Childcare Bill

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Bill as a step in the right direction for young children and their parents, especially in its aim of reducing inequality, and I thank the Minister for his clear explanation of its contents. So let me get straight into the nitty-gritty of the Bill. We on these Benches come at this issue, not from the point of view of working parents, but from the perspective of the child and its welfare. I accept that parents living in poverty is not a good thing for any child; so the objective of reducing economic inequality is welcomed. However, we need to strike a balance between measures that appear to encourage mothers to return to work when their children are very small and the real need to provide enough high-quality childcare where and when it is needed. The emphasis on working parents worries me, too. I want parents to have a real choice, not a situation that is forced upon them by financial expediency; and here I refer to some of the debates we have been having on the Work and Families Bill in the Moses Room about the levels of maternity benefit. If a mother chooses to return to work as soon as she can after the birth of her child, we need to support her choice for the sake of her child with the best quality affordable childcare we can manage. If she chooses to stay at home and look after her child herself, we need to support that choice, too, with the best possible financial benefits we can manage plus high-quality, occasional childcare to help the child develop its social skills and also support and know-how in parenting for all parents. That is the ideal world as far as I am concerned. So, how does the Bill measure up in relation to that ideal, given that maternity benefit is well beyond its scope? It is moving in the right direction, but I have some serious concerns about how it will operate. First of all, good childcare does not and should not come cheap; and this Bill is meant to be revenue-neutral. There is no additional money above that which the Government have already announced for the sector. I pay tribute to what the Government have done up to now for the early years sector—as was listed by the Minister. They are well-meaning and well-advised to do so, given the findings of the EPPE study, to which the Minister referred, about the benefits to a child’s development of good quality early years education. There are also long-term benefits in early identification of problems so that the right sort of intervention can be arranged. However, the Government seem to think that the integration of services will itself generate enough savings to fund all the new duties that the Bill is putting on local authorities. I do not believe that this can be done and, given that the money for early years is not ring-fenced, I wonder how the Government intend to ensure that local authorities are adequately resourced to carry out all these new tasks to a high standard. Only last week I had a meeting with a range of professionals working in the field and they do not believe that it can be done. My second main concern is how the new arrangements will contribute to the provision of high quality and not just Ofsted’s minimum standards. I hope that, although some later years providers will not have to register compulsorily, we will develop a culture in which they will actually want to register, as a mark of the quality of the care they provide. I am a little concerned that the whole area of registration and having two registers, with some people on both of them, will prove confusing—both for parents and providers alike. Perhaps the Minister could give us an idea of the level of fees which providers will have to pay in order to register. I am concerned about the part of the Bill which allows the Secretary of State to exempt certain providers from the need to register; for example, crèches which take children for less than two hours. Although it is often said that children are not there for long and the parents are usually nearby, I believe that some children are put in these crèches regularly, and the parents are not always easily accessible. How will the Government ensure their quality if they are not required to register? We need absolute clarity about the circumstances under which the Secretary of State will authorise exemptions, especially since there will be no parliamentary scrutiny of it. In relation to quality, there is an enormous task to do regarding the standards and qualifications of the early years workforce. Buildings and equipment, including an outdoor play area, are important. But it is the people that matter more than anything else. According to the Explanatory Notes, the local authorities are being given a duty regularly to assess demand for and availability of local childcare provision and to support local childcare providers with information, advice and training. How can they do this without adequate funding? The transformation fund provides only £500 per worker for two years. This is not enough to secure the training needed when we are starting from such a low base. This is an area of notoriously low pay, which encourages a high turnover of staff. This is not good for the children in their care. If we are to up-skill the workforce, they will want to be paid more for their qualifications and we will have to face this while still making childcare affordable. If childcare is to be affordable for the parents we cannot expect private providers to pay for all the necessary training themselves, since they will only pass on the cost to parents, especially if their occupancy rate is below 80 per cent. Neither must we just think about nurseries and playgroups. Childminders in England, like those in Wales, should have to undergo at least a pre-registration training course so that we can be sure they have reached a minimum standard, particularly in the area of child safeguarding. We need to ensure that all those caring for children undertake an approved course on child safeguarding, but where will the money come from? Inspection