First, I apologise to your Lordships for not being able to speak at Second Reading. I will speak to Amendments 1, 29 and 38A. I very much agree with the comments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Andrews and Lady Howarth, but am very nervous of phrases such as “value for money” and “best value” in local government. It has to be about what is best in terms of provision. We have seen early years childcare grow over the last two decades. We have seen the Labour Government, the coalition Government and now the Conservative Government all doing something about early years, but we have not really thought about how it is going to look and how we want it to work. I find it concerning, for example, that three-quarters of our nurseries are, as we know, independent. There is nothing wrong with that, but we know that of those independent nurseries only half have a qualified teacher on the staff. We also know that, when there is a qualified teacher, the learning experience for those children is far greater than otherwise. So it has to be about the quality of the provision, for me.
I wonder about the effects of having those extra 15 hours. It might be great for working parents, but how do they affect the child? I will give an example. Schools will have nurseries, where children will go for part-time provision for three hours a day, Monday to Friday. So you can see a system arising now whereby the working parent will take the child to the childminder and the childminder will then take the child to the school nursery for three hours. With the extra 15 hours, they cannot use the school again, because it is a different set of children in the afternoon—not in every case but in most cases—so they will look for a different provider for the afternoon session. Then the child will go back to the childminder to be taken home to the parent. So there will be four different regimes or experiences of childcare, and I really wonder what the effect will be on those children. We need to look closely and calmly not just at the extra resource and provision, which we all welcome, but at how we ensure that there is quality.