Orders of the Day — Childcare Bill

House of Commons, 28 November 2005.

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Today is a landmark for families and children, as we have embarked on the Second Reading of the first ever Bill on child care, ensuring that all parents can make genuine choices to help them to balance work and family life, and that children have the best start in life. When the Labour Government came to office, child care and early years provision had suffered from years of underfunding and neglect. We inherited one of the worst sets of child care and family-friendly provision in Europe, and one of the worst records on child poverty in the industrialised world. We are determined, however, that child care and early years provision should be at the heart of our strategy to allow families to make the choices that modern lifestyles and work patterns demand. In doing so, we must ensure that we help the people who need it most and improve the life chances of every child.

The Bill builds on our manifesto commitments and sets out our aspirations. It ensures both that we have sufficient high-quality provision and that parents have the information that they need to be able to access the services that they want for their children. The Bill recognises that families on the lowest incomes need the greatest support. It achieves those things by setting out a new duty on local authorities to take steps to provide sufficient child care, integrating inspection regimes, setting targets for outcomes that we want to be achieved for children and ensuring that local authorities provide clear and accessible information for parents.

Paul Goodman (Conservative, Wycombe)

The Secretary of State referred to the new duties that the Bill would impose on local authorities. Will she make more funding available so that they can fulfil those duties effectively?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the £17 billion that we have put into child care provision over the past eight years—enough money to ensure that local authorities are already taking that duty seriously. We are building on those duties, but we are not providing any new unfunded pressures in the Bill.

In 1997, there was a massive gap between the needs of parents and the availability of child care, with a place available for only one in eight children under the age of eight. With an increase of almost 600,000 registered child care places, there is a place available for one in four children. In 1997, there was no guarantee of a nursery place—now there is free part-time nursery provision for every three and four-year-old who wants it. In 1997, there was no help for working parents with the cost of child care. Now, 337,000 families have benefited from the child care element of the working tax credit, compared with a mere 47,000 who benefited from the child care disregard of family credit.

Mark Prisk (Conservative, Hertford and Stortford)

In her response to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), the Secretary of State suggested that funding had been made available, but that the Government did not intend fully to fund local authorities' proposed new responsibilities. What estimate has she made of the cost of that responsibility for council tax payers in east Hertfordshire?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I made it quite clear that there were no new unfunded costs in the Bill. Local authorities have a duty to make sure that sufficient child care is available to parents who need it. They must therefore map demand and talk to parents to ensure that sufficient child care is made available by the voluntary sector or the private sector or, in the last resort, by themselves. However, there is no new unfunded pressure in the Bill.

Peter Bone (Conservative, Wellingborough)

A number of constituents, especially young mums, have told me that they feel under enormous pressure to go back to work and get their children into child care as soon as possible. Is there any provision to encourage mums to stay at home and look after their children in the early years?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

Yes, there is, and the House will shortly debate the Work and Families Bill, which will build on the existing maternity pay and leave provisions, which in 1997 were derisory. Maternity pay at present stands at six months and parents have the right to request flexible working as well, but the Work and Families Bill extends paid maternity leave from six months to nine months by 2007, because we know that parents want choice about whether to stay at home with their young children or to work. Of course, we are the first Government to bring in paid paternity leave for fathers.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I noted the right hon. Lady's comment about maternity pay being extended in the Work and Families Bill. She said that that was particularly to give families choice. Does she, therefore, support our proposal, which we made at the election, that families should also have the option of taking all that maternity pay over the first six months, to give mothers a real choice about staying at home to look after their children by giving them extra money?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

We will debate those issues in the House next week. I urge the right hon. Lady to be patient and make her comments in the appropriate forum. She knows that we have extended maternity leave. When we came to power, maternity pay was for only 14 weeks; it is currently for six months. We as a Government are pledging to extend that maternity leave and pay from six months to nine months, with a goal of 12 months. I hope that that is a measure that she will support.

Since 1997, we have started to build up services to help all parents help their children in their early years and beyond. By 2010, there will be 3,500 children's centres across the country, one for every community, building on the Sure Start approach and ensuring that more families than ever before can benefit.

Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Caernarfon)

The Secretary of State referred to the large number of child care places now available. Would she say that those were well distributed in terms of class, ethnic groups, rurality and provision in urban areas?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

The hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly important point. We need not only to tackle child care for those who can afford it, in places where they find it easy to access, but to tackle the clear child care gaps for more vulnerable groups—for parents of children from the ethnic minorities, for parents of children in rural communities, for those on particularly low incomes and for children who are disabled. The Bill specifically highlights a couple of areas—the plight of low income families, and ensures that there is sufficient affordable child care for that group, and also disabled children. However, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that there are other gaps that we also need to tackle, and the Bill will take that forward.

Liz Blackman (Labour, Erewash)

My right hon. Friend has just mentioned provision for disabled children. She will know that provision has been improving, but it is still extremely patchy. One of the core elements of providing decent child care for disabled children and their families is training. How will the Bill improve the capacity to look after and support disabled children in child care?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. How children are looked after and the quality and leadership available in child care centres is incredibly important, including for disabled children. We will shortly publish our work force strategy, including the use of the transformation fund, which is designed precisely to ensure that there is sufficient support for workers who work in those environments and that the leadership exists so that children can be well looked after, no matter what their special needs. I hope that my hon. Friend will welcome that.

Edward Leigh (Conservative, Gainsborough)

In the context of her earlier answer, can the Secretary of State guarantee, in the interests of giving choice to young mothers, that if a young mother chooses to stay at home and look after her children, the taxation, allowances and benefits will be exactly the same as if she goes out to work?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I am very aware that, from time to time, the Opposition make the proposal that there should be tax relief on child care. That is their favoured approach to those issues, but I have never favoured it as the sole answer, partly because it favours taxpayers and the wealthy at the expense of the low paid. Our provisions in the Bill and elsewhere are designed to make child care accessible and affordable to all groups who need it. That is the approach that we have taken.

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I want to make some progress and then I will take interventions from my colleagues and others.

The Bill will use all the facilities at our disposal. For example, by 2010 all schools will be providing access to a range of extended services, including child care, from eight in the morning until six in the evening. Over the past eight years, such reforms and innovations, alongside the £17 billion that we have invested in early years and child care services, have brought an area previously at the margins of public service into the heart of the welfare state.

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

Earlier, my right hon. Friend mentioned affordability. When she looks at the special needs of children with disabilities, will she take into account the cost of child care to their families? All too often they have to pay what is called the disability premium, so child care is much more expensive for them. Will she look into that issue?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

My hon. Friend makes a good point. The Bill tries to ensure that there is sufficient affordable provision for disabled children. Local authorities will need to take that into account when providing child care and ensuring that sufficient child care is available in their local areas.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

rose—

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I shall give way once more before making some progress.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

I was interested to hear the right hon. Lady's response to the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble). Does she agree that child care costs in the UK are among the highest in Europe, so if no additional funding is going to local authorities, yet they still have to provide additional facilities, will not that push up further the costs for parents?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. That is why it is so important that we have invested £17 billion in early years provision and child care provision over the past eight years. We intend to put more funding into child care, both through the extended schools, to which I have just referred, and through Sure Start centres, setting up such a centre in every community in Britain. That investment was opposed every step of the way by the Conservatives. Britain's hard-working families need that investment.

As family patterns change, with more women working, families need their Government to support them, not a Government who would tell the 1 million and more women in work since 1997 that it would be better if the social clock were turned back a couple of decades. Our aim is always to support parents as they try to make the right decisions for their children, rather than to pretend that the Government know best. That is why we believe that there is no excuse for the do-nothing policies that faced families in the Tory years. Simply shouting "Nanny state" at any measures to support families will not work in the modern world.

Our achievements since 1997, although substantial, do not go far enough. Sixty years on from the Attlee Government, who did so much to establish the welfare state, we must extend its frontiers to embrace the greater opportunities and to confront the bigger challenges of the modern world.

Our "Every Child Matters" programme and the Children Act 2004 have put children and their safety and well-being where they should be—centre stage. The Bill takes that forward and focuses specifically on the early years of childhood. It places a duty on local authorities to improve outcomes for all young children. Every child should have the opportunity to fulfil their potential.

Mark Harper (Conservative, Forest of Dean)

The Secretary of State has made several references to the duties placed on local authorities, and the Bill shows that those duties will be significant. In a previous answer, she said that no costs would be involved in those duties. There would thus be unfunded liabilities for local authorities, and I am at a loss to understand how no costs can be involved in such a large number of duties. If they are to have the significant impact described by the right hon. Lady, surely they will put many costs on local authorities, which will put up council tax.

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

The hon. Gentleman does not take into account the fact that, over the next three years, there will be an average real terms increase in investment in child care of 24 per cent. a year. Massive new investment in child care is being directed to local authorities through the Sure Start fund, through extended school provision and through other measures, which will make it possible for them to carry out the duties in the Bill.

The Bill in itself does not impose any new unfunded pressure on local authorities. It formalises the role that they have already been playing. It gives our vision statutory force and sets out clear priorities for the use of the considerable amount of money already flowing into the system.

Sally Keeble (Labour, Northampton North)

May I raise with my right hon. Friend the fact that the "Every Child Matters" document did not pay proper attention to the role of housing? Can she say what the Bill will do to increase the protection provided to homeless families with children?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Housing is a key part of the "Every Child Matters" agenda and needs to be taken into account in the inspection regime, ensuring that every child fulfils their potential in the fullest sense. As I was saying, the Bill places a specific duty on local authorities to improve outcomes for all young children.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Clause 6 places a duty on local authorities to secure sufficient child care for working parents. Does the Secretary of State agree that, while not calling for public expenditure, it is a route through which more funds will go into child care, because the working tax credit, which is not cash limited, means that more funds will go to child care when more places are available?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The generosity of the working tax credit system has been increasing over the years. It has increased again recently. That has opened up child care to ordinary hard-working families, sometimes for the first time.

Theresa Villiers (Conservative, Chipping Barnet)

Will the Secretary of State give way?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I must make some progress.

Because life chances are still too often determined by parental background, we want to see local authorities reduce inequalities between the poorest children and the rest. The local authority role will be to champion the rights of young children and their families. To do that, they will work with partners to develop integrated services focused around the needs of the child, and they will involve parents in the design and delivery of the services to ensure that they meet their needs. Sure Start children's centres, already being established throughout the country, will play a vital role in achieving those aims.

To enable parents to balance more effectively their work and family responsibilities, we are placing a precise duty on local authorities to secure sufficient child care for working parents. Local authorities already play a key role in planning, commissioning and delivering services for young children and their families and the Bill formalises that role.

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I must make some progress.

To achieve that, every local authority will have to take into account what parents say they need, particularly those on low incomes or with disabled children. Every local authority will then have to work with providers in the voluntary, private and state sectors and do all they reasonably can to ensure that there are sufficient places and that those match parents' needs.

Parents need information and guidance to allow them to make informed choices between the services available, so the Bill extends the existing duty on local authorities to provide information about child care so that parents know about the range of services available for their child from birth to the age of 19.

Nick Hurd (Conservative, Ruislip - Northwood)

Will the Secretary of State give way?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I give way one last time to the hon. Gentleman, who has been very persistent.

Nick Hurd (Conservative, Ruislip - Northwood)

Does the Secretary of State share the concerns of the Daycare Trust, whose judgment is that the Bill will not help non-working families and therefore ignores the needs of vulnerable children from workless households, particularly the disabled? Those children would arguably particularly benefit from high quality early years provision. Does she acknowledge a gap?

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

I do not. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the duty refers specifically to working families but, as child care provision is increased, that child care provision will also be there for those families where no one is in work. As the supply increases, it will not differentiate between the types of parent who want to avail themselves of child care.

These measures call for an appropriate regulation and inspection framework both to give parents confidence that their child is safe and secure and to give children high quality learning experiences and stimulation. For young children, there is no distinction between care and learning. Care cannot be considered good quality unless it provides opportunities for children to learn. Equally, learning must be provided in an environment where children feel safe and secure. However, the current system implies that there is a difference between care and learning. That is why we want to change the legal structure to bring them together in a single coherent system that allows young children to be safe and secure and to learn and develop through purposeful play, just as they would at home with their parents.

To achieve that, the Bill will introduce the early years foundation stage—a single phase of development for all young children during which activities appropriate to their age will be provided to support development. That will build on the widely welcomed foundation stage and the "Birth to Three Matters" framework, and help us to ensure that all children are getting a good start in life. Our objective is for all providers to work to and be inspected against the same framework. That will reduce bureaucracy and raise the bar on quality.

Currently, all child care providers for children under the age of eight must register with Ofsted. However, there is no such requirement on those that provide only for children over the age of seven, so parents have no way of knowing that that provision is safe and that their children will be looked after well. The Bill will simplify and extend the current regulatory framework so that for the first time Ofsted registered child care will be available for children over seven. Registration will be voluntary for providers that care only for children aged eight or above. We think that that is right and proportionate to the level of risk.

However, there will be strong levers to register for all those providing child care. For example, only registered provision will be eligible for tax credit support. We will also provide guidance to schools developing extended services that they should work only with registered providers. The inspection regime for child care provision at schools will also be simplified. If a school provides child care for its pupils on the school site, it will be inspected by Ofsted as part of the routine school inspection.

This landmark Bill shows a Government who assess and act, listen and respond, and learn and move forward. We have witnessed fundamental changes in the world of work and in the way in which families want to live their lives and we have taken decisive steps. As a result of the Bill, parents will have the certainty of knowing that, whatever their situation, high quality early years services and child care will be available to support them and their children.

The Bill is an essential part of our drive to ensure that every child has the chance and support that they need to fulfil their potential. It is an essential part of a modern Government, forging a modern welfare state that supports families and helps them in making difficult decisions on balancing work and family life. That is what this Government believe in and what the Bill is all about. I commend it to the House.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I welcome many of the aims and much of the content of the Bill, which the Secretary of State has explained. However, I am a little concerned about the tone of some of her remarks and I emphasise that Opposition Members—indeed, I thought it applied to all of us in the House—recognise the very important role that child care plays in Britain's future. The Secretary of State made a number of claims about Conservative party policy, so let me place it on the record that it is not our policy that the social clock should be turned back. It is our policy that families should have the choice of doing what works best for them. As someone who, as chairman of education in a Conservative borough in London under a Conservative Government, ensured that there was a child care place in a nursery for every three and four-year-old child whose parent wanted one, I take umbrage at the Secretary of State's comments about do-nothing Tory years.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

It seems a little early, but if the hon. Gentleman feels the need to intervene, I shall give way.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

The right hon. Lady defends, rather surprisingly, the record of the last Conservative Government. Let me give her one fact. The child care disregard in family credit helped 46,000 families—a miserly amount. Today, the child care tax credit helps 347,000 families. Who does she think has a better record on child care?

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

The gap has got wider.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

My hon. Friend is right that, contrary to the claims made by the Secretary of State about child poverty, the gap has got wider under this Government, rather than improving.

We recognise that affordable quality child care is one of the most important concerns for many hard-pressed working families today. Indeed, for some families, access to any child care is a problem. Quality child care and effective parental support are critical to ensuring that children reach their true potential, and that families are able to make the choices about their work-life balance that best suit them, although I recognise that, for many families, it is simply a question of being able to meet the increasing demands of paying their mortgage, tax and other household bills. For the sake of the children, we must get this right, and that is why we want to do our best to ensure that the Bill goes as far as possible towards helping children. However important the issues of work-life balance might be, the outcomes for children are what really matter.

We have a number of concerns about the Bill, and I shall outline them later. The Secretary of State mentioned the Work and Families Bill, which will come to the House in a week's time. It will deal with work-life balance and parental leave, and this Bill deals with child care provision for those who are working. I am surprised that we are dealing with these issues in two separate Bills. Surely it would have made more sense for the Government to address them all together in one Bill, to ensure that we came up with joined-up legislation that works for children and families. I cannot help feeling that the presence of two Bills on these matters, led by two different Departments, reflects the fact that the Government have singularly failed to deliver the joined-up government that they promised.

The challenge for the Government—and for us, working to be back in government—is to so manage the operations and working of government that it works for people and not for Ministers and civil servants. Alternatively, perhaps the chance to issue two press releases and to make two headlines carried more weight among the Government's spin doctors than the needs of families.

Kitty Ussher (Labour, Burnley)

The right hon. Lady mentioned her backing for supported parenting for every child. Why, then, did her party vote against our proposals to give a mere two weeks' leave to new fathers when their sons or daughters are born?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I suggest that the hon. Lady look at our manifesto proposals for parents in relation to flexibility of maternity pay and benefit. Those proposals aim to give families a choice in the provisions they make to look after their children, and in regard to whether the mother or the father wants to go back into the workplace. Choice for families is the underlying principle that we are following in all our proposals, and, indeed, in our response to the Bill.

We know that parents are under strain, and the predicament of the modern family is often particularly difficult. A quarter of all families are lone-parent families, and of the other three quarters, which are couple households, the majority are households with both adults working. In financial terms, a shocking 42 per cent. of families are in arrears with their consumer debt payments, and with the mean age of first-time mothers nearing 30, many parents are now having to cope with the double hit of simultaneously caring for children and parents. No wonder eight out of 10 parents say that they are under strain. Those are the families that we are all keen to help.

The Bill contains measures that attempt to ensure a sufficient supply of child care for families across the country. We support the idea of ensuring that sufficiency of supply, but all too often today, the problem is that families have little choice in the child care that they can use. The emphasis that the Bill places on the working families tax credit, and on the families that receive it, will yet again restrict choice, as has been mentioned earlier. The rising cost of child care places and the lack of real choice mean that many parents are left using the only child care available, rather than the child care that they would really like to use. That lack of choice prevents parents from raising their children as they see fit and from placing them in the environment that they believe will best meet their individual needs. That can result in children being less happy, and in their deriving less benefit from their child care.

Increasing the options available to parents is key to producing the kind of child care that works for families. Just as all children are different, the child care that they need to grow and flourish will be different. That is why, as I said earlier, we want policies that are designed to give parents more flexibility and more choice of child care, and more support for the most important job that they will ever do. That is why we do not believe that a "one size fits all" policy will meet the needs of all children.

We believe that the Bill is too restrictive. Too often, as we have seen, the Government's efforts to make child care more available, however well intentioned, have had an impact on other providers in the sector without producing the net gains for child care that the Government envisaged. Many Members will know full well that Government provision frequently forces the closure of private and voluntary sector child care services offering smaller groups and more flexible care.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

The right hon. Lady may not be aware that there are half a million more child care places than there were when the Tories were in power. Can she explain how a programme involving public expenditure cuts of £35 billion would increase choice?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

The hon. Lady should look carefully at what has happened as a result of the Government's child care provision. For every two places that have opened one has closed, and choice has often been removed from parents.

Andrew Gwynne (Labour, Denton and Reddish)

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

In a moment.

It is wonderful, is it not? Labour Members seem to think that all that matters is a number. The quality of child care does not matter. It does not matter whether livelihoods are affected by closures in the private and voluntary sectors. It does not matter that children are not being given the choice that they need. All that matters is a number—a tick-box, mechanistic approach. That is it.

Andrew Gwynne (Labour, Denton and Reddish)

Parents in my constituency, and in many other constituencies, do have a real choice. There are Sure Start centres, voluntary pre-schools, privately run nurseries, nurseries attached to schools and child and family centres. Will the right hon. Lady acknowledge that that is the true position?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I am pleased to hear of the hon. Gentleman's constituency experience, but I can tell him that many other constituencies have a rather different experience. I am thinking particularly of the impact on Sure Start, on which I shall comment in a minute.

It is difficult enough for parents to find places in nurseries or play groups—that often causes them a great deal of anguish—but when those nurseries and play groups close, it means real disruption for children and real problems for parents. If we are to crack the nut of affordable child care, we can do it only by working with all providers, including the private and voluntary sector, to ensure that the needs of families are met.

