It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to serve under your chairship, Mr Davies, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), who has given us a brilliant exposition of the current problems with funding for childcare. Hopefully I will not repeat much of it, but I think it is interesting that so many people signed the e-petition and, as she explained, wanted to get involved in this debate.
This morning, before this debate, I was lucky enough to be asked to speak on Radio Merseyside—a fabulous local radio station. Often, when I take my little girl to the school gate, I do not have much political discussion
there—parents tend to be busy and not thinking about politics—but it was notable to me that this morning when I dropped off my lovely girl, her teacher said to me, “I’ve just heard you on the radio talking about childcare,” and proceeded to talk to me about all the issues. It does not surprise me at all that my hon. Friend has had the experience of all those people getting in touch with her. This is one of the most significant issues that faces our country, and even though it may not appear to be high politics in the conventional sense, it is where politics in our country could most influence families’ lives for good.
I will go back to basics and talk about the principles of why Government should be involved in childcare, and then make a couple of points about how we should do so. In the end, support for families and children, and for parents at work, goes back a long way in our country. Beveridge recognised when he was considering what made people poor that there were two times in people’s lives when they had less earning capacity and extra cost. One of those was when they got old, and the other was when they had children.
Beveridge recognised that having kids had the power to plunge families into poverty that they would not be in otherwise. That is why he designed family support as part of the very nature of our welfare state. He thought that people should be able to smooth their costs over their lives and receive state assistance at times when they had extra costs and less capacity to earn, so that when they had the ability to pay in, they could do so, smoothing their income over their lives to prevent poverty. That is the principle of our welfare state, and it always has been.
Beveridge knew something else as well about preventing families from being poor. He knew that Government needed to be committed to the principles of full employment and prepared to provide public services to underpin good health and good education, to ensure that people had the ability not just in theory but in practical terms to get a job. When I read the e-petition as submitted, with its emphasis on helping working people, I agree with my hon. Friend that that is exactly what our country should be all about. That is why I think we should adopt the same principles, attitude and approach that Beveridge did when he designed our welfare state.
However, there is a crucial difference between the labour market then and now: people like me can get a job. Women now rightly expect to go to work. It turns out that once the historic prejudices against women in the workplace were removed—piece by piece, by those women in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s to whom I owe every chance that I have had as a woman in the workplace—women in great numbers wanted to go to work and have a career. We therefore need to fundamentally rethink the way in which the Government support families when their children are small, and we need to confront the fact that our labour market is now very different. That means that, as a country, we must applaud the nature and instinct of people who want to go to work and we must seek to provide good public services to back up that driving instinct. That simple conclusion is supported by the contribution of the woman who spoke before me on Radio Merseyside this morning, a dedicated Scouse nan called Linda who had gone on the
radio to explain how stretched her family was; not just the mum and dad but the grandparents were trying to work and do childcare.