Education Bill

I will make a few brief remarks on these amendments. First, in terms of Amendment 8 and the principle of having a diverse sector, I have personally always strongly supported that—as did the previous Government. It is in the interests of parents and children for us to maintain that diversity and to try to raise the quality right across all parts of that sector. There is no difficulty there. My problem with Amendment 6 and Amendment 9 is that they would basically allow individual nurseries to charge top-up fees to parents in one way or another. They would either say, ““You can bring your children for the 15 hours but then you have to pay an extra X pounds per hour because that is our charge””, or they would apply a condition that the parent had to take more than 15 hours. There would be a very high charge for the hours over 15 so as to cross-subsidise. As the noble Lord, Lord True, alluded to, there are other kinds of conditions as well, such as parents having to pay for certain facilities or other items. This is just a way of getting extra funding in. I appreciate some of the problems that nurseries have had. In discussing this, we have to recognise what the impact of allowing it would be. Instead of an entitlement with equal access to all provision for all parents whatever their circumstances, we would have a different two-tier system from that which the noble Lord, Lord True, alluded to. We would have a two-tier system in which parents who could pay the extra fees could go to the nurseries of their choice but other parents with less income would be restricted to going to those nurseries that were not charging a top-up—that did not have to. That is in fundamental contradiction to what this entitlement is trying to achieve. Having said that, I also investigated this at some length. I have long relationships with some of the private providers and great respect for many of them for the work that they do. We commissioned a report to try and understand why some but not all private nurseries were having this kind of problem. That independent report identified two main factors. One was that not all local authorities were distributing the funding allocation quite fairly, and that some were supporting public sector provision, particularly nursery classes in schools—there is a higher cost there—more than the private sector. We introduced, and I think that the current Government are going to proceed with this, a proposal that each area has to agree a single formula for the allocation of funding so that there is parity across private, voluntary and public sector providers. The second factor that our independent consultants discovered was that not all nurseries are equally good at managing the finances behind their business. Many are, and they have no difficulty providing for entitlement at the level funded, subject to what the local authority was doing, but there are others that are not so adept at managing the financial side of their business, and they were the ones that were struggling. Because we want a diverse sector, we need to support the private sector when that is necessary. However, the proposal here is the wrong way to do it because it is through parents’ pockets. The way to support private sector providers is to give them that kind of expertise in financial management but also—this is still happening through the current Government—support in terms of subsidising the training of their staff, support in giving them resources to buy replacement staff for the times when staff have been released on training, and support for the networks of private providers in various ways in a locality. That kind of support costs money, but it is going in. Supporting the nurseries having problems in that regard through the parents’ pockets is not the right way forward. I cannot support the amendments that would allow an entitlement. The principle here would be inequitable for parents, and there are other ways in which we could support what we want to achieve, which is diversity in the sector.