Clause 38 - Conditions on registration
Childcare Bill
9:15 am
Maria Eagle (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Children and Families), Department for Education and Skills; Liverpool, Garston, Labour)
I hope again to convince the hon. Lady that her amendments are not required. The group as a whole concerns the conditions that can be attached to registration and the procedure for making regulations governing the activities of providers registered on the general child care register. Amendments Nos. 24, 26, 37, 39, 50 and 52 propose that the word “reasonable” be inserted in the provisions, allowing the chief inspector to impose conditions on registration.
Amendment Nos. 25, 38 and 51 would limit the conditions that a chief inspector may attach to registration to conditions relating to prescribed matters. He currently has powers to impose conditions on the registration of providers. Those are important because they give him the flexibility to ensure that the requirements that providers have to meet are appropriate to their circumstances.
The amendments would limit the conditions that the chief inspector may attach to the registrations to conditions that relate to prescribed matters. We have had a bit of a canter around that, but it is important that the chief inspector continues to have the flexibility to impose the conditions on registration that he thinks fit—rather than to have that flexibility limited to prescribed matters—to ensure that children are appropriately safeguarded in all situations. The clause will allow Ofsted to take into account individual circumstances that might require control over and above the general registration and regulatory requirements.
Perhaps an example will help. The chief inspector might want to impose conditions of registration that take into account the facilities available. He might decide that a provider may not care for children under the age of two because there are no nappy-changing facilities, which are necessary to meet hygiene conditions and requirements, and to ensure the privacy of children.
In addition, conditions are used to limit the number of children who can be cared for, or to say that the provider cannot care for children overnight. Those conditions, made by Ofsted, are printed on the certificate of registration that providers have to display so that parents can see the conditions and ensure that they are met. It is neither helpful nor necessary to restrict the conditions that can be placed on registration to prescribed matters because there will be circumstances in which the inspector is unable to impose the limits he thinks necessary to provide a safeguard. We cannot possibly prescribe all the instances in the Bill or in regulations, and the inspector needs to be able to exercise his professional judgment.
Conditions are placed on registration for entirely sensible reasons: to support the safeguarding of children and the improvement of their outcomes—that is what the Bill is about—by making provision comply with rules appropriate to the situation.
In respect of that wonderful word “reasonably”, amendments Nos. 24, 26, 37, 39, 50 and 52 make the sensible point that, if reasonableness is so important, why is it not in the Bill? It is a good argument, except that—