Childcare Bill

Many of my hon. Friends have stolen my thunder in terms of replying to the debate, but I am grateful to them for doing so. Perhaps I can be briefer as a result. We have had a short rehearsal today of the debate that we had on this matter in Committee. It is clear that the Conservatives still have not fundamentally understood what we are trying to do. Either they do not understand our intentions or they still feel uncomfortable with them, as they are again trying to take the words ““reduce inequalities”” out of the Bill. As hon. Members have pointed out, the two paragraphs of clause 1(1) have to be read together. The first provides that an English local authority must"““improve the well-being of young children in their area””," and I am advised by parliamentary counsel that that means all young children in their area. The second paragraph provides that the local authorities must ““reduce inequalities””. It is clear, if the two provisions are read together, that it is possible to achieve those outcomes only by taking all children upwards in terms of achievements, and by doing so at a faster rate for disadvantaged children. That is how we will close the gap. The Conservatives are talking the talk, but they cannot yet walk the walk. They have not yet internalised a genuine commitment to the protestations of the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) and of their own leader, who has said that the test of Conservative policies will be to show"““how they help the most disadvantaged . . . not the rich””." The Conservatives’ amendment is inconsistent with the policies that their own leaders are putting forward. To echo the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband), for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) and for Stockport (Ann Coffey), I just wonder whether the Conservative leadership is aware of the amendments that have been tabled. We hear their protestations in the media, but their default position, which we have seen in Committee and again today, is to be against reducing inequalities and not to be prepared to see our provision written into the Bill. I am glad that the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) and her party now think that child poverty is something that we should be reducing, rather than increasing, as happened under the previous Conservative Government to a massive extent. If we had continued in the direction in which they were going, the number of children in poverty would have increased by more than 800,000. This Government are going in the right direction. Amendments Nos. 40, 36 and 52 deal with the definition of well-being. There is considerable misunderstanding about the intention of these amendments, because they attempt to rewrite the Children Act 2004, the ““Every Child Matters”” policies, and the five outcomes enshrined in those provisions. The Childcare Bill is using those five outcomes as the basis for the outcomes duty and other provisions, which is why we have incorporated them as they are. They are the outcomes that children and families identified, and they were endorsed in the 2004 Act. We are really not in the business of rewriting them now. I agree that relationships with parents are important, certainly in helping to achieve those outcomes, but local authorities should not be responsible for the quality of relationships between children and their parents. However, we want to help parents to support their children. We are sticking with the five outcomes, and that is why I am unable to accept those three amendments. I am quite puzzled by amendments Nos. 41, 42 and 61, which deal with target setting. We have just had a big debate about the importance of improving outcomes for children and the duty on local authorities to achieve that. The amendments would replace the targets for local authorities to achieve those outcomes with ““procedures for assessing””. I am at a loss to understand how the Conservatives feel that criteria for judging whether a local authority has achieved those outcomes for children can instead be defined as ““procedures for assessing””. They seem to want to replace an outcome criterion with a process criterion. That is not what we are about. We are interested in outcomes. That is the bottom line, and that is the basis on which the targets for local authorities will have to be decided. They will be decided in conjunction with local authorities, but they will relate to outcomes, not to how well authorities are dealing with the process.