There is real concern in the industry that the Bill will mean closure for many nurseries. I am sure that the Secretary of State will have read in the Financial Times last week about research undertaken by the National Day Nurseries Association. It might interest the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) as well. More than half the association's members had seen their local authorities create child care places that competed directly with them. According to 71 per cent. of respondents, local authorities were not involving them in the delivery of children's centres, and 63 per cent. did not believe that local authorities would collaborate with providers locally to build on existing provision rather than merely replicating it. Purnima Tanuku, the NDNA's chief executive, has said that the Bill

"will not succeed in reversing these trends and establishing a mixed economy in childcare."

We must make full and proper use of the capacity and skills of the private and voluntary sectors. Only by working with them, rather than competing against them, can we ensure that Government resources put into child care deliver value for money. Government provision must complement what is already there. After all, 24 per cent. of private providers are already operating in less affluent communities, and many more are keen to do so. We must harness their potential. Government must promote the mixed-economy approach, building on existing provision, which could benefit children and parents from disadvantaged communities the most.

We have always supported the work done in establishing Sure Start, and we recognise that for many parents it has made a difference. It also has flaws, however. It focuses on the 20 per cent. most deprived wards, but Government figures show that 46 per cent. of the most deprived children do not live in those wards. Too many parents who could benefit from Sure Start or a similar project are denied it, often because by refusing to work with the private sector the Government are not making the best use of resources.

Sure Start is also relatively new and untested. Since its introduction, it has gained support, but we have seen no empirical evidence of the difference that it is making in communities.

Ruth Kelly (Labour, Bolton West)

Is the right hon. Lady going to support it?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

If the Secretary of State had been listening about 30 seconds ago, she would have heard me say that we have always supported Sure Start. What we have said is that we would do certain aspects of it differently. If we are to continue to support Sure Start, everybody in the House must know whether it is doing the job that it is intended to do, and whether it is making a difference.

Ann Coffey (Labour, Stockport)

The right hon. Lady might not be aware that in my constituency the Bridgehall and Adswood project has received national accreditation because of the vast improvement that it has made in children's language skills at an early age, which has enabled them to go on and take advantage of nursery education. It is therefore simply not true to say that there is no empirical evidence.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

The hon. Lady makes a valuable point about her experience in her constituency. She might be aware, however, as I am sure that the Secretary of State is, that a research report by Birkbeck college has examined the effectiveness of the Sure Start scheme. That report has not been published, despite the fact that it was due to be published in September. When the Minister winds up the debate, perhaps she can tell the House why the publication of that report was delayed, and when it is going to be available. Newspaper reports have suggested that far from Sure Start having the impact on children's development that the Government intended, the report's findings were that it had had no discernible effect on the children that it was supposed to be helping. We have supported Sure Start, even though we would want to make changes to it, but if the Minister wants that support to continue, she must publish the evidence and let us judge for ourselves. I hope that she will provide a date for the publication of that report when she speaks later. If we are to invest a large amount of taxpayer's money in helping parents with child care, we must ensure that that provides value for money.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

There is little surprise that concern has been expressed about the Opposition's view on Sure Start, because I looked through their manifesto before this debate—the education section, as I understand it, was written by the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron)—and it contains no mention of Sure Start. Can the right hon. Lady explain that?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

The hon. Gentleman should pay more attention not only to my speeches and those of other Conservative Members but to other publications that we produced prior to the election, in which we made clear—

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

More homework to be done.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I thank my hon. Friend for his helpful sedentary intervention. We set out our views in a number of manifestos, and said consistently that we supported Sure Start. Perhaps by the end of the debate the hon. Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband) would like to quote the manifesto in which we made it absolutely clear that we were supporting Sure Start, and significantly, that we would guarantee the funding for Sure Start, as well as supporting the concept of it.

The issue of providing value for money, about which I was speaking earlier, brings me to my second concern, which is the implication of the duty being placed on local authorities to ensure adequate provision of child care. Several of my hon. Friends have referred to that, and they have had a mixed bag of responses from the Secretary of State, who on the one hand appeared to say that there were no unfunded provisions in the Bill, and on the other, that there were provisions in the Bill, but it did not matter because they were funded. That is not the view of local authorities looking ahead to the implications of the Bill, because it places a duty on them to secure as far as is reasonably practicable child care that meets the requirements of parents who want to work or undertake training.

The Secretary of State said, and I agree, that the Bill confirms the vital role that local authorities will play as strategic leaders. We know the skills that local authorities have in delivering cost-effective services, meeting the needs of local people. Yet once again we see in the Bill the Government giving local authorities another job to do without giving them the resources to do it. Time after time we have seen this ploy by Ministers and we are now seeing a repeat performance.

As a result of the Bill, local authorities will be left literally holding the baby. Simply shifting the problem to local authorities without providing additional money will do little to solve the problem. It may lead to yet higher council tax bills for many people, because councils do not have a magic wand to wave and create more child care places. I say to the Secretary of State that if she genuinely believes that there are no funding requirements for local authorities in this Bill, she is living in cloud cuckoo land.

The Secretary of State does not need to look at me for evidence. The Local Government Association spokesman on children's services, Councillor Alison King, has said that without substantial extra government investment, it is hard to see how the Bill will increase the amount of affordable child care for low-income families. She said also that to be on track to meet the Government's ambitions means investing £200 million in the next two years, over and above existing resources. Perhaps the Minister who winds up will tell us where the money will come from.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

My right hon. Friend has identified one example in which what the Government said does not appear to match that for which the Bill provides. It is clear from clauses 12 and 13 that there will be an obligation to provide advice and assistance to parents and, in certain circumstances, to provide training to child care providers. Given that none of those is currently a duty under statute, it logically follows that all are new. Why is it that the Secretary of State is right and the head of the early years development partnership in Buckinghamshire is somehow wrong?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

My hon. Friend has subjected the Bill to his characteristically rigorous assessment and he is absolutely right. But it is not only those particular clauses that set out clearly new requirements that would cost local authorities. Other parts of the Bill make it clear that if the provision of child care is not suitable, local authorities will have to provide it, so there will be significant costs for them.

Paul Goodman (Conservative, Wycombe)

My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) referred to clauses 12 and 13, but clause 11 states:

"An English local authority must prepare assessments of the sufficiency of the provision of child care".

That too will surely bring costs in its wake. Should not my right hon. Friend add that to her list of costs?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

Indeed, and those costs are ongoing because the assessment must carry on; it is not a one-off effort by the local authority. That is why I said that I found it amazing that the Secretary of State felt able to stand up today and say that there were no new unfunded requirements on local authorities.

With the debate on private sector provision and local authority budgets, it is easy to forget the real reason why we are discussing the Bill today. We are all concerned with ensuring, as Government slogan-writers put it, the best start for all children. That brings me to my final and perhaps most important concern about the impact that the Bill will have on our children.

We all know that, as part of the Bill, the Government are establishing for the first time a national curriculum for children from birth until the age of five. This causes concern for many on this side of the House. We have had the foundation stage national curriculum in place for some time now, but I have been warning that the Government were intent on pushing a more formal educational approach further and further down the age range. At one stage, the DFES had even coined the phrase "educare." Whatever it is called—national curriculum or educare—it is clear that Ministers want to see children in the classroom at an ever-younger age.

Childminders and nurseries will be under a legal obligation to teach the early years foundation stage curriculum to children from birth until three years of age. Ofsted inspectors will then check that children are developing according to the Government programme. For the first time, we are seeing the Government's involvement in the lives of our children moved from the classroom into the maternity room. As the Minister for Children and Families has said:

"We want to establish a coherent framework that defines progression for young children from nought to five".

I think that a potentially insidious part of the Bill is the idea that the Government should and would decide how any individual child should develop month by month and use legislation to determine the outcome of children's development. Therein lies the problem. It is impossible for a Government official or a Minister to establish a framework for the development of babies—[Interruption.]

Michael Connarty (Labour, Linlithgow and East Falkirk)

rose—

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

rose—

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I am going to make some progress.

Babies develop at their own pace and learn to walk, talk and understand their surroundings at their own pace. That is what nature dictates. Children grow at their own pace and it is wrong to tell parents that anything other than that is expected. As Deborah Lawson, chairman of the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses, has said:

"One child might not learn to walk until 14 months, while another walks at 10 months. So it will be very difficult to have a curriculum that matches all children's needs."

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

Clause 41 introduces the learning and development requirements, and I note that it specifically points out that young children have "different abilities and maturities". It also lists simple developmental goals. We are not here talking about educational attainment, but about the development of a young child, which is what health visitors and the like already look into now.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

The hon. Lady says that she has looked at clause 41, but I suggest that she look at clause 41(2)(b) more carefully. The educational background to the provision is clear, because it refers to

"the matters, skills and processes which are required to be taught to young children of different abilities and maturities ('educational programmes')".

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

rose—

Michael Connarty (Labour, Linlithgow and East Falkirk)

rose—

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

rose—

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

No, I am going to make some more progress. I am going to return to the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses and I suggest that it would be good if the Secretary of State listened to the professionals out there, whose concerns about the Bill are evident. Deborah Lawson, chairman of the PANN section committee has said:

"It is important to find the right balance and not have unrealistic expectations of what young children can achieve. Research has indicated the dangers of introducing formal education too early as this can lead to dissatisfaction in later years. Prescriptive formal education can be too much too early for children under five."

Similarly, Peter Moss, professor of early childhood provision at the Institute of Education in London—not known, I have to say, as a hotbed of conservatism—has said that we risk creating

"an 'industrial model' of early years education in which workers follow a manual to ensure children conform . . . All we will do is have a kind of template and check whether children fit into it."

That is yet another example of the Government's mechanistic, target-driven approach to development.

It is time, I believe, that the Government stood back and allowed children to enjoy their childhood and grow up at their own pace rather than forcing them into formalised learning. It is simply ridiculous to impose a national curriculum for children from birth. I wonder what is next on the Minister's agenda—testing for two-year-olds? It is not only the experts at the Institute of Education or those who are working professionally with children who take this viewpoint. Margaret Morrissey of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations has also said:

"We are now in danger of taking away children's childhood when they leave the maternity ward. From the minute you are born and your parents go back to work, as the Government has encouraged them to do, you are going to be ruled by the Department for Education. It is absolute madness."

Another example comes from June O'Sullivan, chief executive of the Westminster Children's Society, who said:

"My real concern is that we will have death by worksheet at 2. How do you turn out creative thinkers and entrepreneurs if you ask them to act to a worksheet at the age of 2?"

Michael Connarty (Labour, Linlithgow and East Falkirk)

I do not really want to interrupt the right hon. Lady's fantasy, but she really must look north. There has been a zero to eight curriculum in Scotland for a decade, which has proved beneficial to the educational process and the life chances of children in Scotland. The right hon. Lady should not disparage what she does not understand.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I was going to make a reference to the hon. Gentleman—who has of course himself gone through education in Scotland, I assume—but perhaps I had better not.

I hope that the Government will work with us in Committee to ensure that it is parents and children themselves who set the pace at which children develop, not the DFES.

Michael Connarty (Labour, Linlithgow and East Falkirk)

Could the right hon. Lady please explain her earlier remark? I do not understand what she was trying to get at.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

If the hon. Gentleman is unable to take a light-hearted and off-the-cuff remark relating to education—[Interruption.] Sadly, this House does not have responsibility for what happens in education in Scotland. I simply say to the hon. Gentleman: do not listen just to me; listen to the professionals here in England who are working with children; listen to those who are saying clearly that they are concerned about the Bill's proposals. I also suggest that he look at the experience of continental countries, where formal education starts much later than, and where results are often far better than, in the UK.

Beverley Hughes (Labour, Stretford and Urmston)

I do not want Members to feel that they are being misled. Has the right hon. Lady read the framework document, "Birth to three matters", which will be incorporated in the new foundation stage? It states that the framework

"takes as its focus the child and steers away from subjects, specific areas of experience and distinct curriculum headings."

It is entirely play-based and focused on what young children like to do.

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I am grateful to the Minister for her intervention. When she winds up, perhaps she could explain how that document ties in with what the Government have included in this Bill—the legislative framework within which everybody will operate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said earlier, we are very conscious of the number of occasions on which what the Government say they will do, and what they do in the Bill in question, are very different. Our interest is the future of children. When the Minister winds up, I hope that she will address the issue of children being allowed their childhood in which to develop at their own pace, and not according to a developmental framework set by Ministers in this Government.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

No. As I said, I hope that in Committee, the Government will work with us to ensure that it is parents and children themselves who set the pace of development, and not the DFES.

I want briefly to mention a final issue relating to this Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) will doubtless want to discuss when he winds up, given that he has done so much excellent work on it: children in the care of the state, or looked-after children, as they are known.

Nick Hurd (Conservative, Ruislip - Northwood)

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the success of this Government's strategy depends on the quality and motivation of those providing care, and does she share my concern about the Government's silence this afternoon on the investment required to upgrade skills in a sector where pay rates are low and, apparently, 40 per cent. of nursery assistants have no GCSEs?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I entirely agree with the extremely valid point that my hon. Friend makes. Quality is a key issue that is raised consistently by child care sector professionals. They are concerned that the drive for numbers could lead to a reduction in quality, rather than providing the quality necessary.

On the question of quality, I am afraid that, frankly, the state's record in caring for looked-after children is shameful. This Bill talks about the well-being of children. It gives specific duties to local authorities relating not only to child care provision, but to the overall concern of the well-being of children. It also makes specific reference to local authorities' social services responsibilities. Today, more than 60,000 children are in the care of the state—the highest number for 20 years—but to call these children "looked-after" is verging on an offence under the Trade Descriptions Act 1968. One in 10 children in care misses 25 days of school or more a year. Six in 10 children leave care without a single GCSE to their name and only 1 per cent. of children in care go on to university. The Government have set a target for 75 per cent. of children leaving care to achieve a single GCSE, but the Government have failed miserably to achieve even that target. In a sense, that the Government have failed to achieve that target is not what should lead us into action. What should force us to take action is the acceptance by the Government that a single GCSE, just one qualification, in any way equips those young and vulnerable people for a life in the real world.

Beverley Hughes (Labour, Stretford and Urmston)

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way a second time. Given the concern that she expresses for looked-after children, can she confirm that her party will support the Government's intention to make schools give priority to looked-after children in their admission arrangements?

Theresa May (Conservative, Maidenhead)

I suggest to the Minister that she look at the record, because my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham moved an amendment to that very effect to the Children Act 2004 and Ministers refused to accept it.

The outcomes that I have set out would not be accepted by anybody in this House for their own children. We must not accept them for those in our care. We will table amendments to address the issue of looked-after children, and I urge the Minister to look sympathetically at those amendments—more sympathetically than the Government have done at our attempts to help looked-after children in the past.

Early-years care is about more than simply enabling parents to work. It is about giving children the best start possible and supporting parents in their role as a child's primary educator. We look forward to trying to ensure that the Bill delivers what we all want for Britain's parents, but—most important—for those who are our future, our country's children.

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

It is with great pleasure that I rise to support this excellent Bill. It is good news for parents, it is good news for children and it is good news for the providers of care for children. It is also good news for employers, because they can be assured that their members of staff have high quality child care for their children while they are at work.

I speak today as the chair of the all-party childcare group, which has campaigned for exactly this initiative for many years. However, I fully acknowledge that the Government have not been sitting back for all those years and have invested in a huge increase in child care places of more than 500,000. The Government have also invested in part-time places for three and four-year-olds, new neighbourhood centres, and excellent Sure Start projects—I have one in my constituency.

I also welcome the changes to maternity pay and leave. We have had some discussion already of the increases in maternity pay, but one of the most welcome aspects of that legislation was the simplification of the rules. The previous rules were so complex that many women did not have the foggiest idea of their entitlement. Now they do. Fathers also now have rights to paid paternity leave and, importantly, so do adoptive parents. Families have adopted children who bring with them very real problems, but have had no entitlement to any leave to care for them during the initial settling-in. The Government have also met many of their targets to reduce child poverty. The Bill is an important step on the way to meeting more of those targets.

I also welcome the Bill as a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, which produced a report on child care for working parents. The Committee acknowledged that lack of child care stood in the way of many parents who wished to work. One of our recommendations mentioned the importance of flexibility in early-years places. It stated:

"Out of school care is crucial for working parents of school-age children. We recommend that further expansion of out of school care should be developed as a priority."

We all need to remember that we are talking not just about pre-school children but, importantly, about children who are at school—the point at which parents often face the most problems. Many working parents can gain access to nursery care, but many of the problems arise once their children start school. I certainly hope that, when local authorities assess the needs in their localities, they look especially at school-age children—something that is even more key when considering the needs of children with disability, to which I shall return later.

Another of the Work and Pensions Committee's recommendations was to re-examine the child care tax credit. We made various recommendations, including the possibility of creating a child care costs run-on system to provide more flexibility for parents who move in and out of the labour market. May I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families that she liaise with colleagues in the Inland Revenue to consider how the child care tax credit can help parents to an even greater extent?

Other key issues raised by the Select Committee related to the child care work force, and there are no easy answers. I am sure that every right hon. and hon. Member wants child care workers to have the highest possible qualifications. We all want them to provide appropriate care, given the important job that they do. However, as those in the child care work force become more qualified, the costs to the providers also often increase. There is a tension between producing a highly qualified work force and maintaining affordability.

Certainly, when the Select Committee considered those recommendations, we took evidence from other European countries which had developed an early-years pedagogy, thus recognising that a mixture of educational and social care inputs is necessary in early-years care. In some European countries, looking after pre-school children is a graduate profession. That is a recognition of its importance: getting things right in the early years provides the foundation for everything else that happens in a child's life. Although I acknowledge that child care must be affordable, which involves a tension, may I ask my right hon. Friend the Minister to address those training and qualifications issues and to look again at that Select Committee report?

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

It is very important that we use our terms precisely. The Bill clearly imposes a duty on local authorities to ensure that there is sufficient child care in their areas. Can the hon. Lady help me and the House by stating which parts of the Bill ensure the flexibility of that provision?

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

I was going to put that question to the Minister, and I hope that she will respond to both the hon. Gentleman and me at the end of the debate. In fact, I want to list four key aspects of the Bill: first, the emphasis on improving outcomes; secondly, the role and responsibilities of local authorities; thirdly, parental involvement; and, fourthly, the new quality and regulatory framework.

First, I want the Bill to improve outcomes, especially for two key groups: first, low-income families and, secondly, families with disabled children. The Bill rightly focuses on working parents because it is important that they have access to the best possible quality of child care.

We must not forget about workless parents. Some parents who stay at home with their children are not disadvantaged—it is their freely-made choice. However, other workless parents find themselves at home because they have mental health problems, for example. They may be a long way from engaging in the labour market and might not have the confidence to look for training and educational opportunities.

As the Minister takes the Bill forward, will she ensure that such disadvantaged workless families are taken into account? The Bill sets out local authorities' responsibilities as the providers of support for children through the child care services in general. I hope that the Minister will consider the overall role of local authorities and ensure that such workless parents are helped by, and benefit from, the increase in child care that will result from the Bill.

That exact group has been helped by the Sure Start project. I have talked to parents who lacked confidence before they got involved with Sure Start and were frightened to access the support provided by statutory agencies. All too often, those parents' experience of education was not happy, so seeking education and training in colleges was a difficult step for them. However, through Sure Start, their self-confidence increased. Talking to other parents and educational and health care professionals encouraged them to realise that they could cross the threshold of a further education college and develop their potential. That was the one single success of Sure Start for many of them. Sure Start has addressed the needs of parents as much as the needs of children, so I hope that the Minister will recognise that in her analysis of the scheme. I acknowledge that it will be more difficult to measure outcomes for such workless parents than for working parents. However, I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister will address that matter.

In the UK, there are 770,000 children with a disability or a limiting long-standing illness. The number of children with complex needs is growing all the time. Some 55 per cent. of disabled children's families live in poverty. The families of severely disabled children face three times the costs of other families, yet only 16 per cent. of disabled children's mothers work, compared with 66 per cent. of other mothers.

Last year, Contact a Family conducted a survey that found that a third of such parents were paying more than £5 an hour for child care and that 6 per cent. were paying more than £20 an hour. That was happening at a time when the average cost of a nursery place was £2.80 an hour, so the families of children with disabilities are facing real costs. If the Bill is genuinely to improve outcomes for disabled children, it must address the cost pressures on their families.

