Childcare Bill

It is with great pleasure that I rise to support this excellent Bill. It is good news for parents, it is good news for children and it is good news for the providers of care for children. It is also good news for employers, because they can be assured that their members of staff have high quality child care for their children while they are at work. I speak today as the chair of the all-party childcare group, which has campaigned for exactly this initiative for many years. However, I fully acknowledge that the Government have not been sitting back for all those years and have invested in a huge increase in child care places of more than 500,000. The Government have also invested in part-time places for three and four-year-olds, new neighbourhood centres, and excellent Sure Start projects—I have one in my constituency. I also welcome the changes to maternity pay and leave. We have had some discussion already of the increases in maternity pay, but one of the most welcome aspects of that legislation was the simplification of the rules. The previous rules were so complex that many women did not have the foggiest idea of their entitlement. Now they do. Fathers also now have rights to paid paternity leave and, importantly, so do adoptive parents. Families have adopted children who bring with them very real problems, but have had no entitlement to any leave to care for them during the initial settling-in. The Government have also met many of their targets to reduce child poverty. The Bill is an important step on the way to meeting more of those targets. I also welcome the Bill as a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, which produced a report on child care for working parents. The Committee acknowledged that lack of child care stood in the way of many parents who wished to work. One of our recommendations mentioned the importance of flexibility in early-years places. It stated:"““Out of school care is crucial for working parents of school-age children. We recommend that further expansion of out of school care should be developed as a priority.””" We all need to remember that we are talking not just about pre-school children but, importantly, about children who are at school—the point at which parents often face the most problems. Many working parents can gain access to nursery care, but many of the problems arise once their children start school. I certainly hope that, when local authorities assess the needs in their localities, they look especially at school-age children—something that is even more key when considering the needs of children with disability, to which I shall return later. Another of the Work and Pensions Committee’s recommendations was to re-examine the child care tax credit. We made various recommendations, including the possibility of creating a child care costs run-on system to provide more flexibility for parents who move in and out of the labour market. May I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families that she liaise with colleagues in the Inland Revenue to consider how the child care tax credit can help parents to an even greater extent? Other key issues raised by the Select Committee related to the child care work force, and there are no easy answers. I am sure that every right hon. and hon. Member wants child care workers to have the highest possible qualifications. We all want them to provide appropriate care, given the important job that they do. However, as those in the child care work force become more qualified, the costs to the providers also often increase. There is a tension between producing a highly qualified work force and maintaining affordability. Certainly, when the Select Committee considered those recommendations, we took evidence from other European countries which had developed an early-years pedagogy, thus recognising that a mixture of educational and social care inputs is necessary in early-years care. In some European countries, looking after pre-school children is a graduate profession. That is a recognition of its importance: getting things right in the early years provides the foundation for everything else that happens in a child’s life. Although I acknowledge that child care must be affordable, which involves a tension, may I ask my right hon. Friend the Minister to address those training and qualifications issues and to look again at that Select Committee report?