regimes are important levers to improve quality and early years is no exception. However, it is vital that the standards against which inspection is done are sufficiently high and that the inspectors themselves have the right training, qualifications and experience to understand what they are seeing. I thoroughly agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said on that point. We do not want situations such as the one she described and like the one I heard about recently, where an inspector criticised a nursery setting for not using worksheets for the children. I welcome the new clauses added to the Bill in another place to make regulations disqualifying from registration people who have been banned from working in schools on grounds of ill-health such as alcohol or drug misuse and also those who have been convicted or cautioned of a prescribed offence. Can the Minister tell us a bit more about what is included in these prescribed offences? However, while I generally welcome these measures, I have a concern about what they will mean for very young offenders. A ““caution”” is defined in the Bill as including a reprimand or warning under Section 65 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which applies to children between the ages of 10 and 17. Does that mean that if a child of that age commits a prescribed offence and gets a warning, he or she will never be able to work with young children or vulnerable adults when they grow up? If so, we need to think again about this. Something done by a child before his moral personality is fully formed should not prescribe his future career in that way. One of the Bill’s main and laudable aims is to reduce inequalities among children so that they all have the best possible start in life, no matter what their parents do. This raises issues, in particular, about children with disabilities, ethnic minorities and other groups, about whom I will say more later. The Bill puts a duty on local authorities to ensure that enough childcare is provided in their area, but it also gives them a duty to reduce inequalities. So is it just about numbers or is it about quality and the appropriateness of childcare for individual children? As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said and as other noble Lords will undoubtedly know, there is a lot of concern among the lobby groups that represent disabled children about whether the Bill will make the difference that is needed. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that disabled children are special and need special help so that they can develop to the maximum possible extent and be socially integrated. We all know that there is not enough care of the right quality for disabled children. Eighty-four per cent of their mothers are not in paid work as against 39 per cent of mothers of fully able children of the same age. Caring for young children with disabilities requires special training, and we have heard, in particular, from TreeHouse, the National Autistic Society and Mencap, among others, about the needs of the children they represent. I will be either tabling or supporting amendments to ensure that these children are properly catered for. The words ““appropriate assistance”” for such families have a very particular meaning and we must take account of that. There are also issues relating to the inequalities suffered by ethnic minority groups, such as travelling people, black and Asian people, refugees, asylum seekers and those without English as their mother tongue. Although assessment and monitoring already takes place under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, and soon there will be monitoring in relation to disability and gender, we need to be certain that not just future but existing provision is monitored to ensure that there is no discrimination. This needs to be done by people who really understand the issues. Not least is the need to be sensitive and to make provision for the cultural heritage of children in early years settings. Children will never be truly comfortable if no one understands their background and culture. This is a matter to which local authorities will have to pay attention. We also need to make certain that through outreach local authorities ensure that all services are accessible to all communities that need them. That will be a challenging task for the extended Children Information Services. I hope that it will also tell parents about the range of financial assistance available to them to help with the high cost of childcare, particularly here in the capital. Much more than just childcare tax credit is available out there and people need to know about it. I give credit to the Government for the help that has been made available, but, as usual, it is not enough. As noble Lords will have heard from what I have just said, the duty to improve outcomes for all children will be a complex process. It is not a matter for which it is appropriate to set national targets. However, it is perfectly appropriate to monitor the performance of local authorities, and if additional measures are needed to do that, so be it. However, I am a bit doubtful about whether anything more is necessary beyond Ofsted, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the new joint area reviews and the race, disability and gender monitoring, to which I have already referred. Perhaps the Minister will consider that point. I now turn to the subject of the child, who has been at the centre of all I have said. We are aiming to improve the situation for each child in relation to the five outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda, but it is hard to see how the Bill addresses ““children making a positive contribution””. Children are notably absent from the list of those that local authorities should consult under Clauses 3(4) and 11(6). The Minister has told me that that is because it is all about planning and co-ordination, where facilities should be placed and how the various agencies should work together. But it is hard for me