Interestingly, at the last meeting of the all-party childcare group, we heard heart-rending accounts from such parents about their difficulties in accessing child care. They experienced several problems, such as a lack of information. Many mainstream nurseries would not accept their children, whether that was because of access problems or for reasons of staff training. All too often, the parents found that staff lacked the confidence to deal with children with disabilities. I hope that my right hon. Friend pays special attention to training that gives confidence to staff who work in a variety of child care settings so that they are enabled to accept willingly a child into their care. Many parents tell me that even in nurseries that can be accessed by disabled children because they have adapted equipment, the attitude of the staff is disabling. It reflects the old adage that the child is not disabled; it is society that is disabled in its response to the child. We must not have that and need to consider the problem as we develop child care provision.

The many workless families with disabled children welcome child care not just because some of the parents want to go out to work—polls and analysis of parents' wishes show that many of them want to work—but because they want their children to socialise. It also allows them respite. We must take those considerations into account. When my right hon. Friend the Minister consults on the birth-to-five framework, I urge her to consider an explicit recognition of the needs of children with disability.

Transport has been raised with me. When families with children with disability send their child to a day care setting or a school, they have transport problems because it comes at a certain time and picks a child up at a certain time. If we want to use the extended school model to include families with disabled children, we have to consider transport arrangements. It will not be easy in some areas. For example, it will be harder to arrange taxis and other forms of transport to ferry disabled children back and forth in shire counties with large rural areas. Nevertheless, we should send out the message to disabled children that they too can access the earliest provision and the wrap-around care—the extended school hours—that is being developed.

We must also consider the needs of the whole family. Families with disabled children—some have more than one—often have other children as well. Local authorities should take other siblings into account when they think about the needs in their area. When they liaise with other statutory agencies, as the Bill requires them to do, will that include health authorities and primary care trusts? A key problem for families with children with disability is that their children are sick more often than other children. If parents choose to go to work, they are more likely to be phoned up by the nursery and told, "Your child is ill. Please come and take her home."

Again, there are no easy answers to that, but if we are to encourage parents of disabled children to access the work force, we need to consider how pre-school provision responds to sick children. In addition, many children with disability are incontinent well into their teens. Again, how will child care respond to that? I hope that my right hon. Friend ensures that there is liaison not just with the Department of Health, but with the Department for Work and Pensions, because such issues need to be taken up with it as well. Parents of profoundly disabled children want a clear message that they are included in the provisions of this excellent Bill. I call on her to say that.

Secondly, I want to refer to the role of the local authority and to some of the phrases in the Bill. What do phrases such as,

"so far as is reasonably practicable"

and "sufficient childcare" mean? Referring back to my point about children with disabilities, there are practical issues that local authorities will have to face. There will be issues for parents, especially those with profoundly handicapped children. Such parents will need clarification, as will local authorities about their role. I emphasise that, although the Bill refers specifically to the employment status of parents, I hope that we can look beyond that.

Many local authorities are as keen as parents to ensure high-quality child care, and that brings me to the issue of resources. I hear what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State says about the big increase in local authority resources over the next couple of years, especially to improve the number of child care places, but she will be aware of pressures on the budgets of many local authority child care services. Given the pressures on Blackpool council and the important work that it does in protecting children from harm, there are many calls on its budget.

Adam Afriyie (Conservative, Windsor)

I recently visited Bracknell Forest borough council educational services; we toured one or two of the schools. I agree with the hon. Lady: it seems that budgets are already under pressure. The authority is attempting to do an excellent job for children, both able-bodied and disabled. Will she urge the Minister to look at the funding requirements behind some of the new duties in the Bill to ensure that there is not undue pressure on the authorities when it comes to child care?

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

Everybody present is taking part in this debate because we all care about these children and their needs. There are issues about the availability of child care places in some areas, especially in relation to child protection. However, I can see the opportunities presented by the Bill and by other legislation. There will be opportunities through the development of children's trusts to integrate services much more coherently, which I hope will help the development of exactly that sort of cross-working. Sometimes, when social services departments intervene to protect children, the families involved are exactly those for whom the local authority wants to provide child care support. So, there needs to be working across local authority departments. I see the framework of children's trusts as an opportunity to do that as well as to involve other agencies, such as the health service, which are vital.

Will my right hon. Friend monitor what resources are available? I repeat that I recognise how much money is being put in, especially to develop children's centres. That is very welcome. I visited Kincraig primary school in Blackpool last Friday, where I talked to people who are very much looking forward to having a children's centre.

The third area that I identified was parental involvement. It will be vital to the success of the Bill to involve parents in the development of provision. In spite of the information that is available, parents still come to me because they do not know what services they can access. The requirement on local authorities to seek out parents to tell them what services are available is welcome, but it is equally important that those parents are part of the development of services. For example, parents of children with disabilities should be included in considering how services can be improved and developed. Parents from black and minority ethnic groups should be involved. We must ensure that services are culturally appropriate and that such parents do not feel excluded. Parents in Fleetwood were involved in the development of the Sure Start project from the outset. Before a suitable building was identified and opened, the local managers talked to them about the services that they wanted. As a result, parents feel ownership of those services—they welcome them and engage with the delivery of direct child care provision and all the other support that is offered to them.

Finally, I welcome the new quality and regulatory framework. My reading of clause 41 is that developmental requirements are on a par with learning requirements. However, that is a false dichotomy. The Bill creates a welcome single framework for early years education and child care instead of dealing with education on the one hand and social care and health development on the other. The two are inextricably linked—children learn through play and by observing others. Children are now examined for their developmental progress. Health visitors used to visit me to make sure that my children had reached developmental milestones as babies, so such provision is not new. As the framework is developed, however, it is important that parents understand it. Sadly, parents who read the headlines in the media may think that their six-month-old will be propped up, a book placed in front of them and a pen put in their hand. [Interruption.] I admit that I read to my children when they were little, because it is good practice to teach children from a young age to follow the reading movement from left to right so that when they learn to read they can follow sentences from left to right and identify pictures. I remember teaching my children colours and shapes and playing with them as part of the educational process. We should reassure parents that the foundation stage—the new framework—encourages them to do all that with their children. We should explain that if they place their child in a child care setting, whether with a child minder or in a nursery and so on, the trained staff will do the same.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

I am listening with great interest and respect to the hon. Lady, who clearly knows a great deal about the subject. The important point, surely, is the need for common sense and flexibility. My wife and I have two young sons—one will be two next month and the other will be three weeks old tomorrow. We are not worried about the age at which Oliver and Freddie will speak, because I did not speak until I was two and a half, but I have comprehensively made up for it in the subsequent 40 years.

Joan Humble (Labour, Blackpool North and Fleetwood)

I could not possibly comment on the latter point, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman on the former. Clearly, common sense is needed, as children develop at different rates. The Bill, in fact, says that that is the case. Within the context of children developing differently, may I emphasise the special needs of children with a disability? The outcomes for them in the framework must be linked to their own personal development.

To sum up, I warmly welcome the Bill. It is an excellent piece of legislation which will bring in much clearer standards and better joint working, not just between the statutory agencies and local authorities, but with a range of child care providers. We need to take into account what we are told by the Pre-School Learning Alliance and private nurseries. They want to be part of the provision. As the Bill is debated, there will be further discussion of the role of local authorities in liaising with existing child care providers, which have a key role. The test for the Bill will be whether it provides affordable and accessible child care services to everyone. The framework represents a move in the right direction, which I find reassuring. I look forward to further debate, but above all, I look forward to the Bill being implemented so that child care is improved and becomes more accessible, so that parents and children can benefit from it.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), whose constituency title is almost as complicated as mine. She has brought great experience and knowledge to the debate.

On behalf of the Liberal Democrats, I welcome the Bill. Given that much of our long-term policy work and commitment relating to early years provision is compatible with the 10-year child care strategy, it would be churlish not to express that general support. However, that does not mean that the Bill has our wholehearted support in its present form. There are a number of issues that I shall raise, and a great deal of detail will have to be addressed in Committee.

Like the Secretary of State, I believe it is worth reflecting on what has been achieved since 1997. I was a chair of education pre and post-1997, and I would be the first to acknowledge the extremely low base from which the Government started and the enormous progress that has been made from 1997 onwards. The creation of early years development and child care partnerships in local authorities, a free nursery education place for all three and four-year-olds whose parents want one, Sure Start, early excellence centres, neighbourhood nurseries and so on, and now children's centres are to be extended to an additional 300,000 pre-school children across 136 local authorities, plus the extended school programme. However, issues have inevitably arisen, and given the sums of money being invested, it is right that clear evaluation and monitoring take place.

I understand that in 2004–05, total public spending on child care was around £5 billion, and I agree with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) that we need value for money from such sums. The National Audit Office reported in 2004:

"From the launch of the measures announced in the National Childcare Strategy to spring 2003, 626,000 new childcare places for all ages were created in England. However, 301,000 places have closed".

For every two places created, one was closed. Sustainability has been an issue and will continue to be one, and needs to be monitored.

Earlier this year I recall the same confusion as the right hon. Member for Maidenhead surrounding the outcomes of Sure Start. I appreciate that evaluation is continuous at a local and national level, and given the wide local variations in schemes and the length of time that it would take nationally to get a true picture, it is important not to jump to hasty conclusions, but feedback is needed. I join the right hon. Lady in calling for some indication of when an evaluation will be published. I note that the national evaluation runs from 2001 to 2008, and is predicted to cost more than £20 million.

Issues have arisen relating to the quality of provision throughout the period that I referred to—for example, the "Panorama" programme which showed some worrying tendencies in terms of quality in some settings. Will the roll-out programme of children's centres, with the provision and level of non-ring-fenced resources to local authorities, mean a watering-down of the original concept and practice of Sure Start?

In 2004, according to the Social Market Foundation report on life chances and early years, 26 per cent. of families reported unmet demand for child care, with lone parents, parents in deprived areas and parents of children with special needs affected most severely. Those conclusions seem to underpin the need for the type of proposals that we are discussing, especially as I assume that 26 per cent. must be an understatement of what the demand would have been if parents had access to more information on availability, affordability and so on.

Further underpinning for the Bill's strategy comes from the EPPE—effective provision of pre-school education—project, published last year, which found that pre-school children with three years' quality pre-school provision who started in nursery at two or younger were up to a year ahead of their contemporaries in educational attainment when they started school. Notwithstanding that report, it is important to consider other evidence that might lead to different conclusions.

Nadine Dorries (Conservative, Mid Bedfordshire)

In a previous life, I visited a large number of Sure Start projects; for example, the Newcastle centre which is second to none. It cannot be beaten and gives an excellent service. However, other Sure Start projects barely qualify for their existence in terms of the provision they offer both parents and children. Does the hon. Lady agree that as we are so far away from evaluation of the Sure Start programmes we need to work towards quality standards, as projects throughout the country are so diverse?

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

There are strengths and weaknesses in diversity and in some ways much was learned by having different types of project. I shall talk later about quality assurance in the context of the Bill, which will be more relevant.

A number of US studies have concluded that maternal employment, particularly full-time, during the first year of a child's life is associated with poorer outcomes. On the other hand, UK evidence—in a study this year—found that only full-time, not part-time, work during the first 18 months of a child's life might have adverse consequences, but that they were minor. There were variations depending on income and education. The study also found that the quality of non-parental care is highly significant in determining outcomes. Other studies suggest that antisocial behaviour in children may stem from some of their early experiences of child care.

After a presentation at the all-party group on children, I became interested in work based on attachment theory. Sue Gerhardt, the author of "Why Love Matters", and others have studied the impact of early parenting on babies' brains and their future mental health. Given the importance of early emotional bonding, one might conclude that nursery care would be inferior to one-to-one care at home. However, I think that work shows the importance of supporting mothers, as Sure Start does, in emotional bonding with their children. It also shows why the current framework of birth-to-three programmes and their implementation matter.

More recently, there have been reports about what the families, children and child care study—the Penny Leach study—will conclude. Press reports suggested that young children looked after by their mothers until the age of three did significantly better in developmental tests than those cared for in nurseries or by nannies, child minders or relatives. However, Penny Leach and her team made the important statement that

"no recommendations about childcare are made by the research team and we certainly do not advocate that all children in the early years of life must be cared for full time by their mothers, nor indeed that one form of child care is always preferable to another. However, it is the view of the team that both parental choice of care and the quality of care are most important."

I echo those points. Parents should be able to make well-informed choices and I certainly welcome the proposals in the Bill about the expansion of local authority children's information services.

On the choice agenda, in an ideal world—to which we should have aspirations, such as those suggested by the Daycare Trust—there would be universal, affordable, quality child care and 12 months parental leave paid at a level that would provide all parents with the option of being able to afford to stay at home to care for their children during the first years of their life if they choose to do so; a home care allowance paid to parents who choose to stay at home to look after their child aged 12 to 24 months and much more. Those are the ideals and I hope that we have those aspirations. Next week, some progress will be made with the Work and Families Bill, but there is still a long way to go. Liberal Democrat policy on child care provision at the general election was to include a maternity income guarantee, which we managed to finance only for first-time mothers. It contained a mechanism by which the money paid over the six months came up to the minimum wage. It is important that we work towards that, because people do not really have a choice with statutory maternity pay of £102 per week. I know that there is a tremendous dilemma: whether to lengthen the period of maternity and paternity leave, or to leave it as it is and increase the amount of money paid.

When talking about child care and early years services, commentators tend to mention the experience of Sweden and Denmark. Increasingly, the recent progress of New Zealand in investing successfully in high-quality child care is also mentioned. The Nordic states have all achieved or are close to achieving two of the United Kingdom's main policy goals—near eradication of child poverty and universal early childhood services—and high levels of gender equality and women's empowerment.

On funding levels, Sweden and Denmark currently spend around 2 to 2.5 per cent. of gross domestic product on early education and care, excluding parental leave payments. Even with the massive investment that this Government have made, which I welcome, that still accounts for just 0.43 per cent. of GDP, so we have a long way to go. The Nordic systems, to which we might aspire, have developed a truly integrated early childhood service.

The proposals in the Bill are largely welcome, long overdue, and have the potential to offer many benefits to a lot of children and families. We must, however, keep the bigger vision in mind, despite the challenge inherent in trying to increase significantly the share of GDP spent on early years provision in future decades. Even with the current proposals, many Opposition Members are concerned about whether there will be sufficient funding to deliver the Bill's goals. Inevitably, as I comment on its specific proposals, I will have to question the cost- neutrality assumptions. I want the Bill to make a difference but, without sufficient funding, what true progress will be made in plugging some of the most important gaps?

The requirement to place a duty on local authorities to improve the well-being of young children and to reduce inequalities between young children in their area, referring to the five well-being outcomes specified in the Children Act 2004, must be warmly welcomed in principle. I hope that we will be able to address the outcomes on looked-after children within that structure, but what will that mean in practice and how will it work effectively? On what basis will targets be set? What definitions will be used? How will monitoring take place? That requirement, in common with many in the Bill, is left to future regulations. It would be helpful if such draft regulations were made available for the Committee stage.

A number of organisations have flagged up the concerns that were expressed by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead about partnership working between local authorities, private and voluntary providers and schools. I wonder whether the Minister will issue guidance in that respect, as there seem to be genuine concerns that existing providers may be pushed out of the market with an expansion of child care within a children's centre or on a school site. It is important that the best solution for a local area is pursued. I do not prejudge what the right or the wrong decision will be, but we need to be assured that, across the country, local authorities are consistently working in partnership.

As we have heard, the Bill requires local authorities to secure sufficient child care to meet the needs of working parents and of those in education or training. Achieving sufficiency is defined as, first, securing child care provision that is eligible for the child care element of the working tax credit and, secondly, providing child care that is suitable for disabled children. In other words, in the Bill the duty to secure child care is closely linked to parents working.

As other hon. Members have said, however, there will be parents who decide to stay at home with their children during the early years and they may still need to access some child care. For example, a parent may want to work part-time—I refer to the evidence that I cited earlier—or to access part-time education. I would be interested to know whether the Minister for Children and Families is considering such situations and how parents can access particular sessions of child care. There is a tension in that respect, because it is quite hard for providers to provide sessions that do not run right through the week, but such flexibility can contribute a great deal to family life.

Having a break from child-caring responsibilities can improve parents' mental health, as we have heard. [Laughter.] The mother may be suffering from post-natal depression, which I do not think is funny. There will be other situations in which parents cannot work. I appreciate that social services may give support under the Children Act 1989, but given the constraints on social services, will that funding be sufficient? About 1.2 million children live in workless families and, like other hon. Members, I am not clear on where funding will come from when people really need support.

I am particularly concerned about disabled children and I am worried that their families will lose out. Much is promised, but will it be delivered? Children with disabilities and their families face particular challenges, and those parents often have a need for child care beyond the need to work. For example, they may need child care to be able to spend time with their other children or to attend appointments about health and education provision for their children.

The National Autistic Society's research shows that accessing critical services and entitlements during the early years is a key stressor impacting on the family life of a child with an autistic spectrum disorder. Securing provision of suitable child care should enhance the well-being of families in itself, regardless of work. For that reason, child care is a cost-effective intervention: providing services for children with disabilities such as ASD helps to prevent families from reaching crisis point, thus preventing reliance on costly residential placements.

Child care provision for children with disabilities is woefully inadequate in many areas. I am very pleased that the Government are seeking to address that issue in the Bill. However, in addition to the points that I have already made, the quality and affordability of the provision required for disabled children should be considered. Will the provision of care for children with disabilities outside the main school day be included? I am also thinking of holidays and respite care.

A mother of a severely disabled child came to my surgery the other week. Across Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole, a survey is being conducted on the provision of respite care at weekends or for whole weeks to allow the rest of the family to go away. A local authority employee told my constituent, "There is only so much money available. If we extend provision at a certain special needs school, that may well mean cuts in the overall respite budget." That was obviously very alarming for my constituent, but I have to point out that there are councils, which are starting from a relatively low base and are rather poorly funded, that may be giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

The concept of sufficiency generally should include other difficult-to-reach groups, such as ethnic minorities, and the issue of quality as well as quantity. However, as soon as we start talking about quality issues, we come to the tensions between quality and affordability. I do not know the answer to that; I suppose that the Minister has to supply the answers. First with regard to quality, I place it firmly on the record that I do not think that it is mad or ridiculous to propose an early years foundation stage. The principle of a coherent framework that provides quality and consistency across settings is in the interests of children and practitioners. Indeed, I have heard several practitioners say that they would like the present foundation stage to be extended to seven-year-olds, as it is so firmly based on skills rather than on prescribed content.

The details of the new proposals and their implementation are important. It is vital that children in their early years are given the freedom to learn through enjoyment, exploration and play, and allowed to investigate new skills and concepts for themselves. It is right that the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who did not learn to speak until he was two and a half, should have been able to develop at his own pace. We need to strike a balance between teacher-orientated and child-initiated activities that are appropriate to the individual child.

I agree with the Conservatives about clause 41. The use of the word "taught" in the clause gives me concern, when it describes

"the matters, skills and processes which are required to be taught to young children of different abilities and maturities".

That sets alarm bells ringing, and we must address that wording. There is also some concern that any proposal to extend the national literacy and numeracy frameworks down to the age of three will result in formalised learning at too young an age. It is vital that the chosen model should not be too prescriptive.

The principles underlying the early years foundation stage will be very important, as were those underlying its predecessors. There are clearly differences between the principles underlying "Birth to Three Matters" and those underlying the foundation stage. For example, the former include the principle that

"children learn best by doing rather than being told",

while the latter includes the principle that,

"to be effective, an early years curriculum should be carefully structured".

It will be important to arrive at a joint set of principles across this wide developmental range, so that we get this right. Both sets of principles cover the importance of working with parents. I know that preliminary consultation is being carried out on the new proposals, and I would like to emphasise that getting the underlying principles right will form the fundamental starting point.

