My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for what he said today and for the discussions that he organised during the course of the Bill. The Bill is very different from the one that first saw the light of day in this House, which was only notable by its lack of detail. It has certainly gained considerable flesh on the original skeleton, and I am grateful for that. However, it is not necessarily a fully formed being just because it has grown throughout its progress. We still have some concerns about the detail that the Minister has finally given the House today.
There has been a broad welcome across the House, which we agreed with, for the Government’s additional childcare offer. I will comment on two particular aspects of the Bill in its final form, in the light of the discussions that we had in this House. First, we have always been concerned about the funding. There were wide discussions in Committee and on Report about
the viability of providers if there were no adequate recompense for the hourly rate, and we welcome the additional funding that the Government have put into that, albeit that it is 30p an hour. I have great concerns that it will not up be upgraded annually by either RPI or CPI. If it is not, that will put additional stress on the financial viability of providers.
An issue that we on this side particularly raised in the course of the discussions was that of the additional capital that should be made available to enable providers to offer the further 15 hours, and there were many discussions about how that could be achieved. I welcome the Government’s capital fund that they have set aside for just that purpose, which demonstrates that some of the arguments we made have been recognised, albeit perhaps not enough, in my view.
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The second amendment that I want to talk about relates to eligibility. In relation to the Government’s policy statement published in October last year, it was stated that:
“Eligibility for the free entitlement will include households where … both parents are working or one parent working in lone parent families, for their children aged three- or four-years-old. This will be defined as earning the equivalent of 8 hours per week on national minimum wage and this can includes self-employment”.
All our deliberations were on that basis. Whatever the Government’s current thinking, the original concept was to include those families with the lowest incomes, because providing childcare has to have more than the single aim of helping more parents into work—it should also be about helping to prepare young children for school.
Much of the early discussion in this House focused on the need for quality of provision and on the qualifications of those delivering it, so it is much to be regretted that the Bill has returned to us with the eligibility criteria substantially changed so that parents are required to work 16 hours before accessing the additional hours. I hope that the Minister will be able to justify this significant change, which means that almost 350,000 children will not have the benefit of the full 30 hours a week that will be enjoyed by other children. That has enormous social and educational consequences.
What we are saying in this Childcare Bill is that the offer will be accessed only by those parents who are already more advantaged, because they are in full-time or substantial part-time work, and are able to support their children’s development. However, those parents who are struggling the most financially, because they are in low-paid, very part-time work, are the ones who will be omitted from this scheme—albeit that they will be able to access the current entitlement of 15 hours. When compared with more advantaged families, they will be left out. It seems to me that those are often the children who the Government and we as a country ought to be putting more focus on rather than on the children of other more advantaged families.
I suppose that it is a stark contrast, really. What the Government are saying is that parents whose household income is £200,000 a year will qualify for the additional 15 hours of free childcare, while parents whose income is less than £10,000 a year will not. That tells the full
tale. I am very disappointed that we are not putting more focus on offering greater support to the families who need help the most. I would urge the Minister to explain to the House why the eligibility criteria have been changed so dramatically and perhaps give us some hope that in the future they will be revised.