I was not in the Department or in position in 2008, but if we raised ratios, I am sure it was done after full consultation and with the support and backing of child care professionals, which is the exact opposite to now. That is the key difference, and I am sure that people out there listening to this debate will know whether that is true and whether that case is a fair comparison.
I sincerely hope that today the Deputy Prime Minister will put his MPs where his mouth is and lead his Liberal Democrat Members into the Aye Lobby with Labour when we seek the opinion of the House on these new clauses shortly, to ensure that in future no Secretary of State can force through, against the will of the House, changes such as those that the Minister has now dropped.
Amendment 76 would require the Government to take the novel step of consulting on the formation of childminder agencies before they legislate to create them. I hope that Ministers will learn the lessons from the furore over ratios. I should say from the outset that I do not have a dogmatic objection to childminder agencies, particularly if they are voluntary. What the Government say they want to achieve through such agencies is all very sensible: greater co-operation and peer support for childminders, as well as access to training and help with gaining bursaries. Childminder agencies will also be a single point of contact for parents who might need a mix of child care solutions. These are all good things that make for a vibrant childminder sector, and are all things that local authority childminder networks and family information services should be providing at the moment. That some of them are not is perhaps down to the devastating cuts to the grant that local authorities previously received from the Department for Education to pay for them.
Since the publication of this Bill, the Department has been consulting on removing many of those duties from local authorities—such as providing training and quality improvement support—and this on top of the attempt in clause 75 to remove the duty to publish child care sufficiency reports, which our amendment 77 would block. All this seems to be a clear sign that the Government want local authorities almost completely removed from the child care equation and that agencies are therefore the preferred configuration for childminders.
Given that the Minister has said that there will be no direct funding from the Government for agencies to provide those services, the implication is that there will be a cost to the childminder. That cost will in turn have to be passed on to the parents, because most childminders do not earn the sort of money that would allow them to soak up the kind of membership fee or commission that we might expect an agency to demand. The most recent
childcare costs survey from the Daycare Trust found that childminder fees were already increasing by an average of more than 5%, year on year.
Of course, as all the parent surveys tell us, cost is a secondary issue to quality, and it is the end of individual inspections by Ofsted that is the most worrying reform. Parents really value the fact that their childminder has proved their effectiveness to Ofsted. A National Childminding Association survey last year found that 80% of parents thought that individual inspections were important, and that 75% might not choose a childminder without the reassurance of an individual inspection. Childminders value the inspections too: 80% felt that moving to an agency model of inspection would have a detrimental effect on their professionalism, and they are obviously concerned that this would put parents off using them as well.
Of course we want more childminders to set up—as I said earlier, we have seen the number drop by more than 1,500 since the election—but we should not be trying to achieve that by passing legislation that has the potential fundamentally to change the market, without first consulting on it and establishing consensus. I would therefore welcome assurances from the Minister that the Government will set up such a consultation before the Bill completes its passage through the other place.