Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department plans to increase the hourly rate to nursery providers under the 30-hours free childcare scheme.

By 2019-20, the government will be spending £1 billion a year to deliver 30 hours of free childcare and fund the increase in rates that we introduced in April 2017.

Our average hourly funding rate to local authorities for three- and four-year olds compares very favourably with published independent research into the hourly cost of childcare. We will continue to monitor delivery costs and have commissioned new research to provide us with robust and detailed cost data from a representative sample of early years providers.

The government requires all local authorities to pass through 95% of their three and four year old funding to early years providers. The government allows 5% of funding to be held back so that authorities can meet their statutory duty to administer our entitlements and for central services such as specialist support for special educational needs provision.