Finance (No. 3) Bill

Of course, Dr McCrea. I was simply going to make the point that quality is partly about diversity and about children from a range of backgrounds and settings being able to meet, play and learn together. One of the consequences of clause 35 is that we will see less of that. There are a lot of stresses and pressures on the financial support for the child care market, and they will also be felt in families as parents struggle to pay what is typically a very substantial proportion of their regular monthly outgoings. Child care takes a big bite out of the family budget. I am sure all hon. Members are familiar with parents who say, ““It's almost not worth my while going back to work by the time I've paid my child care costs,”” but those parents want to go back to work, because they recognise that that is in their long-term interest and that of their children. It is also important to our national economy that parents continue in the workplace. Parents accept that a substantial chunk of the gain from earnings could go towards meeting their child care costs. It is none the less incumbent on us to do all we can to mitigate the effects of meeting those high child care costs by ensuring that we put as much public funding into child care provision as we possibly can. I am therefore very concerned that the single effect of the clause is to take public money out of child care provision. Obviously, that will have many, widespread and damaging effects on the child care market, but in due course, it will also have those effects on children's well-being, and ultimately on economic growth. The Government have taken a decision of the previous Labour Government—a decision that was taken with regret and reluctantly, but none the less necessarily in the current economic context—to remove a tax break from some families. However, I very much regret that the current Government have not redeployed that financial gain elsewhere into a marketplace that is essential to our future economic growth and to our children's well-being, both during their childhood and right through to adult life. Frankly, I am shocked that we can be so casual about sustaining hard-fought for, hard-won public investment in child care. It took my hon. Friends a long time—certainly all of my adult lifetime—to give child care any credibility in the public finances. I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who did an enormous amount of work on that, going back to the 1980s. It is greatly disappointing that the gains that took 20, 25 and 30 years to make are being unwound so quickly, in a matter of months. That is why I cannot support clause 35, or indeed any other aspect of the Bill, and why my right hon. and hon. Friends will fight hard to reinstate funding to the child care market at the level that we got it to. I am grateful for the opportunity to come to the Committee today to speak up for our children.