Childcare Bill

Indeed; and my hon. Friend—obviously—is still here. I no longer have the honour to serve on that Committee, I am afraid. As the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood said, children do not just learn formally; they also learn informally through play and discovery, and through finding out for themselves about the variety of the world around them. A sensible Government will want to put at the cornerstone of their child care strategy the principle of choice. The Government’s 10-year strategy is indeed headlined, ““Choice for Parents””, and I, for one, say amen to that. So one way of thinking about the Bill is to ask how it measures up against the choice principle. We know that this principle has sometimes been honoured more in the breach than the observance. The former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry admitted the following in 2003:"““If I look back over the last six years I do think that we have given the impression that we think all mothers should be out to work, preferably full time as soon as their children are a few months old. We have got to move to a position where as a society and as a Government we recognise and we value the unpaid work that people do within their families.””" She made it clear that she was referring not just to mums, but to grandparents, informal carers and so on. We know that Ministers themselves feel that they have not always lived up to the choice principle that they proclaim. Even before we consider the Bill’s content, Ministers will want to ensure that the choice principle within it matches the choice principle in the tax and benefits system: to ensure that it is simple, clear and easy to access. I will not go into that system in detail, because to do so would be out of order, but I want to make two brief related points. First, it is an oddity to have two payments—child benefit and the child tax credit—that basically achieve the same end. Ministers have yet to resolve that difficulty. Secondly, I want to pick up on the point that the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood made in referring to the excellent Select Committee report on child care for working parents, produced in the last Parliament. She did not quote in full what it said about the child care tax credit. Before she gets up to correct me, I had better point out that it did acknowledge that"““the CCTC is an important component of the Government’s anti-poverty and childcare strategies, and valuable to many parents.””" However, it also said the following, which I may have sneaked in while she was not looking:"““The CCTC is . . . not consistent with””" a particular expert’s view—my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) quoted an expert from the Institute of Education—"““of childcare provision as a public good which is the right of all children, whether their parents work or not. Nor is it consistent with a childcare vision based on the choices made by parents and families themselves, since it is only available to some of them.””" So the Government have a bit of tidying up to do in that respect. One aspect of the Bill about which I have heard some complaints from playgroups and nurseries in my constituency is the fact that the regulatory burden is high. I suspect that other hon. Members have received similar complaints about the planning rules, the way in which VAT works, the business rate regime and even the number of funding streams, which are not always easy to negotiate for private and voluntary providers. Late in the last Parliament, the Daycare Trust identified no fewer than 28 different funding streams through which nurseries, playgroups and other providers of child care are funded. Not surprisingly, many of them found funding difficult to access and the trust wanted some simplification. The Bill contains new regulatory procedures, although one of the reasons we welcome it is the simplification of regulation that it should provide. However, on many occasions, Ministers introduce Bills with regulatory measures that promise simplification, but it does not always happen. Another way in which the choice principle could work would be to recognise the role of local authorities, which is present in the Bill. Ministers are right to make local authorities the lead bodies in implementing the measures in the Bill.