Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Paul Goodman (Wycombe): I signed the report that we are debating wearing my hat as a member of the Select Committee. If I may wear that hat for a moment longer, I congratulate the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Sir Archy Kirkwood), on his skilled chairmanship. Like him, I found the subject more and more intriguing as the Committee proceedings continued.
I speak today from the Front Bench, wearing another hat. I am sure that all hon. Members will agree that this has been a good debate and I want to pick up some points. I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Pond), who has recently taken over some new ministerial responsibilities for child care. As the Chairman of the Select Committee said, the Minister, as a former member of the Select Committee, knows the territory well and I am sure that he will find child care as challenging and enthralling as we all did when we undertook our inquiry.
I am sure that the Minister agrees that, as the report emphasised, decisions about child care are deeply emotionally charged for any working parent of young children. The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) was keen to emphasise that point in her strong contribution to the compilation of the report. There are few more emotionally charged decisions for any parentespecially perhaps for lone mothers, who are, by definition, without a partnerthan the decision to trust their child to someone else, particularly a stranger or strangers. That emotional charge is intensified by the pressure of modern life on the work-life balance of women and families. In that
context, I shall quote the evidence of a nurse, which the GMB quoted to the Committee. The nurse said:
In a very fine speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) picked up the key point: the degree to which parents love and care for their children and to which they have to make some difficult decisions. Those pressures on parents are exacerbated by the inevitable debate about the effects on the development of children of child care outside the home. In a very good speech, my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) developed, as I expected him to do, some of the points that he made to the Select Committee. Those points were also made by other Members during the debate.
Members of the Committee will remember that there was some discussion about the degree to which our report should flag up the debate about the effects of formal child care on very young children. I have no intention of revisiting that discussion in depth today, not least because of the time constraints, but the report is extremely circumspect about those effects. It says of pre-school children that
I must confess that I believe that the debate about the effects of child care on very young children, although important, may be beside the main point: given the emotionally charged nature of child care and despite the extremely complex ways in which it is provided, the key principle for working and non-working parents should surely be choice. The Select Committee report broadly reflects that view. Perhaps inevitably, the Committee found that there were different views about the choices that working parents want to make. Although working parents may sometimes disagree about the choices that they want, the House will agree that child care choice is what they want. That choice may be to stay at home when their children are very younga point made by some of my hon. Friends. It may be informal care by relatives, friends or neighbours, more formal care, such as a child minder or high-quality formal care outside the home at a day nursery or children's centre. The key question raised by the report and the Government's response is whether the Government's child care strategy is firmly based on the principle of choice.
The official Opposition want to study with care the announcements made yesterday, because we have learned from experience that when spending announcements are made it is vital to study not just the
big headlines but also the small print. For example, the Chancellor said that
Mr. George Osborne (Tatton) (Con): Steady on.
Mr. Goodman: I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that it does politicians no good to be too adversarial, even if we necessarily have to be adversarial sometimes. He will also share my fear that despite yesterday's announcements, the evident good will of Ministers and the ever-rolling stream of initiatives and announcements, the answer to the question, "Do the Government have a coherent child care strategy based on choice?" is, sadly, "No". I shall explain why.
As the Select Committee's report makes clear, the Government's child care policy for working parents is inextricably linked to their anti-poverty strategy. There was some discussion in Committee about whether the anti-poverty strategy was the foundation of their policy. The Government have set themselves two main targets and the hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley), in a very good speech, picked up one: reducing the number of children in workless households by 2006. The second target is that 70 per cent. of lone parents should be in paid work by 2010.
Like the Chairman of the Select Committee, I was extremely impressed by the oral evidence that we heard from Professor Moss, on which I shall read out part of the Committee's conclusions. The report states:
The House may now begin to appreciate why the Government do not seem to have a clear and coherent strategy for child care based on parental choice. That lack of clarity, combined with the bewildering proliferation of funding streams and the administrative burdens that some
providers reportmy hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire mentioned this in the context of playgroups, in his reference to the difference between quality and qualified staffmay help to explain why demand for child care continues to outstrip supply. The number of day nurseries is certainly up. But the number of child minders is, as the report puts it, "decreasing in number". In 1997, there were almost 100,000. By this year, that figure had fallen to almost 72,000 and the number of places in playgroupsmy hon. Friend will have noticed this in his perusal of the reporthas fallen from more than 350,000 in 1997 to roughly 300,000.
Next Section
| Index | Home Page |