In a second point on quality, research shows that who provides the early years education is vital in determining its quality and impact. The EPPE project found that, in socially diverse settings, the quality of practitioners' knowledge and understanding of the curriculum and pedagogy was vital. Some years ago, the Liberal Democrats proposed a new qualification—that of the qualified early years teacher. It would be a graduate qualification covering the three strands of early provision: health, education and social services. The long-awaited children's work force strategy was published earlier this year, and the 10-year strategy set welcome long-term goals for increasing the number of workers trained to degree level and for degree-qualified early years staff to lead all full-time day care settings.

Given the clear evidence that positive child development depends on services being of high quality, and that a well qualified work force is the biggest determinant of quality, I am worried that only half of Britain's 100,000 nursery workers have a child care qualification. The average gross salary of a child care worker is £7,800 a year, compared with £22,662 for a graduate trained nursery or primary school teacher. The £125 million a year transformation fund announced in the 10-year strategy to support investment by local authorities in high quality, affordable, flexible and sustainable child care provision is inadequate for a radical review of the sector. Although it shows an unprecedented commitment to investing in the work force, it equates to approximately £500 per member of the work force, which is not enough to raise salaries, invest in training or increase staff numbers. Changes need to take place over time, but it is my duty to point this out today. I acknowledge that commitments are being made, but there is still such a lot to do.

We need investment in continuous professional development. We really do need to develop a professional work force who are esteemed by the public, and in whom the public have great confidence. The tension between quality and affordability could not be greater. The Government face major challenges, given the investment that is required and the knock-on effects on the cost of child care.

The third strand of quality is registration and inspection. We welcome the Government's commitment to retaining regulation for those who care for any children under the age of eight, but I agree with some of the organisations that have expressed concern about the regulation of crèches. Let me give another constituency example. At a major facility in Poole town centre, one of my constituents had a very unfortunate experience involving a three-year-old who was not being cared for properly. Ofsted was called in, and found that regulations were not being observed. I understand from a reply given by the Minister at the time that Ofsted wanted the facility to change and to take its recommendations on board, but it had the option of offering less than two hours' provision.

Here is another of those famous tensions. The Government do not want to overregulate—none of us want to do that—but my constituent called on me to try to secure more regulations. What I consider important is for parents to be given information about crèches. Even a notice on the wall stating that a crèche is not subject to regulation would be helpful. Anyone would surely assume that a major facility in a town centre was regulated, and that all the staff had been checked. Could that information be added to the bank of information already available to parents?

I also share the concerns raised about the different registers, which may prove complex in practice and difficult for parents to understand. The Bill states that the Secretary of State "may by order provide" exemptions from the requirement to register in certain circumstances. That will require a great deal of clarification in Committee.

I have heard reports of concern about the quality and consistency of inspections of early-years facilities. I hope that as we move into a new phase, we will pay attention to the qualifications required of inspectors—the training that is required, and the processes involved in inspections. Will early-years provision at independent schools be subject to the same processes? I am pleased to learn that the same framework will apply.

We must not underestimate the importance of self-evaluation to the process of improving quality, and to the formulation of what we hope will be rare inspections. I am sure that many Members have, like me, presented quality assurance certificates in various pre-school settings. I am always proud to do that, and am always amazed that the leaders of playgroups and nurseries have time to do all the work that is needed to earn the certificates. Such processes are very important.

There seems to be some uncertainty—although perhaps not on the Minister's part—about the future of Investors in Children. I know that there are many different forms of quality assurance—I think that there are more than 70—but there should be a recognised kite mark which parents can understand. That was mentioned in the Government's consultation, but we do not seem to have been told what will replace Investors in Children if its funding is cut. When an inspection takes place in a school that covers early years, is an early years specialist always part of the inspection team? That would fit in with this agenda.

I want to conclude by commenting on the new duties on and delivery by local authorities, and particularly on what is meant by "reasonably practicable", on which several Members have commented.

We are told that the local authority must assess the market and parental needs. What are the milestones, however, to show what is reasonably practicable and what local authorities must do? There are bound to be councils in which it is very difficult to ensure that child care is available to fit every circumstance. Variations between the provision of councils such as Islington and Poole mean that their starting points will be very different. Will some families be disappointed? Is a parental guarantee being offered or simply an expectation? What is practicable in relation to children with disabilities and severe disabilities?

It will be difficult to go out and find low-income and ethnic minority families and make them aware of and interested in all the choices. In 2002, only 3 per cent. of parents had contact with their local children's information service—that figure is from a Department for Education and Skills study. I applaud the aim of developing children's information services further, but again, councils will start from different bases, and outreach work will be required.

Can the aspirations be delivered within existing funding? If the funding is based on the child care element of tax credits, we still have the dilemma about workless families. In that regard, we must think of what is best for the child. There is a continual dilemma relating to supply-side and demand-side funding, and the advantages and disadvantages on either side, and it would be interesting to hear about the pilot projects being carried out in London.

In relation to the part of my constituency other than Poole, what is reasonable and practicable in very rural areas? It is important not to set up local authorities to fail, and equally important not to enable them to get away with doing the minimum. We need to know what "reasonably practicable" means.

We have had one interesting representation on listening to children, about which we all agree. It related to listening to very young children, along with parents and providers. That work has produced some interesting results, which we might explore in Committee.

Child-centred as the Bill is, family support is so important. For families with difficulties, universal family support is needed. It is obviously very costly to provide multi-disciplinary support, work, housing, child care, literacy and training, but there are great benefits in the longer term. If the Government are serious about preventive action rather than cure, they need to examine family support much more.

How many more parents will access child care as a result of this Bill? Without additional money, will a single child get more care, or will a single parent who is struggling with affordability no longer have to struggle? Will the Bill be a false dawn? I sincerely hope not. We will work with the Government in Committee to address our great concerns about certain aspects of the Bill, although we applaud its principles.

Ann Coffey (Labour, Stockport)

I welcome the Bill. The Government's continuing investment in child care and the working tax credit is and has been crucial in overcoming barriers to work and tackling inequalities. I welcome particularly the investment in Sure Start. In the poorer part of my constituency, the Sure Start project has been an outstanding success in supporting parents, raising standards of care and achieving significant improvements in language skills among the most disadvantaged children.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) about the role of Sure Start in building confidence among parents. The community's commitment to the project was evident when the Minister for Children and Families opened the Sure Start building in Bridgehall recently. Huge additional value has been secured from social regeneration projects in the area, and I hope that any evaluation of the success of Sure Start projects will take that into account—they are not simply deliverers of child care.

I look forward to the new children's centres building on the success of Sure Start in my constituency. Through a range of services, including a subsidised playgroup, it has provided support to working and non-working parents. As 4Children and other organisations have pointed out, the most disadvantaged children are in workless households and it is those children who would most benefit from high quality child care from birth, and their parents would benefit also from support. That is the basis of Sure Start provision.

Such parents are victims of a cycle of low aspiration and poor education, handed down from generation to generation, which the Government have addressed through a number of measures. I believe that it is essential to continue to deal with inequalities from birth and that children from disadvantaged and workless families should continue to get the support offered through Sure Start, including access to good quality child care.

Clause 6 is clear on the duty being placed on local authorities to ensure sufficient child care for parents who require it in order to take up, remain in or undertake work-related education or training. That is very important.

Clause 7 provides a duty to secure early years provision of a prescribed description, free of charge, for such periods as may be prescribed for each young child who has attained such age as may be prescribed but is under compulsory school age. The precise nature of this measure will be known only when it is set out in the secondary legislation that is to follow, but I hope it will be explored in Committee. At present, local authorities have a responsibility under section 17 of the 1989 Act to promote the welfare of children within their area who are in need and to promote the upbringing of such children by their families. I hope that the Government intend to ensure that, under clause 7, this duty will extend to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

With the setting up of the new children's directorates and the Government's commitment to dealing with inequalities and improved outcomes for all children, it would certainly make sense for local authorities to look at areas of deprivation and to provide services to families that help overcome disadvantage, including good quality child care to workless households. By subsidising playgroups, the children's fund has certainly helped to show the value of such provision.

New child care places in my constituency have been provided by the private, voluntary and public sectors. Recent legislative changes have meant that schools can be direct providers of after-school child care; indeed, it has been in their interests to do so. The spare capacity in primary schools has meant that parents are now taking into account a range of factors in making their choice of schools. Where numbers are continuing to decline, that is likely to be the case for a number of years. It also ensures that after-school clubs are more sustainable if they are registered with Ofsted and families can access the child care component of the working tax credit.

Where schools have nursery places, private providers—there are some excellent ones in my constituency—have been providing the wrap-round child care. Some after-school activities are run on a voluntary basis. It is very much a mixture of provision, and the funds have come from various places such as the neighbourhood nursery initiative, the children's fund and Sure Start grants.

The issue of sustainability is a real one. In one area of my constituency, a school started an after-school club, as a result of which parents who had been using a private provider ceased to do so. The private provision for two or three schools became unsustainable and the private provider withdrew the service. Some weeks later, the after-school club also folded. The net result is that there is no after-school care in the area at all. It is therefore welcome that local authorities will play a strategic role in ensuring sufficient child care, but I think that the word "sustainable" should be added to their duties—as far as is possible in a vast and changing market that depends greatly on work in the area and the demand of parents.

I am pleased that local authorities will discharge their duties in co-operation with parents and all the providers in the area, but I make a plea that that should include parents from areas where it is often not easy to make that sort of contribution. If necessary, some training should be made available to parents to enable them to take part in the consultation.

Many jobs in my constituency are provided by the retail sector, which, as the House knows, often works to shift patterns. Most child care in my constituency, however, is provided on an eight-to-six basis. The antisocial hours involved in shift work can raise the cost of child care, particularly for single parent families. There are also likely to be more informal care arrangements, the cost of which cannot be recovered through the working tax credit because the providers are not registered.

I was pleased to see that parents can now pay for care in their own home and, if parents are properly consulted on the availability of child care in their area, Government initiatives such as this, which benefit shift workers and parents of disabled children, are more likely to be promoted by the local authority. At the moment, the needs of shift workers are often invisible and it is not enough to provide sufficient child care: it must be of the sort needed by parents.

When I discussed the Bill with the carers and parents group of the Sure Start Adswood and Bridgehall project, they wanted to bring to the Minister's attention the issue of affordability. They said that that was a problem for people who worked less than full time, but more than 16 hours a week because of the operation of the benefits system. I am sure that they will welcome the Secretary of State's remarks, in which she made clear her commitment to ensuring the affordability of child care for low income families. I might add that this particular group of carers and parents took part in the consultation exercise, which again demonstrates the success of Sure Start. Some years ago, they would not have been able and would not have had the confidence to do so. That has changed because of the existence of Sure Start in the area, which should not be underestimated.

I welcome the Bill, which demonstrates the Government's continuing commitment to investing in families and children and tackling inequalities in our society. I am sure that it will make a huge difference to my constituency.

Paul Goodman (Conservative, Wycombe)

I want to begin by briefly considering the context in which the Bill is set. We all know as constituency MPs who deal regularly with parents that almost nothing is as important to them as the care of their children. In my experience, child care is as important to my constituents—whether they are parents or not—as the headline issues fought over at general elections such as hospitals, schools and crime. That is the wider context of the Bill.

Once we acknowledge the phenomenal child care pressures on parents—whether they be single parents, couples living with a permanent partner or whatever—in the modern age in which many people work 24/7, two obvious points follow. If the House wonders why I should mention them, it is because obvious points are sometimes overlooked. The first is that the first providers of child care are, of course, parents—and that applies whether there is one parent in the household or two. I say that because according to clause 18(4), which deals with the "Meaning of childcare", child care

"does not include care provided for a child by . . . a parent or step-parent of the child . . . a person with parental responsibility for the child"

or

"a relative of the child".

That might at first seem strange, but I want at this point—perhaps curiously—to come to the Minister's defence. She would say by way of response that the Bill does not want to load obligations—so to speak—meant for others on to parents, step-parents and so on. None the less, it is striking that we are dealing with a Bill that formally excludes parents from child care.

The second perhaps obvious point was made by the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), my former colleague on the Select Committee. She is still there—

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

So is Fleetwood.

Paul Goodman (Conservative, Wycombe)

Indeed; and my hon. Friend—obviously—is still here. I no longer have the honour to serve on that Committee, I am afraid.

As the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood said, children do not just learn formally; they also learn informally through play and discovery, and through finding out for themselves about the variety of the world around them. A sensible Government will want to put at the cornerstone of their child care strategy the principle of choice. The Government's 10-year strategy is indeed headlined, "Choice for Parents", and I, for one, say amen to that. So one way of thinking about the Bill is to ask how it measures up against the choice principle. We know that this principle has sometimes been honoured more in the breach than the observance. The former Secretary of State for Trade and Industry admitted the following in 2003:

"If I look back over the last six years I do think that we have given the impression that we think all mothers should be out to work, preferably full time as soon as their children are a few months old. We have got to move to a position where as a society and as a Government we recognise and we value the unpaid work that people do within their families."

She made it clear that she was referring not just to mums, but to grandparents, informal carers and so on. We know that Ministers themselves feel that they have not always lived up to the choice principle that they proclaim.

Even before we consider the Bill's content, Ministers will want to ensure that the choice principle within it matches the choice principle in the tax and benefits system: to ensure that it is simple, clear and easy to access. I will not go into that system in detail, because to do so would be out of order, but I want to make two brief related points. First, it is an oddity to have two payments—child benefit and the child tax credit—that basically achieve the same end. Ministers have yet to resolve that difficulty.

Secondly, I want to pick up on the point that the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood made in referring to the excellent Select Committee report on child care for working parents, produced in the last Parliament. She did not quote in full what it said about the child care tax credit. Before she gets up to correct me, I had better point out that it did acknowledge that

"the CCTC is an important component of the Government's anti-poverty and childcare strategies, and valuable to many parents."

However, it also said the following, which I may have sneaked in while she was not looking:

"The CCTC is . . . not consistent with"

a particular expert's view—my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) quoted an expert from the Institute of Education—

"of childcare provision as a public good which is the right of all children, whether their parents work or not. Nor is it consistent with a childcare vision based on the choices made by parents and families themselves, since it is only available to some of them."

So the Government have a bit of tidying up to do in that respect.

One aspect of the Bill about which I have heard some complaints from playgroups and nurseries in my constituency is the fact that the regulatory burden is high. I suspect that other hon. Members have received similar complaints about the planning rules, the way in which VAT works, the business rate regime and even the number of funding streams, which are not always easy to negotiate for private and voluntary providers. Late in the last Parliament, the Daycare Trust identified no fewer than 28 different funding streams through which nurseries, playgroups and other providers of child care are funded. Not surprisingly, many of them found funding difficult to access and the trust wanted some simplification.

The Bill contains new regulatory procedures, although one of the reasons we welcome it is the simplification of regulation that it should provide. However, on many occasions, Ministers introduce Bills with regulatory measures that promise simplification, but it does not always happen. Another way in which the choice principle could work would be to recognise the role of local authorities, which is present in the Bill. Ministers are right to make local authorities the lead bodies in implementing the measures in the Bill.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

My hon. Friend mentions regulation. The Government say that the Bill will simplify regulation, but we need to be reassured on that point. To that end, does my hon. Friend agree that it would be a useful earnest of the Government's good intentions if the Minister, when she winds up, committed them to publish the secondary legislation in draft form before Report, so that we would be in a position to judge how the Government's promise matches the reality?

Paul Goodman (Conservative, Wycombe)

I was concerned that my hon. Friend was about to ask me a form of question that he has been known to deploy about whether I was familiar with this clause or that clause in the Bill, which I might have overlooked. I am glad that he asked a question to which I can simply say, "Yes." I certainly hope that the Minister will provide that assurance.

The Secretary of State's brief remarks about the role of local authorities will not quite do. She said that the Bill would place no new duties or obligations on local authorities, but she also said that a mass of money had already been provided in various forms to ensure that they could meet their duties. Those two statements do not add up. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke)—and, by a more roundabout route, the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood—pressed the Government to ensure that any duties placed on local authorities are adequately funded. That will be a pressing issue with those of us whose local authorities already have very stretched budgets and look to the years ahead with some trepidation in terms of the support they receive from the Government. It would be most unfair if local authorities, in trying to meet any obligations placed on them by the Bill, became liable for capping.

It is important that the value of childhood is recognised in the Bill. Childhood is not simply a means to the utilitarian end of achieving academic or vocational qualifications. Childhood is part of the ordinary process of growing up and maturing as a human being. That is where much of the controversy about the Bill has lain. Attention has been drawn to an analysis of the Bill headed "Childcare Bill: Orwell in the nursery?". Miriam Stoppard claimed that the Government are headed in the wrong direction, because the Bill would introduce children to the prospect of failure at an appallingly early age and was another incursion into family life by the nanny state. The Secretary of State and other Labour Members have rubbished those fears this afternoon, but—like my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who cited the relevant clauses earlier—I think that clause 41(2) is ambiguous. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole was right to concentrate on the ambiguous nature of the word "taught" in clause 41(2)(b). Clause 41(2)(a) refers to "early learning goals" and clause 41(2)(c) to "assessment arrangements". The Government will need to clarify in Committee how far they seek to push the educational process down the age range.

It could be suggested that the Bill is pulling in two different directions. Local authorities will be obliged to provide a greater quantity of child care. The question that follows is whether the quality will match the quantity. High quality child care is not always the same as affordable child care, and the question is how the two elements are balanced. Hon. Members have been right to argue that sometimes we need to take the hit on quality to ensure that child care is affordable, but worries have been expressed about what that will mean for children with disabilities, children from minority ethnic groups and children who are at a relative disadvantage to the rest of the community. That is also a worrying aspect of the Bill and I hope that the Minister will be able to address those points when she responds to the debate tonight and that they will be further considered in Committee.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), although I do not know whether he is my namesake or I am his. I am happy to welcome the Bill. Since 1997, the Government have made tremendous progress on early-years education and child care provision. We are all impatient for faster change, but we should remember what happened when Gladstone introduced the Education Act 1870. It took another 32 years before most children were in state-funded elementary schools. This new extension of the welfare state is just as significant as that one was, and marks a real social transformation.

We have done well since 1997. We have an extra 500,000 places and most three and four-year-olds have taken up the guaranteed nursery places available. Even so, we need to double the number of child care places available. In particular, I welcome clause 1, which will give a new general duty to local authorities to

"improve the well-being of young children in their area, and . . . reduce inequalities between young children in their area".

I do not know whether that is the first time that the connection between education and poverty has been made explicit, but it is a truth that we all intuitively accept. Children who live in poverty do less well at school, and poverty of experience is an aspect of poverty. By the age of three, the children of professional families already have vocabularies that are greater than those of adults in the poorest families. We have made strides in that respect as well in the past eight years. The percentage of children who start school with cognitive delay has fallen from 40 to 26 per cent.

Rather than repeat more statistics, I want to tell a story that a play worker described to me. She was involved in a play scheme during a half-term holiday. In the middle of the afternoon, it was time for a snack. She gave an eight-year-old an apple to eat. After the child had eaten the apple, she asked the child, "What did you think of that?" and the child said, "Well, it was very nice, but I didn't like the hard bit in the middle." The child had never eaten an apple before. It is remarkable that we can expect a child to go to school to learn that A is for apple without knowing what an apple is, and every child is entitled to that sort of straightforward experience.

The Sure Start scheme has had a very positive impact in my constituency. We have a Sure Start programme at St. Helen Auckland with new facilities, and another on the Woodhouse Close estate, which is the most deprived part of my constituency. There are a lot of villages in Teesdale, and the rural section has mobile provision, with a fantastic bus that goes round to ensure that families who are isolated in villages also have access to services.

The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) mentioned the evidence from the EPPE study. I know that it sounds like a sister of Prudence, but it stands for "effective provision of pre-school education". The study found that child care is most beneficial to those who are disadvantaged, but only if it is of high quality. That finding was further reinforced by a study by Professor Melhuish for the National Audit Office. He found that, in the first three years, high-quality child care benefited disadvantaged children and that most provision gave those who were over three educational and social benefits. So improving access to child care under the Bill, alongside the improvements in maternity pay and leave from 14 to 40 weeks, will give every child the best start.

