Finance (No. 3) Bill

In a moment. I should like to talk about what this provision will mean in terms of the number of children likely to access good-quality child care provision in future. The knock-on effect of clause 35 will be that not only the children of the families from whom this tax break has now been removed will be affected, but so too will the increased number of children who will fall out of the ambit of affordable, good-quality child care. I say that not only because of the importance of a universal market that tends to raise quality and aspirations but because starting to chip away at the money that is flowing into this market, which will inevitably happen, means that some parents who are currently able to afford to access the formal child care market will decide not to do so. As money starts to be withdrawn from the market, provision generally will start to be reduced, and in turn other parents will find it more difficult to access it, whether or not they have financial support from other measures such as the child care element of the working tax credit to enable them to do so. Then we will be in a downward spiral. By removing funding at the top but not putting it back elsewhere, we start to shrink the child care market, and the more it shrinks the more it continues to shrink. The problem with this market, as we have seen again and again, is the insufficiency and unpredictability of provision, and those elements will be put under further pressure because there will be less money to sustain the market even at the current levels. I am conscious that a couple of my hon. Friends wanted to intervene, and I do not want to deprive them of the opportunity to add their comments if they would still like to do so.