Clause 8
Child Poverty Bill
10:15 am
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington North, Labour)
What my hon. Friend says is absolutely right. We know that there has been a significant expansion in core funding for free places, which we should be proud of. However, the complexity of delivery, particularly given that we rely on a market model for a lot of child care—we use the private and voluntary sector for so much of it—invariably means that charging becomes a factor and that we cannot rely, without further strengthening the requirement on local authorities, on the people who are most in need being able to access the services that they require.
My right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary is well aware of my concern about how the child care tax credit works. The Government are right to say that that tax credit is a more generous means of funding families on low incomes, so that they can afford child care in the marketplace. Sadly, the number of people who claim child care tax credit is small. For example, in my local authority area, only about 100 or so families actually receive it. It is, and has been, possible for local authorities to say that they will introduce extra charges for child care, on the assumption that the child care tax credit will take up the slack. It will not do so, because it is structurally difficult to claim. It effectively militates against certain areas of the country where costs are high and working tax credit take-up is relatively low. We end up losing the provision. That has been the case in the past, and I fear that it will be so in the future if we cannot guarantee delivery.
So far, I have concentrated mostly on under-fives, because that is where the greatest expense lies for parents, but an even bigger concern, not covered fully in the Childcare Act 2006, is child care for older children. We know that the extended school service exists, and that a huge amount of money has gone into it; that is something of which I am very proud. It is also true that the level of prescription relating to extended schools is such that it is perfectly possible for a school to say that it is providing a full extended school service, but not actually provide a single service on its site. That is how the classification of extended schools operates. Looking at service delivery throughout the country, I am not at all sure that there are not very real variations in the quality and provision of service.
We seek to migrate lone parents on to the employment and support allowance, jobseeker’s allowance and income support, on the basis that the extended school services exist and on the basis that there is the ability to pay for them, but we lack the robust information that would let us know whether that actually happens.