulated. That is really what I am trying to say, and I do not know how they are to have any idea of the difference between a crèche that operates for one hour and 59 minutes and one that operates for two hours and one minute.

Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Children and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)

I might agree with the hon. Lady that that is rather a good idea, and I am certain that without an amendment, whether well-worded or not, that is what we intend local authorities to do when they provide information about what is available in their area. I am also certain that they will want to ensure that they do that. Obviously, it is then up to parents themselves to decide what is suitable on the basis of the objective information that they receive.

The hon. Lady raised the issue of parenting classes. Of course we want to equip parents to support their children, engage in their learning and promote positive outcomes, but there are many ways besides parenting classes to do that. It would not be sensible to single out in the Bill the provision of information on parenting classes. It is our aim to ensure that families are able to access information on the whole range of parenting support, which includes parenting classes, but to list in the Bill all the services that could benefit parents—the hon. Lady guessed that I would say this—would be over-prescriptive. I will not say that that would be typical of the Liberal Democrats, which I might have been tempted to say had she not been so graceful when she introduced her amendment.

We shall ensure that local authorities are required to tell parents about parenting classes and all the other programmes that may be available locally by including a requirement in the regulations and guidance that they do so.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the intention behind amendment No. 191, as does the hon. Lady, who made clear her party’s support for it. I fully accept that parents of disabled children have not always been well served in the provision of child care. The market has not previously provided sufficient suitable places, which may be characterised as market failure. Clause 6 addresses that, which is why it specifies in particular the provision for disabled children. However, the general provision of information is not aimed at addressing market failure in the provision for any one specific group. This clause is about local authorities providing information to parents about what is available. Making some change to the details in clause 12 will not address the market failure as such and, as we want to ensure that information is provided to all parents and all disadvantaged groups, we do not think that a reference to a particular group is sensible. However, as I said, the regulations will prescribe the   content of the information. They will clearly specify that information should be provided about the services available to disabled children and their parents.

Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing & Shoreham, Conservative)

I have been listening to the Under-Secretary. She just said that it would not be sensible to single out a particular group of children, but, by her own admission, she did precisely that in clause 6(2)(a)(ii) by referring to

“the provision of childcare which is suitable for disabled children”.

Only disabled children are singled out. Why would it detract from the clause to include a requirement that information on such provision is provided?

Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Children and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)

I was attempting, obviously unsuccessfully, to explain that. The duty under clause 12 is to provide information about existing provision. We know that there has been a substantial market failure in respect of the provision for disabled children. Clause 6 is about improving that provision, which is why disabled children are specifically mentioned in it. Clause 12 is about providing information on what is there, not about addressing market failure and the lack of suitable child care provision to meet the needs of parents of disabled children.

I said that there will be specific reference to disabled children in the regulations. I shall do my best to ensure that they pay particular attention to the issues that the hon. Gentleman raised about the specific needs of the parents of disabled children, and that they tackle the extra obstacles that those parents often face in finding suitable provision for their children. I believe that that will deal with concern that he raised.I hope that in the light of those explanations, hon. Members will feel able to withdraw their amendments.