Cost of Child Care — [Mr Jim Hood in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:04 pm on 20 November 2013.

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Photo of Chloe Smith Chloe Smith Conservative, Norwich North 3:04, 20 November 2013

It is a pleasure to follow Mr McFadden, whose surname I have just acquired, with an extra z, from his fellow Scot, my husband.

Parents in Norwich North are taxpayers, too, and in this debate we must think about what they are paying. I am delighted that the Government I support have taken many of the lowest-earning parents out of income tax altogether, which is a good thing, but we ought to approach the debate honestly. Those young parents, who, as the right hon. Gentleman rightly said, are very busy, do not necessarily have time in between looking after their youngsters to take an extremely close interest in the goings on of this Chamber, but they should not be paid the disrespect of our talking dishonestly about the size of the pot and who pays for it.

Like my hon. Friend Dr Coffey, I am grateful to Bridget Phillipson for calling this debate, which gives us an opportunity to talk about these important issues. The hon. Lady might not be surprised if I begin by saying that, if she knew how hard it was going to be to reduce the deficit, she might have thought twice about her support for her party’s running up of the deficit in the first place. I know of no woman or man, no mother or father—indeed, no rational person—who would desire to leave debt to their children without having had the courage to address it themselves. It ought to be commonplace in this debate to say that addressing the deficit now ensures that future generations are not burdened with unsustainable debt, higher taxes or diminished public services. Of course, I will address the public service aspect today.

Among the many claims and counterclaims that have been made in recent weeks, the salient point, with respect to the taxpayers who have to trust us to do such things for them, is that the Leader of the Opposition has pledged to extend free child care for three and four-year-olds, but he is trying to pay for it using a concept of money that he has already used more than 10 times. It is just not good enough to face young parents with such false accounting, and I am confident that the Minister agrees. It is not good enough to say, “Yes, we’ll borrow more to fund it,” because that borrowing only comes back on the children who we might otherwise be trying to help.

I am pleased that the introduction of tax-free child care that the Minister has so passionately advocated will mean that parents get £1,200 towards each child’s child care costs in addition to both our extension of the hours of free child care and our cutting red tape for schools, so that they can offer more affordable care after school and in the holidays. Those are practical and affordable actions, and we must have this debate in that context. We have to take decisive action for the reasons that we have all tried to set out, but we have to do that by addressing the cost and quality of child care and by having respect for those who entrust us with the job of honest politics.

It is essential that the Government maximise the contribution that women can make to the economy, not because of political correctness but because it is an economic reality. Growth will get this country back to where it ought to be after Labour left it lying in a ditch. Such growth will come about only if we have women in the workplace doing their best for themselves and their family and gaining satisfaction from the careers that we would all like to see. We must remove barriers to the workplace, which is why I am here today to add my voice to the support for what the Government are doing to promote child care policies that help women get back into the workplace.

That leads me to yet another of the numbers that we might want to focus on in the debate. Yesterday, in the main Chamber, a couple of points were made about the number of women in work and the way we might look at the statistics. One statistic, which is important to use in today’s debate, is that almost 200,000 women in coupled families with dependent children have re-entered the workplace since 2011, compared with 185,000 between 1996 and 2011. Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal had to deal with the notion that a few years of achievement now are worth more than 13 years of non-achievement in the past, and that point stands on the same side of the argument.