Clauses 39 and 44 will deliver the high-quality child care that is needed for children who live with disadvantage. Those clauses set out the early years foundation stage that the early years providers must meet. They also set out the process of regulation and inspection, which is important to ensure that the standards are met. Opposition Members have considered clause 41, but I draw their attention to clause 41(3), which describes the learning and development issues as follows:

"personal, social and emotional development . . . communication, language and literacy . . . problem solving, reasoning and numeracy . . . knowledge and understanding of the world . . . physical development, and . . . creative development."

It is not hard to argue that that broad range of experiences is what children up to the age of five and beyond need.

Before my election to the House, I ran the National Association of Toy and Leisure Libraries, which has a 1,000 projects across the country, and I chaired the Children's Play Council. We need to take seriously the truth that small children learn through play. I am disappointed that those hon. Members who were vocal earlier this afternoon about the importance of play, rather than formal learning, are not here now, but I invite them to join the all-party parliamentary group on play which my colleagues and I want to set up.

Ensuring that children have opportunity to play in their early years and after school and that lots of policies take account of children's need to play is essential. That has been recognised already by the Government as one of the key factors in the 10-year child care strategy, which says that activities should be

"underpinned by a play based approach to promoting children's development and learning, building on children's experiences to help them extend their skills and develop their understanding and confidence."

There may be doubts about the learning and development issues set out, but I ask Opposition Members how they can criticise Sure Start for not producing results, as they put it, or outcomes, if they are not prepared to agree any measure against which we can test how children perform. We would like the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) to respond to that point later this evening.

One of the positive and significant things that has happened in the past eight years is that child care policy has been devolved to the other Administrations. So children in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are learning in different frameworks and under different curricula. That gives us an opportunity to check how effective the English curriculum is compared with the others. For example, it will be interesting to find out whether things are better in Wales, which has a play policy.

I remind hon. Members of what the policy framework is in Northern Ireland, because it is particularly attractive and we may want to consider it when assessing the English experience. In Northern Ireland, the early-years foundation stage is intended to

"build self-esteem, develop the ability to play, generate an interest in stories, develop number understanding and foster curiosity."

That is a slightly different perspective on similar themes, but some hon. Members may think it a little more child friendly.

Although I am pleased about this extension of the welfare state—I hope that it will change society for the better—the key thing is that children are not human becomings; they are human beings. They are living now, and it is their experience now that matters. That is why the quality of provision matters as well.

I have just three concerns about the Bill, and I hope that they will be addressed in Committee. First, why, for children over eight years, is there only provision for voluntary registration? Only risk-based inspections will be carried out, and unless someone makes a complaint, no three-yearly inspection of provision for those who are over the age of eight will take place. Although some eight and nine-year-olds are quite assertive and good at describing their needs, I am reluctant to go down the path of thinking that they should be responsible for the quality of their child care. We need to look at that a little more.

I am unclear—perhaps the Minister can clarify this—how the Bill interrelates with the proposals on extended schools. In the move to extended schools, we need to remember that all children need time for play and that the 8 am to 6 pm provision in schools must not become purely related to homework clubs. There must be a wide range of activities, games and play time, as well as time to chill out and relax, because everyone needs that every day.

My third concern, which has been raised by other hon. Members, relates to the qualifications that we will require. I know that the Minister intends to introduce regulations, but it would be helpful if we could see an early draft of them in Committee. The problem has been one of long standing in this country. When my mother came to England from Denmark in 1951, she was given her naturalisation certificate because she had one of the unusual skills that the economy needed—she was a nursery nurse. Here we are, 54 years down the track, and we are still short of people with such skills.

I am not trying to suggest that solving the problem will be an easy task for the Minister. I know that the number of people who need to be recruited is in the same ball park as the numbers in the red army. It will be tremendously difficult to address the problem, but one way in which we could get a regulatory structure with a lighter touch would be by having more well qualified people working in the sector. I welcome the Bill wholeheartedly and hope that those issues can be addressed in Committee.

Rob Wilson (Conservative, Reading East)

I do not wish to detain the House for too long because we can all agree about an awful lot in the Bill. I agree with the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) that there has been a big improvement in early years child care over the past decade or so.

Most of us would agree that bringing up children is one of the most rewarding things that people can do. However, it is not always easy to juggle the many competing demands of work and home life. The Bill stems from a desire to try to help parents who often find themselves in great difficulty when juggling such responsibilities. When it comes to child care, there are sadly no easy answers or solutions for the simple reason that each family's circumstances are different. That makes it difficult for any Government to get things completely right. I acknowledge that efforts are being made and that some progress has been made over the past eight years, but I am not convinced that the Bill strikes an effective balance between the competing tensions.

It is interesting that the 1998 general household survey found that the most popular category of child care for a mother working full or part time was that given by relatives. Having read all the various briefings on the Bill, I am left wondering how effectively it supports that option for parents. Study after study has shown that many women want to remain at home to look after their children, rather than using child minders, crèches or nurseries. Many women feel extremely guilty about returning to work only months after giving birth.

It is also interesting to consider the matter from the perspective of what is best for the child. The effective provision of pre-school education project, which followed 3,000 children between 1997 and 2004, found that large amounts of group care before the age of three were associated with higher levels of antisocial behaviour. Such behaviour also increased if a child had received a lot of care from a child minder. However, the study found that if relatives—usually grandmothers—provided a substantial amount of care, children displayed less antisocial behaviour and were more co-operative.

It does not take a rocket scientist to work out what is going on. Young children are much better off in the care of their mother, father or members of their close family in the early years from birth to the age of three. In fact, the Government have agreed that if mothers work full-time during the early stages of their children's lives, it can have a negative impact. Families, and especially mothers, should not feel pressurised—either financially, or emotionally—to put their children's care outside their families during those important early years. I would argue that even between the ages of three and five, it is extremely beneficial if, in addition to receiving high-quality pre-school education, children have their mother or a close family member with them for part of the day.

The Government, to their credit, recognised in the 1998 document "Meeting the Childcare Challenge" that many parents preferred grandparents or relatives to look after children. However, rather than thinking about how to support that desire of many families, the Government dismissed it as being

"against the direction of social change"—

the Secretary of State reinforced that belief in her opening remarks today. It was felt that only Government intervention could "fill the gaps".

That is really what troubles me about the thrust of child care policy. It seems to be more prescriptive than necessary, and choice is talked about, rather than delivered. There appears to be a feeling that the Government know best, or at least better than families themselves. If the Government truly wished to offer choice, would they not be coming forward today with policies that offered the widest possible choice? One gets the slight feeling that the Government still believe that mothers who want to stay at home are a "bit of a problem".

I am talking not about a bit more time for maternity leave, but about how the Government can help to support a mother through a period of years in which she brings up two or three children. The evidence shows us what is best for the child and wider society, so offering that would give families a real choice, not just a choice from a menu of state-sponsored initiatives. If the Government are really serious about one of their central principles—

"the importance of ensuring every child has the best possible start to life"—

they must engage in such wider thinking and reform.

In areas in which Government intervention was needed, there has been some success. For example, Sure Start has made a contribution in some of the country's most deprived areas. Several areas have benefited significantly, so I give credit where credit is due. However, it is also true that the scheme has acted as competition with voluntary and private nurseries and play groups in those areas and has thus caused some to close.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Conservative Members have said repeatedly that they are in favour of choice, but against competition. I do not understand how they can be in favour of choice if they say that there should be no competition among providers.

Rob Wilson (Conservative, Reading East)

If the hon. Lady will allow me to continue for few moments, I will address that very point.

It makes no sense to have a situation in which the state is in competition with existing providers. The state can fill gaps, by all means—it probably should do that—but it should not provide something that amounts to unfair competition. If the state sets the rules and funds projects out of general taxation, private and voluntary groups cannot compete on a level playing field.

For example, local authorities will have a duty under the Bill to ensure that there is sufficient, and free, early-years provision in their areas. The desire is clearly that local authorities will co-operate with existing providers to ensure that that happens. Indeed, I was pleased to see a commitment from the Department for Education and Skills to encourage local authorities to work closely with private and voluntary providers and to complete full audits of local child care needs.

Some organisations want the Government to go further. The Minister will be aware that the National Day Nurseries Association, which is the largest body representing private, voluntary and maintained day nurseries, has said that both local authorities and child care providers would benefit from a clear and uniform national framework for partnership working. The association wants measurable targets to be set for local authorities on the involvement of the private and voluntary sectors. It says:

"this would ensure that duplication of provision and the full involvement of all sectors could be enforced."

The association's research suggests that local authorities are not adopting a partnership approach, which is why it wants such firm guidance on the requirement for partnership working. It is clearly concerned about the way in which local authorities will take the strategic lead.

There are clearly dangers in effectively outsourcing child care provision to local authorities. For example, the CBI has warned that local councils must not be allowed to construct a "state monopoly" of child care provision. I think that the CBI is also worried about local authorities' in-built advantages. For example, authorities are able to reclaim VAT when they set up day care centres, but private providers cannot do that. We must take such worries extremely seriously, and I think that that addresses the point about why there is not a level playing field for public and private sector providers of child care.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that since 1997, under the Sure Start programme, the Government have put far more money into voluntary sector providers, which give exactly the kind of care for which he calls, than did the last Tory Government?

Rob Wilson (Conservative, Reading East)

I am aware of the investment, as I recognised earlier.

Perhaps the Minister could use this opportunity to reassure the NDNA and the CBI. It is important that their concerns are addressed fully.

I also have other concerns, such as those on the early years foundation stage. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) said, there is a danger in introducing formal education at such an early age. Why do we need to be so prescriptive? It is inappropriate to start formal learning at such a young age. Children start school much earlier in the UK than they do in other European others, yet their results tend to be much better than ours. Ministers might want to consider that again.

As with so much legislation that is pushed through on the shoulders of local government, I am worried that the measures will not be fully funded by central Government out of existing tax revenues. The increased bureaucracy must not be allowed to increase local council tax in my constituency. The reaction of the Local Government Association is enlightening. It believes that

"without substantial extra government investment, it is hard to see how this Bill will increase the amount of affordable childcare for low income families and those with disabled children."

The LGA wants extra investment from central Government. It states:

"If Government can't find this money, the cost will be borne either by parents or council tax payers."

As we have some of the highest child care costs in Europe and have had huge council tax increases since 1997, neither of those is an attractive option.

Those problems should not and cannot be skirted around. They must be addressed if the child care plans are to prove effective and not to be just more empty promises. Overall, I give the Bill a cautious welcome. As I said, there is commendable intent behind it, but many questions need to be answered before it can become effective. I look forward to the Minister's response in the hope that she deals with some of my concerns.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

It is a privilege to speak in the debate, following my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills and my hon. Friends the Members for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman).

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

And my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson).

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

I was going to come on to the hon. Member for Reading, East.

It is partly a privilege to speak because this is the first child care Bill to be considered by the House, as I think the Secretary of State confirmed. It arises from the 10-year plan published a year ago at the time of the pre-Budget report of 2004. Like any legislation, it is worth asking a simple question at the outset: why is it necessary? My central case is that it is necessary because it explicitly sets out the state's responsibility for child care provision in statute for the first time. It strikes the right balance between the responsibilities of the Government, who need to plan provision at local level, and the role of voluntary and private sector providers, which other hon. Members mentioned.

I want to argue that the Bill is, first, necessary on the grounds of equality; secondly, justified by considerations of efficiency—in particular, an analysis of the child care market and its imperfections; thirdly, necessary given the progress made since 1997 and the lessons that we have learned about child care and child care policy; and, fourthly, right in its choice of local authorities as the body responsible for planning provision and for being accountable to parents.

The first argument for the Bill is on grounds of equality—the need for more equal life chances for children and equal access to the labour market for women, who tend to be primary carers. Labour Members believe that although parents have the primary responsibility for children, it is, as Beveridge said 60 years ago,

"in the national interest to help parents discharge that responsibility . . . "

Today, we know from research that life chances are shaped not at four or five, as we used to think, but much earlier in life, with the differences apparent at 22 months. We know that the right kind of intervention—Sure Start and other policy measures—can make a difference, which is why it is right that clause 1 sets out a new duty on local authorities not just to improve children's well-being but to reduce inequalities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland said.

The case for the Bill is also based on the dramatic transformation of the role of women in the labour market. Fifty years ago, just one third of women worked; today, more than two thirds do. In the context of that change, the role for public policy is to give parents and women in particular real choice, so that they can both be at work but also have time off after the birth of a child, so that they can work part-time, and so that some can choose to work full-time and have the child care available when they need it.

The hon. Member for Reading, East said in his interesting remarks that the Government were forcing women out to work. Perhaps I can be so bold as to suggest a bit of homework. He should look at the 10-year strategy on child care. Chart B7 on page 77 makes it clear what has happened to the position of mothers with children under five. In 1990, less than 50 per cent. of them were in work. By 2001—in just 10 years—nearly 60 per cent. were in work. The Labour Government did not force them to do that; it is mothers who want to do that.

A large amount of bunkum—I hope that that is not unparliamentary language—has been talked about how the Government favour forcing women out to work and do nothing for mothers who want to stay at home. The pre-Budget report of 2004 allocated £600 million by 2007–08, around 40 per cent. of which went, I think, on extending paid maternity leave for mothers from six to nine months. That is nearly half the amount of money. Some of it went on the transformation fund and some on nursery education. We are helping to give mothers who want to go out to work a choice, but far from being prejudiced simply in favour of them, we are, within limited resources, helping to extend choices for mothers who want to stay at home.

My second argument is about efficiency. For me, that is the nub of the debate—the essential reason for the Bill. It turns on whether we believe that the market on its own—Conservative Members will be interested to hear this because they are great believers in the market—can deliver the choices that we want for parents and women. In a debate in the House, Lord Lamont of Lerwick, then the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Thames and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, summed up what was then the prevailing view of the Conservative party. He said:

"if married women want to work and if employers want to employ them, the market will work and employers will pay the necessary wage to encourage married women to return to work."—[Official Report, 11 July 1989; Vol. 156, c. 892.]

I welcome the Bill because the initial clauses in particular represent a profound break with that position. I believe that to be right and I want to explain why.

On its own, the market has not delivered and will not deliver. There are three reasons for that. First, there are major gains to our society of child care and education for the under-fives which are simply not priced in the market. Economists, and I count myself as sort of an economist, would call those positive externalities. It makes the case for making child care more affordable, as the Bill will do, than it would be if it were simply left to the market.

For parents, in particular mothers, we know the long-term costs of being out of the labour market for a number of years. Each year of interruption to hourly employment has been estimated to reduce hourly earnings by 4 per cent. The danger for our society is that if mothers are forced to stay out of the labour market, we lose their skills and talents. In the real world, the costs of child care are so high that an individual would have too low a financial gain from work in the short term without the Government playing a role. That is part of the case, which, I am sorry to say, the previous Government never accepted, for a general subsidy for lower and middle-income families—currently expressed through the child care tax credit—for the costs of child care so that the choice of whether to go out to work is real, especially for mothers with young children.

Externalities apply not just to parents but to children. Every additional month of quality pre-school care from the age of two has been shown to improve cognitive performance at the start of school. The country has an interest in promoting integrated high-quality care and education, because that is in the long-term interests of our nation.

There is a second market failure. Perfect markets rely on the presence of perfect information, and in child care there are significant imbalances of information. That is addressed by clauses 12 and 13. It is hard for parents truly to know the quality of their kids' child care settings. In addition, research suggests that parents facing tight cost constraints may not be fully aware of the long-term benefits of quality—hence the role for Government to ensure that the work force are properly trained and to subsidise quality. That will lead to better long-term outcomes and give parents the confidence to use child care if they wish to do so.

The third problem with simply leaving child care to the market concerns availability. In most markets, there are low costs involved in switching from one provider to another, but clearly that is not so in child care, given the disruption faced by children and parents. I regret to say that turnover of child care providers is high. In ideal theory, there are many consumers of and providers of child care, but in many areas of our country that is not the case, so small changes in demand have very disruptive effects. There are real costs and problems in relation to sustainability, hence the need for a role for Government to try to ensure greater sustainability and continuity in the child care market. That is what clause 6, in particular, seeks to do. So the case for the Bill on the grounds of equality and efficiency is clear.

Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Caernarfon)

The hon. Gentleman posits three causes: market failure, a lack of perfect information, and availability. Does he also accept that there is fundamental structural difficulty, particularly in areas such as mine, because of the imbalance between rural and urban areas? There is unavailability not only because of the features that he mentioned but because the state fails as well as the market.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

I take that point. I recognise that sustainability and availability are a particular problem in rural areas, which makes the case for giving a proper role to local authorities, as the Bill does.

The third aspect of my case for the Bill is the stage that we have reached in the development of the national child care strategy. Other speakers have rightly drawn attention to the progress since 1997: free nursery education for all three and four-year-olds; more than 500 Sure Start children centres, including those in my constituency in Askern, Bentley and Moorends, which are transforming people's lives; and a child care tax credit, which, as I reminded the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), reaches 337,000 families at a cost of £900 million, compared with just 47,000 who benefited from family credit. Now we need to move from a much improved patchwork of provision to a durable framework to meet child care needs.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

As always, I am listening to the hon. Gentleman's speech with great interest. He posits the scenario of market failure. I cannot resist the conclusion that, in so doing, he is hearing voices against which he is arguing, but those voices are not ours on the Conservative Benches. Put simply, does he accept that, in addition to market failure—I do not disagree with him about that—there is such a thing as Government failure and that that is more likely to manifest itself in circumstances of monopoly?

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

I take the point that Governments can fail as well as markets, but I slightly take issue with the hon. Gentleman's intervention—I should say, in our mutual admiration society, that I have the highest respect for him, too—because I am afraid that what we hear from Opposition Members is not simply a desire for competition and for the private and voluntary sector not to be put out of business, but a gut problem about the state extending its role in this area. They have not really come to terms with that. I should probably exclude the hon. Gentleman from that category, because he tends to have much more enlightened views on these matters than other of his hon. Friends.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the thrust of the Bill is to make the local authority the commissioner? I am not sure that I entirely see the state reaching out. Areas such as mine are totally dependent on a partnership, because there just would not be enough child care without harnessing the best of the private and voluntary sector. I suspect that the situation is patchy across the country. One cannot make a single statement about it.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. I completely agree that we are talking about a new role for the state. The state is the commissioner. Of course there needs to be a mixed economy of provision—I said that at the outset—involving the private sector and the voluntary sector, but I urge her to recognise that there is a big change in the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland pointed out, it has never been set out in statute that a local authority, or indeed any agency of Government, has a responsibility for ensuring sufficient child care. That is a significant step forward and change. Indeed, I come to clause 6, the relevant clause. This is an important crossing of the rubicon in terms of the state's responsibility for child care provision, from which it will be difficult, I hope, for any Government to resile.

The problem is that parents have never until now had an accountable body to which they can turn. Local democratically elected representatives are the right people to carry out that function. Local authorities have access to information on the ground and are best placed to audit and plan provision. They are also best placed to ensure coherence and efficiency of provision in respect of schools.

There are two key questions about how the duty of sufficiency will work and to whom it will apply. I have made it clear that I believe in a mixed economy of provision, and this answers a point that the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) asked another hon. Member earlier because clause 8 makes it clear that we will maintain a mixed economy of provision: child minders, nurseries and other provision, provided by the voluntary sector and the private sector, as well as the state.

The hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd), who is not in his place, raised the concern that the Daycare Trust and others have about the position of non-working parents, and about specifying that duty only for the parents on the child care element of the working tax credit and that that might be too modest. With the kindest respect to Opposition Members, they cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that the problem with the Bill is that it places enormous upward pressure on council tax bills and then say that it does not go far enough in extending provision.

This is a sensible and modest first step. It covers parents going a long way up the income scale. Working hand in hand with the increased limits and the increased proportion of costs payable under the child care tax credit, it will make an important difference. We will have time to assess the duty as it beds down, after it comes into force in April 2008.

