I do wish it was my Bill that we were debating here. I really do, but it is not; it is the Minister’s Bill and it is for him to defend it and to argue against my new clause. That is why we are here. This is not a re-run of the election campaign. I am sure we are all glad about that—I know I am!
New clause 1 also asks the Government to evaluate the impact on parental employment and the administrative burdens placed on parents and providers. What parents want, aside from high-quality and affordable provision, is a scheme that is easy to understand and predictable. After someone has had a baby, deciding when to return to work and for how many hours is a difficult and finely balanced choice. Employers and parents need certainty. As parents fret over the balance between work and family life, employers and co-workers also make choices about their hours and staffing. We want those parents who choose to work to be able to do so. Any opaqueness about eligibility is damaging to take-up of the scheme and harms the confidence that the Government will not move the goalposts once complex family arrangements have been put in place. The proposed scheme, under which someone earning £107 in half a day would be eligible for 30 hours per week of free childcare but someone who works 15 hours a week on the minimum wage is not eligible, will seem bonkers to most people. I therefore urge the Government to do as new clause 1 suggests and monitor the impact of this change, in particular on parental employment patterns.
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It is not just the complexity of the scheme that will put some parents off; so, too, will the potential administration involved in proving they are entitled to the free additional hours. How exactly does the Minister envisage parents will be asked to prove to providers that they are entitled? What about parents working on zero-hours contracts, who have unpredictable hours? We are all aware of the difficulties encountered in the tax credit system when earnings fluctuate. What will happen when a parent is entitled to 30 hours of free childcare, but then their hours dip below the threshold for some reason? Who will be responsible for policing that or putting mistakes right?
I notice that there are provisions in the Bill for HMRC to become involved, as well as tribunals and local authorities, and the Minister has explained previously that he secured £1 million—well done—of emergency funding from the Contingencies Fund to pay for the development of a joint online childcare application checking system, to be devised by HMRC. The Minister says he thinks this system will be simple and straightforward and save parents valuable time. New clause 1 simply asks that the Minister be held to this assertion. We are not asking him not to do it; we just want to hold him to it.
Experience tells us that schemes that are administratively burdensome are open to abuse, deliberately or inadvertently, and are off-putting to potential beneficiaries. So the purpose of new clause 1 is to ensure that these unintended consequences of the Bill—of which the Government have been warned by stakeholders in the sector, not just
by us—are closely monitored, so that steps can be taken to ensure the new measures in no way harm availability or quality and do not place unreasonable burdens on parents or providers.