Childcare Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Andrews and Lord Northbourne

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbourne (CB)]

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Listowel for mentioning that we were going to speak together and I apologise to the Minister for being a minute or two late—I did not realise that there had been a slight rehash of the timings. My Amendments 4 and 7 dare to ask, in this company, whether childcare is always the right answer for all children and all parents. I shall, of course, come back with those questions when this matter returns. I understand that we are not discussing these things in any detail today, so I shall not press my amendments.

[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, I have a few comments. First, Amendment 1 raises a lot of the issues that we began to talk about in our previous discussion on the way the Bill is managed. Again I tell the Minister that we are very grateful for the flexibility he has shown under the circumstances.

Amendment 1, in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, creates an opportunity for the Minister to give us a bit more information on the timetable in general. He has said clearly that we will have the results of the funding review before Report. It would be really useful if he would spell out, as far as he is able at this point, some sort of road map for the process as it will run over the next three to six months. There are so many reviews and all manner of different things happening. There are the pilots—I, for one, do not know much at all about those. Is it possible to set out the department’s working timetable, and perhaps put a copy in the Library, so that we can reflect upon it as we come back at various stages of the Bill? That would be very helpful.

Secondly, there is a contrast between the amendments in this group. Some are probing into the workability of the process itself and then there are two, in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, which raise much more fundamental questions about impact and longitudinal issues. We need a proper debate on what we actually know about the impact of childcare, in terms both of learning and social skills. At the moment we have a rather random collection of evidence about impact, much of which is from the agencies themselves. It would be extremely useful, given the investment that is going into this and given the expectations raised by doubling childcare, if we could have some thorough, systematic research on impact, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, suggests in his amendment.

I do not want to labour the point, but I am reminded that there is a contrast between the way the Bill has been introduced and the way previous childcare legislation was introduced. If we go back to 1999 and look at “Meeting the Childcare Challenge”, that was a very detailed road map for increasing the supply of childcare, which went along with tax credits, with start-up capital, with revenue funds and with the extension of after-school care. There was a very clear prospectus as to what was going to happen and how it was going to be funded. We should bear in mind that past massive changes in provision have been planned carefully. Some studies on not just the value for money of what we are getting but the impact on educational achievement in particular are long overdue. For example, a recent report from the National Literacy Trust on reading shows an increasing, not decreasing, gap between the achievement of boys and of girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, after all the effort that has gone into investing in boys’ education. We really need to know what we do not know, as well as what we do know.