I am pleased also that, significantly, the Bill extends the duty to those undertaking education and training preparatory to work. It would be helpful if the Minister clarified how that will work. I am conscious, from talking to people in my constituency, that funding in this area tends to be quite patchy, and I know that it is not covered by the child care tax credit.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

Uncharacteristically, the hon. Gentleman has identified a logical lacuna in his own argument, and in the process was a little unfair on my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd). I put it to the hon. Gentleman that it is perfectly possible for us, without inconsistency, to raise the issue of the cost on the one hand, and possible implications for council tax bills, and to identify on the other hand our concern that parents who are not working will not get the full benefit that they deserve. The issue is who pays for that.

Ed Miliband (Labour, Doncaster North)

I suppose that there is a difference of opinion. I have not had the experience of being in opposition as a Member of Parliament—[Interruption]—and I do not plan to experience that for some years hence, but I would have thought that coherence was an important aim for a member of the Opposition. The problem that the hon. Gentleman highlights about the position of non-working parents is answered in part by Sure Start, which makes services available to them. If he is saying that full-time day care should be provided for non-working parents, that may be a step further down the road. I do not think that there are resources available at this point to do that. That was the only point that I was making. I hope that it was not a lacuna and that if it was, he will explain precisely why afterwards.

I want to highlight the issue of quality, to which I referred earlier. It is a great irony that teachers of the over-fives require all kinds of qualifications—there is cross-party consensus on that—while care and education for the under-fives, who are more fragile and vulnerable, and for whom supervision is arguably even more important, have not been seen as a profession in the same way. I therefore welcome clause 13 and its new duty to provide information, advice and training to providers. That is part of the greater professionalisation of the work force envisaged in the 10-year plan which is essential to give parents the confidence of high quality, and which will work in combination with Ofsted inspection and the new transformation fund to improve quality.

The Bill has many other positive aspects but, as I have made clear, the central and important step forward is the fact that, 60 years after Beveridge, we are making the provision of child care into a proper and legitimate duty of Government. That is more than a commitment to resources. In the 19th century, primary education for all was accepted as a responsibility of Government; in the 20th century, secondary education for all was accepted as the responsibility of Government. The Bill recognises that at the start of the 21st century we are embarking—I emphasise the word "embarking"—on a journey down a road on which pre-school provision for all will become a clear responsibility of Government. Labour Members can easily accept that, because we think that Government, working alongside the private and voluntary sector, can help to expand freedom and will not necessarily stifle individuals.

"The welfare state contributes to people's freedom and enterprise. It is people who are secure, that dare to try their wings."

That was said by Göran Persson, the Prime Minister of Sweden. Nowhere is it more true than in child care. That is the ethos at the heart of the Bill. I am glad that the Opposition support the Bill, but the warning to them is that if they will the ends—better child care—they had better support the means, and abandon their previous commitment to reducing public expenditure as a proportion of national income. As both leadership candidates remain committed to a smaller state we can already see contradictions emerging in their position, which we will expose over the coming months. In the meantime, I commend the Bill to the House.

Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Caernarfon)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband), who gave a finely argued speech that will probably do no harm at all to his widely advertised prospects. He and the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) both posited that social Darwinism had produced a certain type of education in the 19th century and another type in the 20th. At the dawn of the 21st century, everything is to the good and it all represents progress. The hon. Lady cited the Education Act 1870. The majority of the Welsh working class were literate long before then, having been taught at Griffith Jones Llanddowror circulating schools and Robert Jones Rhoslan circulating schools in the early 19th century. It is pertinent to our debate that those schools were provided without state funding and without any help from the private sector. The state was indifferent, and the private sector did not think that there was any money to be made from teaching the ignorant Welsh how to read.

I welcome the Bill on behalf of Plaid Cymru, and I am glad that part 2 addresses issues particular to Wales. I should like mainly to address the question of rurality, which I have already raised in interventions, as well as issues relating to the Welsh language and the inequalities in child care that arise from those factors. They are largely matters for the Welsh Assembly, but they are relevant to our debate, because part 2 makes particular reference to Wales. The provision of proper child care is important, especially in rural Wales and deep rural Wales, but my argument is pertinent to child care in deep rural parts of England, and other hon. Members may wish to speak about such issues.

Rural parts of Wales have particularly low rates of economic activity and a greater incidence of seasonal and part-time work, as well as casualised work. In some areas, a higher percentage of the work force is female, and the population receives lower wages. All those factors are relevant to consideration of the effect of child care on economic activity, on wages and prosperity, because parents with care responsibilities are much more likely to qualify for child care tax credits. The criteria for such credits are the same in both rural and urban areas, but they are more difficult to meet in rural areas, where there is a lower provision of good child care and where employer-provided child care is almost non- existent, especially in my constituency. There is therefore greater dependence on informal child care, mainly provided by relatives.

The same regulations apply to the registration of child minders in both rural and other areas, although the circumstances are different as many relatives who provide care do not wish to be registered. Those matters are problematic in rural areas, where there is a corrosive conjunction of low wages, job insecurity, long travel distances and low child care provision, which leads to inequalities within those areas and to gross inequalities between them and urban areas. Child care in the medium of Welsh is difficult to find in both rural and urban areas. At the weekend, I was in Cardiff for the game—I was glad to see Wales beat Australia—and I had a chat with a new mother who was trying to access Welsh-medium child care for her nine-week-old son in central urban Cardiff. She had been told, however, that it was now too late—she should have put his name down before the first scan. She thought that it would be easier to get him into Eton than to access good-quality registered Welsh language child care in the middle of Cardiff. Again, that may be a matter for the Welsh Assembly.

Clauses 22 to 30 are specific to Wales. Many of those clauses replicate the English provisions, but their detailed application is left to the Welsh Assembly. There are practical reasons for doing so, as education, economic development, health and social services are devolved matters. As a member of Plaid Cymru, I cannot understand why the Welsh Assembly or even the Welsh Assembly Government cannot deal with the entire matter, as it is largely non-controversial. However, that may become the case if the Government's proposals on the Welsh Assembly Government's powers are passed. There are, however, important differences between the provisions for England and those for Wales, including the provision for child care in the medium of Welsh.

For too long, the provision of child care has been considered part of family or education policy, or as a women's issue, rather than as a central feature of economic policy. It is such a feature in Wales because of the lower rate of economic activity and the difficulty of accessing child care to enable families to gain a decent income. The fact that it has not been considered so goes some way towards explaining the poor state of provision, which has been marginalised. Historically, low priority has been given to child care, and it compares badly with provision in other countries. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland mentioned Scandinavia, and various Scandinavian countries immediately spring to mind.

On the detail of part 2, clause 22, as I mentioned, makes particular reference to child care involving the use of Welsh. Clause 23 refers to less restrictive circumstances for local authorities to provide that child care themselves, so that there might be direct provision where it is very scarce. That is highly relevant, given the arguments that I have already made. Clause 26 gives the power to require local authorities to assess child care provision, but that power will lie with the Assembly, as will the terms of the required assessments. I find all those features entirely acceptable.

The provision of child care in rural areas and through the medium of Welsh are the main themes of my remarks. I refer to some research that I commissioned in 2004, entitled "Gofal o Fath Gwahanol"—"A Different Kind of Care", which is an examination of child care in deep rural areas. If any hon. Members are interested, I have copies available. The research showed some unsurprising facts: that self-employment was very high in rural areas—50 per cent. higher in rural areas of Wales than in the rest of Wales, and that 83 per cent. of people in deep rural areas have some knowledge of the Welsh language, compared with 28 per cent. in Wales as a whole. Here we have particular features of requirements for child care, which are specific to deep rural areas.

The research also showed that lack of child care was a problem for 40 per cent. of women in rural areas, and that was particularly the case in respect of Welsh-medium child care. In those areas, part-time work was more prevalent, more people had second jobs, sub-minimum wage work was twice as prevalent, there was more dependence on cars, distances to work and to child care were greater, and there was a lower take-up of benefits. All these features conspire to make it more difficult for people with child care responsibilities—predominantly women, of course—to access child care in order to find the work that the Government are so keen for them to take up. In many ways these difficulties are structural in nature. It is impossible to shorten the distances between far-flung communities, but one can take action to ameliorate the effects of that.

I mentioned the lower take-up of benefits. The research shows that that is partly because of a cultural perception surrounding poverty—it is not acceptable to own up to being poor—and also because of a culture of sturdy independence from the state, which is laudable. That was found not only in my research, but in the Rowntree research published on 2000.

The research that I commissioned was largely participant observation—talking to children and to parents from a local school and a local community from Tremadog and Blaenau Ffestiniog. As I said earlier, there were tremendous problems. There was very little formal provision paid for by the private sector and very little provision from the public sector. But the pertinent point is that families did not see informal and formal care as being proxies of each other. They put them in different categories. They did not think, "Now we will use informal care, and if we have the money and the opportunity, we will use formal care," because they saw them as different things. They considered informal care by families as vastly preferable. They preferred the quality of informal care, a finding that also emerged from research by the Daycare Trust.

People preferred to receive care from family members whom they knew, trusted and loved. The care was provided because of family ties and the love of grandparents for their grandchildren. The grandparents were not looking for registration or for a wage. They were not looking for that sort of payment, but they were looking for an acknowledgement of the cost involved. There is some cost, though it is not great.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

The hon. Gentleman mentioned grandparents providing care for people in their own family. Earlier in the debate, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) said that one way to reduce regulation would be to increase the number of highly qualified people. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that because of their life experience, grandparents might be very well qualified to provide child care not just within the family, but well beyond it?

Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru, Caernarfon)

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely pertinent point. It is interesting that the grandparents did not see themselves in any way as professional carers and were not looking for registration, which would allow the care-giving parents to apply for tax credits. It was not that sort of system. The parents and grandparents did not see the informal care provided by grandparents and formal care provided by the paid-for system or by the state as proxies of each other. We are looking at different animals.

There should be some recognition of such informal child care. It might not be a matter of recognising grandparents as child-minders providing commercial child care in their homes and being assessed by inspectors, but there is a strong case for some sort of intermediate category offering some recognition. That is what parents want. When we asked parents what they thought about making payments to close family members for care, they said they would like to give some recognition. They did not want to employ their parents or their parents-in-law. They would make payments in kind, and they saw that there was a certain cost involved in such payments. We are, of course, talking about low-wage families. That is one of the reasons why I believe there should be an intermediate category between informal and formal care.

The Secretary of State referred to the fact that tax credits are not cash limited. If they are applied for and people succeed, they are paid. Other budgets have a cash limit. Some of the assessments that we made of the potential benefits for constituencies are quite startling. In my constituency, Caernarfon, the tax credits claimed were £600,000 per year in 2004. Should informal care be recognised, that sum would go up to £750,000. That is the order of change involved—about 25 per cent. However, should all care provided by informal carers be recognised at the highest rate, the sum would be £5.6 million. That is a huge amount of value that parents and grandparents put into the economic system, and it is unrecognised. I am not arguing for £5.6 million or anything close to it, but the work that grandparents put in should be recognised in some way.

Echoing the hon. Member for Doncaster, North, there is an argument in terms of efficiency. Nobody has made the point that we depend a great deal on older women to do the caring. As the economy changes and there is more pressure on older women who have not yet retired to return to work, the number of women available to undertake informal not-paid-for caring will inevitable decrease, so that source of care is a diminishing resource.

I shall deal briefly with provision through the medium of Welsh, which as I recognised earlier, is a matter more for the Welsh Assembly. Provision through the medium of Welsh is in some cases non-existent, and in some cases under great pressure. In general, it is grossly inadequate and leads to the very inequality that the Bill is intended to combat.

There is an absolute need for that provision. As an adult I speak English fairly well, although I speak Welsh much better, but many children under three and four do not speak English. In my constituency, about 75 per cent. of the population speak Welsh, and about 90 per cent. of under-fives speak Welsh and no English in their family, yet the overwhelming majority of the small amount of child care is not available through the medium of Welsh. Clearly something is going seriously wrong, so I hope that my remarks are noted in the Welsh Assembly and that suitable action is taken as soon as possible. There is a crisis and there could be great dangers for small children being cared for in that situation.

Some of the issues that I raised are for the Welsh Assembly Government, while some are for the Treasury, in respect of legislation and the payment of child minders, especially in rural areas where neither paid-for nor voluntary provision is available. In large measure, we should be guided by what parents, grandparents and, most obviously, children, want. From the research that I commissioned, it was clear that children love being with their grandparents. I shall not trouble the House with lengthy quotations, but one nine-year-old made some charming and engaging remarks. He said:

"We played outside our grandmother's house in the morning. Then we went for chips and then we went to see 'Scooby-Doo 2'."

He said all that in Welsh—apart from "Scooby Doo-2".

We should be guided by what parents, grandparents and children want, and we should guard against overdependence on a market model that has not succeeded in many deep rural areas. Through the Welsh Assembly Government, we should be looking for much-extended provision in Wales.

Madeleine Moon (Labour, Bridgend)

As a Welsh Member, it is with pleasure that I carry on the Welsh theme from the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams). Listening to various speakers in the debate—the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), my hon. Friends the Members for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), for Stockport (Ann Coffey), for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) and for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband), the hon. Members for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) and for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson), followed by two speakers from Wales—it is clear that across the country we are united, which is fairly unique in the House, in seeing the Bill as critically important for children. It is their futures, their care and their experience that we are debating. We are deciding how they are to be valued, protected, nurtured and supported. Those issues must be central to all our child care provision.

We are united in agreeing that the Bill is important to parents. There has been agreement that the chance to take up education and training is important for parents. There has been a recognition that child care gives many parents with mental health problems or depression the opportunity to take a break—a point made by the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. Child care is important for people who need to raise the economic status of their family and, by having two working parents, to tackle the poverty and deprivation that they face.

The hon. Member for Reading, East noted the importance of the Bill to employers. We must recognise that it is impossible for a company to fulfil its potential for growth and quality unless its work force are able to pursue extended education and training and can give a commitment to work, without anxiety about the safety and security of their children.

This week, I read an amazing statement in The Observer magazine. Billy Killington, a 61-year-old porter at Covent Garden said:

"You would have to be mad to be a racist nowadays. What on earth would be the point? It would be like banging your head against a brick wall constantly."

Racism has not disappeared, but Billy was recognising that the world has moved a long way from when racist attitudes were the accepted norm. Similarly, employers are waking up to the fact that addressing child care and work-life balance issues is critical to keeping a loyal, skilled and experienced work force. They are beginning to see that child care responsibilities are no longer a barrier to employing women. I thus look forward to hearing a future Billy voicing a belief that had become equally rooted in our society—that we would have to be mad not to see flexible, quality child care as critical to the future of children, marriages, employers and Governments. We have started some of that debate today and we should feel intensely proud of that.

The Bill is important for government at every level. In Britain, we have the highest employment rate ever and the longest period of uninterrupted growth in modern history. Growth and stability are enjoyed by the majority, not just a few get-rich-quick kids in the City. If we are to build a modern Britain, prepared to face the economic challenges from China, India and America, we need to invest in a society where every citizen matters and where work pays and people are equipped with the skills and support they need to engage fully with our challenging and changing world. That means providing the quality child care that Members have talked about many times today: meeting the needs of parents, children, employers and Government.

Like other Members, I particularly welcome aspects of the Bill. I welcome the responsibilities placed on local authorities, especially to provide child care for working parents on low incomes; to promote the provision of child care generally; to target child care for parents with disabled children; and to inform, advise and assist parents and prospective parents. The lady to whom the hon. Member for Caernarfon referred would thus be able to book her child into the appropriate Welsh language play scheme the minute she found out the result of her pregnancy test.

Thanks to the Government's management of the economy, people in my Bridgend constituency are generally more affluent, more socially and geographically mobile and better educated. Probably only one other Member has read The Western Mail today. A front-page article tells us that the Welsh economy is approaching a boom period, with indicators of continued expansion. That bodes well for my constituency, despite unemployment of a mere 3.8 per cent., with 1,500 people registered unemployed, 800 of whom are women. We have 18,000 women working: 83 per cent. are working between 10 and 44 hours a week, and 44 per cent. work between 35 and 44 hours. There are 6,900 families receiving child and working tax credits, which has helped many of them out of poverty and into work. I have to admit, however, that the wrap-round, sustainable and affordable child care that is essential if we are to compete for jobs in the promised boom period and face the future as a modern, progressive area is not as widely available as I want.

We have been helped by such things as the excellent Sure Start programme at North Cornelly, which has made a huge difference to local families. Cornelly children's centre is a bilingual, integrated centre, which opened last April, although the formal opening will not take place until next year. The head teacher told me that it had made a huge difference to the community. From the baby club for newborn infants, mother and toddler groups, playgroups and the two nursery classes, children have the opportunity for stimulation and education from birth until they join mainstream schooling. Classes also operate to encourage parenting skills and to equip parents for a return to the workplace. The centre will officially open in March 2006, but parents and staff are all agreed that that new resource is already making an impact in an area of social and economic need. Like people in the rest of my constituency, that head teacher will welcome the roll out of Sure Start centres in other communities.

Three common denominators face all parents when they are looking for child care, the first of which is finding it. We have acknowledged today that we must expand provision. That is why the Bill has been introduced—to encourage the growth and development of child care. The second denominator is funding, which, again, has been covered extensively in the debate. There is also the fact that, once one's children are of a certain age, ensuring that the care is acceptable to them can become complex. The parent may want to keep their child in child care, under the supervision and support that they like, but that may not be necessarily what the child wants.

In Bridgend, we have the Genesis project, which promises a new beginning for parents and children. The project will enable 700 parents to overcome barriers in learning new skills or returning to work. It also aims to create 900 additional child care places in two and a half years.

For the older children whom I mentioned earlier, we have 17 before and after school clubs, which support parents who work the traditional 9 to 5 hours. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) talked about the importance of providing child care that support those who work shift patterns. I appreciate the importance of that. Covering Kenfig Hill, Pyle and North Cornelly in my constituency, the wonderful KPCY project, standing for Kenfig Pyle community youth, helps those parents who face the nightmare of finding child care and support outside the 9 to 5 provision. The scheme was recently named as the national lottery's most inspirational project working with young people in the UK. It provides a secure and safe environment—the sort of environment parents dream of.

There are 700 registered members at KPCY, who call in at different times depending on their interests and needs. The majority of those in the project are eight to 16-year-olds, including those at risk, or who have become disaffected and hard to engage. Since its opening, there has been a 60 per cent. cut in crime. However, that project is due to close in January because, despite the hard work of parents and staff at KPCY, it cannot raise the funds to continue the core funding that will be critical once the project loses its national lottery funding.

We had a meeting at which the local police constable talked to politicians and community leaders about how critical it was that KPCY did not close. She spoke movingly of Helena Porobich, the local lady who set the project up after her child died as a result of a drugs overdose.

The police constable went in one day to see how things were going at the project. She saw Helena go over to a child who had come in, opened his bag, got his school books out and was starting to look at his homework. Helena said, "Have you eaten yet?" The child replied, "No, mum's in work." Helena said, "Well, you're not doing that homework with an empty belly." She went into the kitchen and cooked that child a meal.

That is the sort of flexibility that the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) talked about. That is the sort of flexibility that I have in my constituency and that I am about to lose. I am particularly pleased about the power for local authorities to assist and to make arrangements for the provision of child care. My local authority currently puts no core funding into KPCY. I hope that the Bill will encourage that sort of funding to be made available.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

I agree that that is an example of precisely the sort of flexibility that we want to see and need to have guaranteed. Taking the argument one stage further, does the hon. Lady accept that another example of such flexibility would be ensuring that there is provision, either for the whole day or just a segment of it, for an unemployed parent who wants to maximise her skills by retraining and going on an adult education course, or for someone who, dare I say it, is just going off for a couple of hours for a work interview?

Madeleine Moon (Labour, Bridgend)

The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that that is exactly what the Genesis project provides. It is expanding across Wales. Let us hope that, for once, we will send the project over the border—over the Dyke, as we say in Wales—to England.

