Childcare Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely pertinent point. It is interesting that the grandparents did not see themselves in any way as professional carers and were not looking for registration, which would allow the care-giving parents to apply for tax credits. It was not that sort of system. The parents and grandparents did not see the informal care provided by grandparents and formal care provided by the paid-for system or by the state as proxies of each other. We are looking at different animals. There should be some recognition of such informal child care. It might not be a matter of recognising grandparents as child-minders providing commercial child care in their homes and being assessed by inspectors, but there is a strong case for some sort of intermediate category offering some recognition. That is what parents want. When we asked parents what they thought about making payments to close family members for care, they said they would like to give some recognition. They did not want to employ their parents or their parents-in-law. They would make payments in kind, and they saw that there was a certain cost involved in such payments. We are, of course, talking about low-wage families. That is one of the reasons why I believe there should be an intermediate category between informal and formal care. The Secretary of State referred to the fact that tax credits are not cash limited. If they are applied for and people succeed, they are paid. Other budgets have a cash limit. Some of the assessments that we made of the potential benefits for constituencies are quite startling. In my constituency, Caernarfon, the tax credits claimed were £600,000 per year in 2004. Should informal care be recognised, that sum would go up to £750,000. That is the order of change involved—about 25 per cent. However, should all care provided by informal carers be recognised at the highest rate, the sum would be £5.6 million. That is a huge amount of value that parents and grandparents put into the economic system, and it is unrecognised. I am not arguing for £5.6 million or anything close to it, but the work that grandparents put in should be recognised in some way. Echoing the hon. Member for Doncaster, North, there is an argument in terms of efficiency. Nobody has made the point that we depend a great deal on older women to do the caring. As the economy changes and there is more pressure on older women who have not yet retired to return to work, the number of women available to undertake informal not-paid-for caring will inevitable decrease, so that source of care is a diminishing resource. I shall deal briefly with provision through the medium of Welsh, which as I recognised earlier, is a matter more for the Welsh Assembly. Provision through the medium of Welsh is in some cases non-existent, and in some cases under great pressure. In general, it is grossly inadequate and leads to the very inequality that the Bill is intended to combat. There is an absolute need for that provision. As an adult I speak English fairly well, although I speak Welsh much better, but many children under three and four do not speak English. In my constituency, about 75 per cent. of the population speak Welsh, and about 90 per cent. of under-fives speak Welsh and no English in their family, yet the overwhelming majority of the small amount of child care is not available through the medium of Welsh. Clearly something is going seriously wrong, so I hope that my remarks are noted in the Welsh Assembly and that suitable action is taken as soon as possible. There is a crisis and there could be great dangers for small children being cared for in that situation. Some of the issues that I raised are for the Welsh Assembly Government, while some are for the Treasury, in respect of legislation and the payment of child minders, especially in rural areas where neither paid-for nor voluntary provision is available. In large measure, we should be guided by what parents, grandparents and, most obviously, children, want. From the research that I commissioned, it was clear that children love being with their grandparents. I shall not trouble the House with lengthy quotations, but one nine-year-old made some charming and engaging remarks. He said:"““We played outside our grandmother’s house in the morning. Then we went for chips and then we went to see ‘Scooby-Doo 2’.””" He said all that in Welsh—apart from ““Scooby Doo-2””. We should be guided by what parents, grandparents and children want, and we should guard against overdependence on a market model that has not succeeded in many deep rural areas. Through the Welsh Assembly Government, we should be looking for much-extended provision in Wales.