Childcare Bill

I support the amendment that enables providers to have a right of appeal. I looked through the Bill to see whether, if a provider found itself unable to provide what it wished to and it appeared that it had met all the criteria, it had a right of appeal as a basic human right. I hope the Minister will tell me that it is somewhere in the regulations—he is nodding—because it is crucial that it is there. The second issue is maintained schools. When I raised this at Second Reading, the Minister robustly told me that schools were places where these services should be developed and that the concept of Every Child Matters was that school campuses would provide a wide range of facilities so that most parents would want to drop their children off and take their small children to the nursery at the same time. Those are very good arguments, but they contrast starkly with the planning that the Government are trying to put in place to make sure that under-5s provision is not duplicated or lost because other provision moves forward. The Government must be able to find a way between those two things. I have it clearly in my head that the Government are determined that schools should be able to do that. I hope the Minister will listen to our genuine concerns. It is not that we do not want to have nurseries on school campuses—we all think that that is a good idea—but we fear that they will endanger other facilities, which will mean that some parents will lose places because other provision will be forced out of the market. This is not an easy problem. Between now and Report, I hope that the Minister will have a look at how those tensions are balanced to see if there is some way through the dilemma.