I would like to look at the issue of children with disabilities. Much of what I planned to say has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood. Like me, she is aware that families with children with disabilities are one of society's most disadvantaged groups: 55 per cent. live in poverty or are in serious debt. Parents and children suffer loneliness and social isolation.

As hon. Members have said, there are 770,000 disabled children in the UK, and there are 46,500 in Wales. Every day, 75 children are born or diagnosed with disabilities. Having come from a background of working in social care, I am conscious of the fact that, when working with children with disabilities, social services departments and education departments perhaps focused a lot on the disability. What they forgot perhaps was the child's need for fun, for friendship and for normality.

The majority of disabled children live at home, yet because of a lack of child care, their mothers are seven times less likely to have paid work, although disabled children cost three times as much to raise. Confined to their homes, disabled children are missing out on opportunities for learning, having fun and making friends.

Again, Bridgend is leading the way. I invite hon. Members to come to see our Y Bont project. I promise them that they will be amazed. It is a model of best practice in the provision of care and support for children from the age of six weeks to pre-school. Y Bont provides support and information to parents and carers and high quality training to staff and to local playgroups catering for children with disabilities, with which it shares its toy library facilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) spoke of the provision of toy library facilities.

Y Bont is a registered charity and survives thanks to rigorous fundraising and local commitment to its invaluable service. We know the quality that we have. We are desperate to keep it, but it provides for only 12 children. It needs to be expanded and I hope that the Bill will allow for that.

We have said that local authorities must be flexible in their provision of child care. Child care must be looked at holistically, so that there is provision for different working patterns and provision that ensures that, for example, if a disabled child needs to attend school both before and after normal school hours, the transport arrangements and child support arrangements are in place. Many children with disabilities are restricted in the activities that they can engage in after school because the paid, one-to-one support that they have during the school day is removed the minute the school ends. They cannot then engage in the social activities that are critical to their having the normality that their school peers enjoy.

Transport arrangements must be not only flexible but secure. When tendering for school transport, my local authority circulated to more than 100 taxi companies the names, addresses and pick-up times of disabled children in my constituency of Bridgend and in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies), placing numerous children at risk. When making child care arrangements, local authorities must be mindful of the need to ensure that all aspects of the care have in-built flexibility and meet the most rigorous child protection standards. My local authority certainly failed to do that. If we are to build in flexibility, there must be guidance for local authorities on tendering for school transport.

Access to information can be a barrier to good-quality child care, and we know that access to information is most difficult for those living in poverty. In areas where children are most likely to live in poverty, parents are least likely to have paid work and, consequently, have the least assistance to get out of poverty.

Bridgend county borough council's children information service is excellent. I invite hon. Members to look at its website. It has a specific area for child care and children's issues. There are leaflets and other very good attempts to engage with communities. I attended two excellent fun days held in the recreation centre. Families were bussed in from outlying areas to spend time meeting and talking to representatives of the whole gamut of child care provision that is available throughout the county borough. We need such practices to be rolled out throughout the country.

One of the most important aspects of which we must be aware today is the great expectations that are being raised by the Bill. As politicians, we must be aware of the danger of a gap developing between the promises that we make and the expectations that people will have outside the House. The commitments laid out in legislation must meet the day-to-day reality faced by parents and children. Parents' expectations following the Bill will be high. We cannot fail them or their children.

The clear message of the Bill to parents, children, employers and all levels of government must be that children are vulnerable unique individuals for whom only the best will be good enough. The Bill places a responsibility on local authorities to spearhead the growth in the availability of child care.

I shall conclude with a reference to the Genesis project, which I mentioned earlier, and its aims. The project will work alongside parents to help them to explore long-forgotten hopes and aspirations and to provide guidance and support to help them to achieve their hopes and build a brighter future together. That is what I see the Bill offering throughout the United Kingdom. I commend it to the House.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

I am pleased to participate in this important debate. It has been of a high calibre and there have been tremendous areas of agreement between hon. Members on both sides of the House, which is important. I am also pleased to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), who made a serious contribution. I listened with great interest to what she said about her constituency and about expectations. I endorse what she said. We must always be realistic. We must not raise expectations too high and then not meet them. If we did, we as politicians would be criticised in the media and by parents and others who depend on child care. The hon. Lady made a very good speech.

Child care is a great concern in my constituency. Regrettably, many men and women have had to come to my surgery or write to me to say that, although they want to return to work, they cannot find the necessary child care. Either they cannot afford the costs of the existing provision, or they cannot get their child into the child care that they think the child needs. That very serious issue should concern us all. It is therefore opportune for all of us to consider ways in which to improve and increase child care provision but, as many hon. Members have said, we must do so with quality as a top priority. We are talking about quality for our children and for the future.

It is also very important that child care be affordable. In today's society, the cost of child care can be prohibitive for people who want to go back to work. If we do not make changes, society will suffer and the children will suffer, which is why this is such a serious issue for us all to debate and concern ourselves with.

I welcome the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), which was excellent, moderate and constructive as usual. She was also very positive. Something that has come out of the debate is that we are all positive about going forward. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) made some very helpful and interesting contributions and interventions, which shows his commitment. We listened to him with interest. That said, Opposition Members have concerns about the Bill, which I would like to develop later in my short contribution.

I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who made a thought-provoking and measured speech. I did not agree with all of her contribution, as she would expect, but I agree with her comments on disabled children and their parents, an issue that the hon. Member for Bridgend also highlighted. It is a great concern that parents of disabled children do not find it easy to get the necessary child care, either because of cost or because of their special needs.

In my constituency, there are mothers of disabled children who would like to return to the workplace but simply cannot find provision of satisfactory quality, where they would be happy to leave their children and which has the necessary facilities. We should all be considering this important issue to ensure that such child care provision is dealt with satisfactorily.

I welcome the Bill in principle, because I am a strong supporter of the aims of providing quality and affordable child care for working families. Therefore the general thrust of the Bill is to be welcomed. An increase in provision and greater access to child care must be priorities in today's society. Life today is more hectic. More men and women want to return to work whenever they can. When they have children, they obviously want the best for them, but they also want to get on with their careers, because that in itself can help their children. We heard from some hon. Members that in today's society, in which people have children later in life, they may have young children and be responsible for elderly parents at the same time. Life is demanding now for people. At the age when many people now have children, they often have elderly parents to care for as well.

Choice and opportunities are two issues that have come up in several contributions from Opposition Members and Government Members. We passionately believe that there should be choice and that people should not be forced into just one form of provision. Parents should have a choice and feel comfortable. Some of the Secretary of State's comments seemed to suggest that there was a greater emphasis among Government Members on one type of opportunity and less choice. I do not think that she meant that, or least I hope that she did not, because choice and variety of provision make the situation better for parents. Parents can make a choice about what they think is more appropriate for their children.

As I said in an intervention on the Secretary of State, child care costs are very high. We hear that costs in this country are probably among the highest in western Europe. They are prohibitive for certain people, particularly those who are returning to low-paid jobs. In London—my constituency is in south-east London—the costs are particularly high and are out of reach of many people on low incomes. Many parents are therefore forced to stay at home and look after their children—which might not be the best thing for them or for their children—because they cannot afford to pay for the child care that would enable them to go back into the workplace.

I am also concerned at the fall in the number of playgroups, pre-school places and childminder places in Greater London. Such schemes all offer parents greater choice. Many private and voluntary sector child care places have also closed, and that is regrettable. The Conservatives want more choice to be available to parents, and we would like to see more work being done with business and the voluntary sector to provide more affordable child care places, more childminders, more workplace nurseries and more clubs for older children.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

I agree with what my hon. Friend says about workplace nurseries. Would it not be sensible to consider tax incentives for the provision of such facilities? If the Government were worried that that might represent a dead weight cost, or that it might be an imprudent use of public funds if relatively well-off companies were to take advantage of such an opportunity, might not a way round that be to incentivise businesses to provide workplace nursery places for low-income employees who might not otherwise be able to benefit from them?

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

My hon. Friend makes a sensible point, as he usually does on these matters. We should consider tax incentives, because they would encourage an increase in provision. If we are serious about increasing provision, we must consider all the available opportunities, and not just focus on a narrow few.

There has been much debate today on the duties of local authorities in England and Wales. Those authorities will have to secure, as far as is practical, the provision of child care to meet the needs of parents, and that is welcome and encouraging. However, giving local authorities more powers and responsibilities raises the question of cost. The Secretary of State did not really answer our questions on that earlier, and I hope that the Minister will look a little harder at the issue. No extra money is being provided. The Government have said that they have put adequate money aside, but other duties will be required of local authorities, including advice and assessment and even the provision of child care. They do not know how much that is going to cost, having made their assessment, or how much child care they are going to have to provide, but there will be an increase in cost.

Any such increase would worry my constituents. If the Government are not providing extra money to pay for the extra responsibilities, will council tax payers have to pick up the bill? My local authority, Bexley, has already had a 35 per cent. increase in its council tax over the past three years, and that has hit people hard, particularly people on low incomes with families, pensioners and people on fixed incomes. If the local authority had to increase the council tax to provide the additional services required by the Bill, it would probably hit hardest those who could least afford it, and that worries me. The Secretary of State did not give us enough reassurance that that would not happen. A further problem is bureaucracy.

As a former teacher and lecturer, I have some concerns about the educational aspects of the Bill. Parents are the primary educators. Of course, we need to help them, but we should not dictate to them. They generally know better than Governments or bureaucrats—or supposed experts—what is best for their child. However, the Bill feels somewhat prescriptive. The Government like rules and regulations, and it worries me that the Bill contains new rules that dictate how infants should communicate, use language and literacy, and so forth.

Childminders and nurseries will have to teach the early-years foundation stage curriculum from birth to three years old. Ofsted will come along to check that the children are developing according to Government policy, and the Department for Education and Skills will be in control. That worries me, because children in their early years should be encouraged to learn through enjoyment and to develop at their own pace. They need to zone in on their social skills by co-ordinating, talking and sharing. Every child will develop to a different level and a different ability, as my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham said earlier. It worries me that the Bill is so prescriptive about the level of educational involvement. Older children should certainly have formal education, but a more detailed curriculum is inappropriate for children in their early years. Parents, not Ministers, know best how to bring up their children. Of course we want more child care places, but we want to give parents the ability to superintend their child's development.

Mark Williams (Liberal Democrat, Ceredigion)

Perhaps it would be helpful to reiterate that the word in the Bill that is giving many of us a problem is "taught". I, too, am a former teacher, and I think that the phrase that we are looking for is "structured play". That would give the children the opportunities that they need. I suspect that that is covered by the Bill, but the phraseology of the provisions gives us cause for concern.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman that what is needed is structured play. We want our children to develop to maximise their potential; we do not want to teach or control them at that stage.

Madeleine Moon (Labour, Bridgend)

I have listened to this argument throughout the afternoon, and I think that hon. Members are making a mountain out of a molehill. We are talking about parents educating their children, but this is also about, for example, children pouring water into jugs and seeing how much water goes into them. That is education, but it is also play. It is about children playing with sand, and getting paint all over their fingers. That is play, but it is also education. We must remember that we are talking about the same thing.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

I very much hope that we are, but I have a niggling feeling that the Bill is proposing something more structured. If it is not, of course we would welcome it. The hon. Lady is absolutely right: play is education, and the two go together. However, the phrasing of the Bill contains a hint of more formal instruction, and that worries me. I would be grateful if the Minister would tell me if I am wrong, but the wording does place a question mark over this issue.

John Bercow (Conservative, Buckingham)

This theme has percolated much of the debate. I confess that I am much more sanguine about the provision than some of my colleagues, many of whom have focused on the word "taught". I am keen to close down this part of the argument, and I would like to suggest that the real problem in clause 41 lies in its use of adult language to describe things that we hope very young kids will be able to do. We are not seeking to create mini-intellectuals, but the problem lies in the Bill's use of such phrases as

"knowledge and understanding of the world"

to describe circumstances applicable to nought to five-year-olds.

David Evennett (Conservative, Bexleyheath and Crayford)

Time will tell on that one. I am sure that this issue will be discussed further when the Bill goes into Committee.

I am a great supporter of grandparents. When my children were young, my parents and parents-in-law were a tremendous help and support to my wife and me, looking after the children and taking them out. Unfortunately my parents-in-law are now deceased, which is a great sadness. Peggy and Ron Smith did a tremendous job for us as grandparents, though, and I welcome what grandparents do. I shall continue to stress the value of grandparents as child minders, and the fact that we should not write them out of the equation—not that I am suggesting that the Bill does that.

The Bill has potential. Some aspects still need to be addressed, but I think we have overcome the earlier to-and-fro of the debate. It was suggested that Conservative Members were not concerned about child care, or wanted to turn the clock back. That is ridiculous. We want to move forward. We are positive and enthusiastic: we want to give people more choice, and to allow them to return to the workplace in the knowledge that their children are being looked after well in an environment that is conducive to both education and play.

We must always consider the needs and interests of the child. We must bear in mind what is best for children, while also thinking about what is affordable and appropriate for parents. Parents must have a genuine opportunity to decide what is best for their children. None of that will be achieved through bureaucracy. Shortage of funds and uniformity are issues to be borne in mind. I glory in diversity, because I think that that is the best way of securing the best possible provisions.

I hope that the Government will take account of our concerns, because they have been expressed in a positive spirit with the best interests of society in mind.

Roberta Blackman-Woods (Labour, City of Durham)

I support the Bill, and I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett), who I think welcomed it broadly as well.

For decades, my hon. Friends and I have campaigned for decent child care. The Bill brings that ideal one step closer. Nothing is more important than investing in our children's future. The Bill is intended to support families, particularly parents who wish to work or undergo training, and to enable them to take such action safe in the knowledge that their children are being well looked after. It builds on the significant amount that the Government have already invested to support hard-working families with, for instance, extended maternity leave and extended paid maternity leave.

Since 2003, parents of children under six or disabled children have had the right to apply to work flexibly and to have that request considered seriously. Paid paternity leave has also been introduced. Moreover, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), for the first time adoptive parents have been given rights to adoption leave and pay. The Government have invested in Sure Start centres, which are intended to provide excellent child care in a multi-disciplinary setting and a range of services to support young children and their families in our most disadvantaged communities. That programme is being extended, and a pledge has been made that there will be a children's centre in every community by 2010. I applaud that.

An important framework of support for all parents, catering for a wide range of needs, is already in place, but the Bill aims to go further. Under the present Government more people are in work, and that can have beneficial effects on children. Children with working parents are less likely to live in poverty, more likely to do better at school and less likely to become disadvantaged adults. A variety of Government policies and initiatives have been devised with the aim of enabling parents to enter and remain in employment, from the new deal to in-work financial support and extended nursery provision—along with, of course, many opportunities for learning and skills development.

When we consider the employment patterns of families with dependent children, the need for more good-quality child care is obvious. According to data from the Office for National Statistics and on labour force trends, in 2004 most working-age families with dependent children included at least one parent in employment, and half of them included two parents in employment. When only one parent was employed, it was usually the father. Couples with pre-school-age children were much less likely to be dual earners than those with school-age children, and couples with three or more children were less likely to be dual earners than those with one or two children. That may indicate a need for more flexibility in child care provision.

Employment rates among parents have increased steadily in recent years. That upward trend reflects increases in both full-time and part-time employment. Over the 10-year period up to spring 2004, employment rates for couple mothers and lone parents with children under five increased by eight and 12 percentage points respectively.

The need for high-quality child care is clear. As I said earlier, a good start has been made with Sure Start, extended schools and the local focus on "Every Child Matters", but more needs to be done to implement the Government's 10-year child care strategy. Many families have difficulty in finding affordable child care that fits their circumstances and is flexible enough to meet their needs. Services that seek to support families with young children can be disjointed and lack effectiveness. The complexity and inconsistency of the current inspection regime sometimes makes it difficult for parents to secure the assurances that they expect about the quality of the provision on offer.

The Bill attempts to deal with those problems, and to implement the child care strategy further. It should be given credit for building on current public service agreement targets in giving local authorities a new duty to improve the well-being of young children in their areas, and in particular for introducing the requirement for gaps to be closed between the most deprived groups and the better off. That emphasis on tackling inequality is hugely welcome. I urge the Secretary of State to use the powers conferred by the Bill to set targets for the reduction of inequality if they prove necessary.

The new duty imposed on local authorities to secure sufficient child care for working parents is welcome. I explained earlier why that is so necessary. The extended duty to ensure that parents have access to information about services and facilities for children and young people is also a positive step. Moreover, a more robust and appropriate inspection regime is being introduced. Many Opposition Members have spoken of the need to provide quality child care, but we cannot be sure that we are delivering quality child care without a sound inspection regime. That is what the Bill aims to provide.

Local authorities will have a duty to assess all child care provision within a year, and subsequently once every three years. That will be necessary to ensure that provision is adequate, and to test the role of the public sector in the delivery of child care.

A number of measures in the Bill are welcome. There is substance on which local partnerships can build—and, as many of my hon. Friends have said today, there is much on which to build: 525,000 new child care places, nearly 1,300 more neighbourhood nurseries, and nearly 600 children's centres have been provided since the Government came to power.

Let me end by describing a visit I made some weeks ago to a nursery facility at Witton Gilbert school in my constituency. It is a partnership between the school, voluntary sector and local parents, delivering nursery provision at its best, with excellent and committed staff, extremely well resourced facilities and a sound mixture of structured and free play. I had a truly wonderful experience, and I had not realised that I would need skills in sand and water play and storytelling as an MP. It was really pleasant to sit down with the three-year-olds and have free milk and fruit—restored by this Government and disgracefully removed by the previous, Conservative Government, who obviously put the needs of very young children to the bottom of their agenda. That excellent facility also complements two new Sure Start centres in my constituency. If the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) and the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries), who is not in her place, are really not certain about the benefits of Sure Start, I invite them to come to see what is being achieved in my constituency. Those centres are not only giving valuable opportunities to disadvantaged children but helping their parents with parenting skills, training and routes to employment. Importantly, they are also giving essential support to grandparents who provide care for their grandchildren.

As a young student some time ago—I will not say how long—I carried out a comparative study of pre-school provision and the quality of pre-school provision in a range of European and western industrialised countries. Much to my dismay, Britain came bottom of the league table on almost every indicator of child care provision. We had pretty good child care facilities in this country during the second world war and shortly afterwards, but successive Governments failed to invest in child care, so we ended up at the bottom of the league. Thanks to this Government, who have invested in child care, we are now nearly at the top. This Bill should help us to build on the excellent record of the Government so far. We all want excellent child care, such as that in Witton Gilbert in my constituency, to be available to all young children. I therefore urge Members to support the Bill.

Kitty Ussher (Labour, Burnley)

I welcome the Bill, which, I believe, encapsulates the heart of our party's values—to aim to break the link between people's income and their opportunities. The Bill will benefit children through a more structured curriculum, better protection for the very young and extended hours proposals, but will also break the link between income and opportunity for those adults who wish to enter the work force but who have so far been prevented from doing so. It is heartbreaking to be told by someone that they want to work but cannot afford the child care, or, in extremis, as I once heard in my constituency, that they want to go to a job interview in order to work but cannot afford the child care to do so. As a result of the Bill, both those occurrences will be less likely. I am proud to follow my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods), whose advocacy of the Bill was intelligent and wide-ranging.

During the opening speeches, some Opposition Members—I apologise for not having been present for the entirety of this afternoon's debate, due to my Select Committee commitments—tried to imply that the Government are introducing this Bill to force parents to work. That is not my understanding. The Government will support all parents as they make their own choices about how best to balance work and family commitments. They understand, as I do, that different people will want to work in different ways at different stages of their life. The Government's job is to make those choices easier.

Let us not beat about the bush. In the past, and unfortunately even now, choice in terms of child care has been a middle-class preserve. If one has a higher income, it is easier to pay to have one's children looked after if one wishes to go back to work than if one has a lower income. Much of what the Government are trying to do is to extend that type of choice to all families. I believe that this Bill will do that.