to agree that a Bill that makes such far-reaching provision for children should not include somewhere the need to consult them, especially when the clauses to which I have referred contain the magic words ““all reasonable steps””. I shall be looking for an appropriate way to correct that as the Bill progresses through your Lordships’ House. The other big issue relating to the nature of children themselves is the Early Years Foundation Stage, introduced in Clauses 39 to 48. That framework, which brings together earlier frameworks, is generally to be welcomed and has been so by most professionals, despite the best endeavours of the tabloid newspapers which have referred erroneously to a curriculum for babies. I am sure that the Government intend no such thing. However, although I would disagree with the terminology of the tabloids, I also disagree with the terminology of the Bill. Tone of voice is important if one is to communicate what one really wants to happen. Young children learn by being supported to play and to explore the world around them, making sense of it and expressing their understanding and feelings about it. Article 31 of the UN convention is particularly relevant, as it provides that children have the right to rest and leisure and to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to their age. Therefore, those principles need to be better reflected in the wording of the Bill; for example, a child should learn through play rather than being taught, as in Clause 41(2)(b), and should be assessed by observation rather than being tested, as in Clause 41(2)(c). I shall be tabling amendments containing what I and most professionals in the area believe to be more appropriate wording. I have mentioned exemptions before and here is another place where they give me cause for concern. Clause 46(2) allows providers to exempt particular children, presumably disabled children, from the EYFS framework. I believe that that may infringe their rights under Articles 23 and 29 of the convention. We should be ambitious for all children, while accepting that some of them will not be able to do some things as well as others, but that should not prevent them from being included in the ambitions that we have for all children. Next, I echo the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on sustainability of nursery places and how local authorities will work with all providers in their areas to provide a healthy mixed economy of provision. I was horrified to learn that between 1990 and 2003, 626,000 new places were created of which almost half were lost by becoming unviable and closing down. What a lot of wasted expertise. We must ensure that the development of children’s centres, the rollout of Sure Start and the creation of more extended schools do not result in reduced choice for parents because private and voluntary sector providers close down. Local authorities need to adopt best practice, which I know exists in places, and to work in partnership with their local providers to ensure that there is not a proliferation of new places where others of the appropriate type and quality already exist. The word ““appropriate”” is very important. It appears in Clause 8(3)(b) in relation to whether local authorities can provide maintained-sector childcare in their areas. They cannot do so if someone else is willing to provide it, unless it is ““appropriate”” for the local authority to do so. As the Bill progresses, I shall explore what the Government mean by that word, what standards will apply and what safeguards will be in place. The fact that schools that provide childcare are exempt from certain parts of the Bill is a matter that we shall want to explore. What is to prevent the new independent, but state-funded trust schools or academies acting independently of a local authority’s planning system and providing childcare, completely upsetting the balance of the local mixed economy? What is to stop them providing it at any price? It could possibly become a loss leader to encourage parents to send their children to the school. What would that do to the equilibrium of the local market and all the hard work done by the local authority? The ability of the local authority to plan provision sensibly should not be fettered. It is particularly important in rural areas such as parts of Wales—which is also covered by some clauses of the Bill—where distances to travel to suitable provision can be very great. Finally, there are questions to be asked about the child’s right to privacy and how that relates to the data collection measures in the Bill. The measures are very wide-ranging and I wonder whether any of this will duplicate Section 12 of the Children Act 2004; for example Section 12(4)(b): the information about the child’s education. The Government say that these data are needed for two reasons: first, to allow funding to follow the child and, secondly, to allow local authorities to prove they are carrying out their new duties. The child’s right to privacy must be properly balanced by the Government’s perfectly proper right to have appropriate information by which to monitor the effects of policy and I am concerned to get that balance right. As things stand, Clauses 99 to 101 seem to me like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, despite the ban on publishing names. Who will be prescribed to collect and share the data; and what data will be permitted to be collected? I expect all this, like so much in the Bill, will be prescribed in regulations, a matter about which my honourable friend Annette Brooke complained bitterly in another place. However, perhaps the Minister can enlighten us, since we cannot properly scrutinise the Bill unless we have this information. I close by promising the Minister that we on these Benches look forward to scrutinising the Bill with great care and vigour, extracting a lot more information from him over the coming weeks and, I hope, sending it back to another place considerably improved in the interests of all our children and their families.