My Lords, I will speak very briefly on these amendments. As noble Lords will know, we agreed with and very much supported the amendment originally proposed by the noble Baroness on Report and we still think that the principles behind it are important. We also noted, both on Report and in the Commons, Ministers’ wording when they agreed with what was proposed; that is, they agreed with the concept of flexibility and the need to build more flexibility into the system, so obviously that is very welcome. I suppose that my one remaining concern is that “flexibility” may be all things to all people. It can hide a thousand sins. I would like to drill a little more into what is meant by that word. The noble Baroness’s original amendment specifically referred to flexibility being in the context of extending opening hours beyond nine to five and making provision in school holidays. It would be very helpful if the Minister could confirm that “flexibility”, in his terms, is about those sorts of issues and not some weaker concept.
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I have another concern. If that flexibility is there and if the local authorities embrace it in the way that we hope they will, surely there will be funding issues. To provide a more flexible arrangement which may go into the evenings, weekends and school holidays would be an added cost. I am not clear how the scheme that the Minister is proposing would provide that extra funding for the flexibility that we all see as important. If the pilots work and show that that flexibility is welcome, can the Minister clarify what extra funding will follow those extra hours?
Finally, I have one more question. The funding review seemed to identify that one of the ways of making the scheme pay would be the spare capacity in the system. In other words there were nurseries which were not running at 100% capacity for 100% of the time, for example, and we could therefore ensure that they used their staff more effectively to increase the ratios and provide more capacity in that way. That is fine and I think we can all understand it although, for all the reasons that we also understand, I do not think that we would ever reach 100% capacity. But if we are to have flexibility with longer hours—some people might want school holidays and others would not—that would seem to run counter to it. We go for either maximum capacity or more flexibility; I do not quite see how those principles can run in parallel. I hope that the Minister is following my line of argument here. It would be really helpful to have some answers on that.
We do not want to delay the Bill by wrangling over this issue and we seem to have quite a lot of agreement. However, we want to be confident that the understanding with which we are going forward is a real one that will embrace the concepts in the noble Baroness’s amendment and is not just something very general around “flexibility”. As I say, that word could mean 101 things to people. I look forward to the Minister’s response.