I welcome the new duty on local authorities to assess the type of child care available in their areas, and to provide more child care through whatever means they consider most appropriate. I note that the Bill is not the vehicle for discussing finance, and that the spending review is the best place for that, but I want to put it on record that the Government are already making a huge investment in various types of child care through free nursery places, funded Sure Start schemes expanding into children's centres throughout the country, the child tax credit and child care tax credit. I would be interested to hear whether the Conservative party can confirm its commitment to both those tax credits in the wind-up to the debate. Once the supply of places is increased under the new duty on local authorities, the Government will, in effect, indirectly subsidise the demand for those places through our tax credit system, which aims to help precisely those people who have been unable to afford to go to work when they have wanted to do so previously.

I notice that the duty on local authorities will be to increase child care supply as far as is reasonably practicable. Can the Minister give some more examples of what "reasonably practicable" will be interpreted to mean? Can a local authority say, for example, that it has other priorities or does not have the finance available? I hope that that is not the case.

The Bill builds on Sure Start, which has been one of the most important programmes introduced by the Government. Constituents have said to me that they are surprised that politicians introduced such a programme, because it will be a long time before its effects are felt. To the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who implied that its effects have not yet been proven, I would say that that is the case almost by definition, because it will be a long time before there is an economic impact. My understanding, however, is that there is a great deal of evidence to show that young mothers who benefit from Sure Start are more likely to quit smoking, access training courses and go into education and then employment if that is what they want, and that both their mental and physical health have been improved. In my constituency, the same applies to some dads, too. I very much welcome the Government's commitment to build on that and to expand the number of children's centres.

I want to share with the House one anecdote from my constituency. When I was campaigning and canvassing in the general election only six months ago, a person who is now my constituent said to me that they would not vote Labour because they could not access their Sure Start programme as they lived just outside the geographic boundary. I had to explain that Sure Start would not exist were it not for a Labour Government, and that our plans were to expand it sufficiently so that every community had a children's centre. Let us make sure that we do not lose the fantastic reputation that Sure Start has, and that we keep the brand. Some people working in Sure Start centres seem to think that it will be replaced, whereas I understand that the opposite is true and that we will build on it.

I welcome this Bill, which is overdue. It will be long-lasting and will have effects not only on our children, but, I hope, on our children's children. I hope that it can be supported on both sides of the House.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

I am delighted to be addressing such a packed House at this time of the evening. I feel that the general consensus that was breaking out at one stage has shortened this debate, which has been a good one with well-informed and weighty contributions from both sides of the House.

We started with the Secretary of State, who I am sure has been scuppered by the time adjustment this evening, talking about the £17 billion extra that has gone into child care. She was being a little disingenuous. It would be interesting to know how that figure extrapolates, because a large part of that money is wound up in the additional funding going into Sure Start, which we have supported. We said on numerous occasions before the election that we would ring-fence that money.

Contrary to what the hon. Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband) said, we are the only party since 1997 that has held debates on children's matters in this Chamber. The Government have never held a debate on children's issues in their own time. In those debates and at questions we said that we supported Sure Start and would protect its funding, although we had ambitions to change some of its emphasis.

It is rather disingenuous for the Secretary of State to claim that there are no new unfunded costs attached to the Bill. The Bill contains a large number of directives to local authorities to ensure the sufficient provision of child care, to carry out assessments, to facilitate training in order to bring about the big increase in staff that is needed and to provide information. All of that will have costs attached to it.

As the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) rightly said, one of the big issues will be providing the child care work force required to make this Bill a reality. The transformation fund allocation of £125 million will just scratch the surface of what is required to provide training and encourage people into that line of work, as well as giving them the sustainable and decent wages that are all too often lacking now. If we do not get the staff, many of the aspirations within the Bill will not be achieved.

The hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), the chairman of the all-party childcare group, made a well-informed speech, as usual. She mentioned the child care element of child tax credits and their relatively low take-up at the moment. She also emphasised the social care input that is so vital for children in early years. She raised many of the questions that many hon. Members wanted to raise in terms of some of the definitions in the Bill and what is involved in the "sufficiency" description in parts of the Bill. She also talked, rightly, as did many other hon. Members, about the problems of children with disabilities and how a relatively small number of their parents and carers are working parents and carers, with all the difficulties attached to that.

The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), who is in her place, made a good point; we need to see some of the regulations as soon as possible because a lot of the detail is not included in the Bill. It is vital that we have sight of at least draft regulations so that, in the discussions in Committee—as well as in another place—we can talk about the realities and the detail.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), who is also in his place, rightly mentioned the many stresses on parents struggling to bring up children in difficult circumstances and with financial pressures, and said that parental child care does not feature in the Bill, very important though it is. He also mentioned the word "discovery", which is useful in terms of how children develop in the early years and is different from the terminology of "taught", which features in the notorious clause 41, to which we will return on many occasions.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the costs that will be imposed on local authorities and the potential increases in council tax that may result from that. He also talked about the need to simplify the funding streams attached to certain aspects of child care.

The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) said that the Bill was a real transformation and mentioned that we needed to double the number of child care places. She said that she would be setting up the all-party group of play, which is such an important element of the Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) mentioned the importance of the family and added that this was a prescriptive Bill in many respects. To give him his due, he gave credit to Sure Start and said that his constituency had benefited from Sure Start projects. Mine has not, because we have no Sure Start project in my constituency even though I have areas of real deprivation. My hon. Friend also said that we needed a level playing field between existing and future providers and cited the issue of differential VAT treatment between private, independent providers and those working through Sure Start.

The hon. Member for Doncaster, North, who is back in his place, spoke in dramatic terms about crossing the rubicon and about the state extending its role. I think he is right and it was very good of him to admit it up front. Some of us have concerns about the state extending its role as a parent when the state's record as a parent is a lousy one, has been for too many years and still is for those looked-after children for whom it has direct responsibility.

The hon. Member for Doncaster, North also mentioned spending. If we analyse the costs attached to the Bill, we see that it is right that we need to spend more, but that spending must be cost-effective and well targeted. The average capital cost of a new nursery place is about £15,000. At the moment, the occupancy rate among the private and voluntary independent providers is about 76 per cent. On the face of it, there are a lot of available places, most of which are described as good quality places that could be used without the considerable capital start-up costs that will be involved in the way envisaged by the hon. Gentleman. We need to have a proper debate about whether the money is being used properly. Much of the criticism of Sure Start projects in the past was that they could not be scrutinised in isolation but must be scrutinised holistically in terms of their effect on other existing providers in those areas where they have been set up. We want to return to that.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

The hon. Gentleman said that there were many areas with spare capacity. Does he have any sense of which areas those are, and if they are in the same places where there is a shortage of child care places? It is an interesting notion.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

That is a good point. If one looks at the survey that the National Day Nurseries Association has conducted among a large sample of its members, many of the vacancies are in areas where new providers, heavily subsidised at the front end, are coming in. That cannot make sense and that is why partnership and co- operation, as well as some of the conditions placed on local authorities in determining whether there is a sufficiency of supply, are vital to the Bill. We want more assurances from the Government on that.

The hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) characteristically went on at length and in detail about the problems of providing child care in rural areas and, not for the first time, talked about the shortage of Welsh-medium child care. If he is on the Committee scrutinising the Bill, we may find ourselves talking about those subjects at length, as we have on previous occasions. The hon. Gentleman, in common with many other hon. Members, also talked about the extended family, and he made a good point about the need for some sort of intermediate category between formal and informal child care. There is certainly some merit in that.

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) mentioned the problems of child care that affect us all across the country, in particular those relating to disability and the extra costs associated with that. She spoke highly of the Genesis project—a Sure Start project—in her own constituency.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) said that the Bill represents a positive way forward. He referred to costs and factors relating to special needs that hold back many women from returning to the work force, but he rightly said that choice has to be an important part of the Bill. The one-size-fits-all model is inappropriate. He spoke about the high cost of child care places, assuming it is possible to find them, in London and also mentioned the importance of children being encouraged and enjoying their development at an early age as opposed to being formally taught. He cleverly managed to sneak in a reference to his in-laws, Peggy and Ron Smith, as we approach Christmas. I am sure that he will be relying on them for cover during the Christmas holidays—and not least for a present, too. I shall perhaps mention my in-laws later.

The hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) made an interesting contribution about employment patterns, using some of the Office for National Statistics data. She was the only hon. Member to refer in detail to the need to close gaps and to tackle inequality, which is an important aspect of the Bill. She then said that we need to rely on targets to achieve that, which is where we may part company. There are many ways of reducing inequality and we believe that it should start with levelling up rather than levelling down. We will want some assurances about that when we come to debate the detail in Committee.

The hon. Lady also referred to the inspection regime, which is necessary to measure quality. We can tick as many boxes as we like and increase the numbers by as many as we like, but quality is crucial. If they are not quality child care places, we are not doing any service for the children who need them and their parents. The hon. Lady also mentioned the pet Sure Start project in her constituency. It was all going so well until she lapsed into a little partisanship. To mention what happened eight and a half years is no longer sufficient; we have to go back about 34 years to refer implicitly to "Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher"—all those years ago.

Finally, we had a late entry from the hon. Member for Burnley (Kitty Ussher), who made a very good contribution about breaking the link between income and opportunity and raised a fair point about the need to give choices to a wider range of people. That is what the Bill should be all about.

As I said, we have had a good debate and, to reiterate the opening comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), we welcome the Bill and will support it, just as we have welcomed previous child care measures. I was involved in the Children and Adoption Bill and the Children Act 2004. Indeed, we worked together across the House to improve the legislation as it went through its Committee and later stages. I hope that the same will be true of this Bill—that we have a good, well-informed and constructive debate in Committee.

Affordable and quality child care is a subject that is at last coming of age in Westminster politics and, given the significant proportion of our constituents who are affected, that is long overdue. Ahead of the last election, it was interesting that when we produced a manifesto solely on the subject of child care, it generated considerable interest among the Government, such that the Prime Minister had to come forward at that stage and produce his own thoughts on child care. All parties recognise the importance of getting child care right. That has many implications for children, parents, child care providers and children's voluntary organisations now, but, more importantly, getting it right now will have enormous implications for the future social, educational and career development of those children as they grow up.

It is interesting that the under-fives are the only part of the population that is projected to grow by 2012—[Interruption.]—by some 4 per cent. to 2.9 million children. It is clearly the sector of population that we should focus most on while the rest of the population shrinks—[Interruption.]—in numbers, not in size: ho, ho. I am trying to raise the level of the debate a little. As a recent report from the US National Academy of Sciences found:

"A failure to receive care as a child can disrupt the normal development of a hormone system linked with social bonding which has significant implications for whether children develop into good and responsible citizens."

The Bill should be subject to detailed scrutiny, and we welcome the Government's intention to allow, as I understand it, three weeks in Committee without knives, so we can properly study those proposals that require the most detailed examination. A common complaint across the House has been the lack of detail at this stage. I, for one on the Conservative Benches, have form for criticising legislation that leaves too many of the detailed considerations to secondary regulation and codes of conduct, which are all too often not produced until well after a Bill has passed all its parliamentary stages. I therefore ask the Minister whether the Government will make draft copies of their proposed regulations available during the passage of the Bill either through this House or in the other place, as that would greatly assist our deliberations.

The general principles that we should apply to the scrutiny of the Bill are as follows. First, the measures should maximise parental choice. Whether a parent chooses to send his or her child to a state-run nursery, a voluntary-sector nursery, an independent provider, an extended family member or to leave the child at home if possible, they should not be hampered—and certainly not financially disadvantaged—in doing so. They should choose whatever course of action they believe is most suitable for their own children. As the Pre-School Learning Alliance put it:

"Parents should be supported in whatever childcare choices they make, regardless of their personal circumstances."

The second criterion is one of quality over quantity. It would be detrimental if, in expanding the accessibility of child care places, quality was compromised so that the development of children at crucial early years was prejudiced by inappropriate levels of care from inappropriately qualified providers. Inappropriate day care could make children more likely to suffer from emotional problems. Do the skilled work force exist or will they exist in the next few years in order to provide the quality of care that we are all agreed that we need?

Thirdly, we will judge the Bill on the degree of accessibility provided on a level playing field. There is concern that the Government intend to increase provision through working tax credits only, thereby supporting parents into work. Obviously, we need to help the most disadvantaged families—the result of poverty, disability or whatever—most of all, but many non-working families would benefit from access to additional child care help yet that funding arrangement will not apply to them. Lack of affordable child care is a problem for all parents across all social scales. In any case, the take-up of the tax credit is relatively low with only about 300,000 families currently accessing the child care element of the working tax credit. We need some answers about who else will be able to access the new child care places.

The fourth criterion that we will apply to the Bill is simplicity and transparency. Child tax credit is notoriously complex and bureaucratic and any new arrangements for funding child care should avoid bureaucratic procedures for providers and parents—a point made in the briefing note from the National Union of Teachers.

Fifthly, we need to achieve the right balance. What is the right child care balance between care, education and play; and what is the right balance between family care and paid professional care away from home? The Bill is centred almost entirely on the non-maternal care of young children by paid employees.

Sixthly, another criterion that we shall apply in scrutinising the Bill is one of sustainability. It is no good creating new, heavily subsidised child care places only to knock out perfectly good-quality existing ones. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead mentioned, for every two new places that have been created, one has been lost.

The concern is that the advantageous models of capital cost will be paid up front, through various neighbourhood nursery schemes, for child care that is not viable in a financial sense, so that when the funding runs out after three or five years, those schemes' viability will be questionable, even though they have knocked out much of the competition. We need competition, but we need it on a level playing field that is fair to all; indeed such criticisms have been made in the past. So there are many questions that we want the Government to address this evening and during the Bill's later stages.

Does the Minister genuinely believe that these aims can be achieved without extra funding? The Local Government Association is concerned that extra funding is simply not going to be attached to this Bill, at a time when children's services departments throughout the country are greatly stretched and undergoing significant reorganisation, largely as a result of the Children Act 2004 and the Adoption and Children Act 2002. They are rightly creating new children's services departments and directors of children's services, and new structures for child protection and for greater co-operation between, and working with, all interested parties. Can the Minister be sure that in pushing forward the measures in this Bill, those departments will not suffer from a lack of funding, and from a lack of ability to pay the attention that they must continue to pay to elements of recent legislation that they are still trying to absorb?

According to the interdepartmental child care review, the child care work force needs to expand by some 8 per cent. every year to meet Government targets on child care growth. We need reassurance from the Minister, given the slightly disappointing child care work force strategy that was published in the spring, that the Government are on course to produce those skilled people. Turning to the difference between care and education, and the early years foundation stages innovations, the National Union of Teachers pointed out that there are no initial teacher training courses appropriate for the learning and development needs of children aged from birth to three. Concern has also been expressed about the many other responsibilities placed on local authority children's services departments, which are still absorbing and adapting to recent legislation, as I said.

Can the Minister give us some idea of how we define the Bill's reference to reducing inequalities? Will the definition be very broad? How on earth do we define the various contributions made to society? It was difficult enough to define that in the Children Act 2004; it will surely be much more difficult to define in dealing with children between the age of birth and five. What will be the precise duty relationship between local authorities and their partners? Here, there appears to be some discrepancy with the requirements for co-operation contained in the 2004 Act. What targets are to be prescribed by the Secretary of State, and can we be assured that they will be based on quality outcomes, rather than on the ticking of quantitative boxes? How does all this relate to looked-after children? There is of course a potential conflict of interest when the local authority is facilitator and provider of early-years child care, as well as corporate parent. So we have a number of questions concerning the outcomes for looked-after children.

On the duty to secure sufficient child care for working parents, as outlined in part 2 of the Bill, what does "sufficient" mean? What are the penalties if a local authority is deemed not to have provided sufficient child care? How does a parent complain or exercise their rights if there is insufficient means of child care in their area? Will there be an appeals process for providers if a local authority does not genuinely secure a mixed economy, or encourage proper partnership with all providers?

Turnover of staff could also give rise to the questions of quality and continuity. What measures exist to encourage continuous improvement in quality once the initial targets have been met? How will central Government and local authorities most effectively provide guidance to parents on how to judge what factors will best benefit their children's learning that cannot come from parents themselves? How is affordability to be determined? The Bill leaves that issue hanging in the air.

The sustainability criteria in this Bill are important. The National Day Nurseries Association has warned:

"In many areas good quality provision is being undermined through the creation of child care for the under 5s in schools and in some newly developed Sure Start children's centres."

Occupancy levels in many NDNA nurseries are dropping, having declined in the past year from 82 per cent. to an average of 76 per cent. They are in danger of becoming unsustainable. According to Laing and Buisson, an occupancy level of 90 per cent. is required to guarantee sustainability. What assessment has the Minister made of current spare capacity in the sector?

If schools provide child care for three and four-year-olds, private and voluntary providers will be left to cater for one and two-year-olds. That is an unsustainable model, given the high staff ratios required for under-threes. It is therefore essential that Sure Start children's centre programmes build on existing child care provision, rather than duplicate it. An NDNA survey revealed the following:

"Almost 50 per cent. of day nurseries reported that their local authority is creating a children's centre, with Government funding, nearby to their own setting. This unnecessarily duplicates existing PVI provision, the overwhelming majority of which provides services of good quality . . . The principle of a mixed economy in child care, favoured by the Government",

is in danger of

"being overlooked, with opportunities for local partnerships being missed. This threatens the sustainability of childcare overall".

Other respondents to the survey said that the majority, 71 per cent.,

"reported that local authorities were not yet involving them in the delivery of local children's centres . . . 47 per cent. of day nursery respondents confirmed that a local children's centre or school had launched childcare services aimed specifically at the under-fives, which directly competed and duplicated their own services."

Chapter 2 of part 3 of the Bill, which deals with the requirements to be met by early-years providers, will doubtless lead to some fireworks in Committee. We have major concerns about this issue. The provision has been described as standard assessment tests for embryos. Perhaps the point is encompassed in the use of the word "taught" in clause 41(2)(b), as has been mentioned. The Daycare Trust points out the following:

"It is important that the new Early Years Foundation Stage Framework looks at children's development in the broadest sense and does not simply educationalise services for very young children."

The trust has also referred to this as

"the schoolification of early years provision for very young children."

As the Minister knows, the first two years of a child's life are crucial. The way that they develop, and are helped to develop, has a major impact on how they turn out. The wiring of the brain is a physical development— the joining together of neural pathways that takes place between birth and the age of two. At between the ages of six months and 18 months, the "social" part of the brain grows; it is not there at birth. The growth, or lack of it, depends on positive stimulus from an attentive and loving care giver. The satisfactory development of the brain almost entirely depends on the quality of attachment achieved during the first two years. That is basic attachment theory, but the point is that those first two years are very different from the following three. Yet the Bill does not differentiate between the first two years and later years. We need to pay some attention to that point.

Helen Goodman (Labour, Bishop Auckland)

Opposition Members, including the hon. Gentleman, have repeatedly said that they do not want targeting or the early-years foundation stages, and that they are unhappy with the criteria set out in clause 41. They have also said that they want to know how effective Sure Start and other provision is. Can the hon. Gentleman square that circle for us?

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

I do not think that there is a circle to square. My point is that we are in danger of treating all children under five the same, but basic attachment theory shows that children are very different in the first two years, which are all about the connections that the child makes with the parent or child care provider with whom it comes into close contact. Trying to educationalise or schoolify, as people have put it, those crucial early years threatens to upset the social development of that child. That is why we need to be assured that the early education plans are not as prescriptive as many people fear.

The explanatory notes for clause 41 mention

"six areas of learning and development . . . what most young children are expected to achieve . . . educational programmes, setting out what should be taught to young children . . . arrangements for assessing the learning and development".

That is educational language, not the language of social development. That is why we are so concerned about the prospect of prescriptive schoolification of provision for very young children, when what they need is the chance to interact socially and form attachments. They need to be observed, encouraged and stimulated, not tested and not taught.

As the NUT has warned, the proposal to extend the national literacy and numeracy frameworks downwards to age three will result in formalised learning too soon. We want to scrutinise that closely and, in particular, table amendments to ensure different treatment for children at that early age.

We support the principles behind the Bill, but we want to scrutinise it closely. There is a lot at stake and we cannot risk an approach that puts quantity ahead of quality outcomes. We must not apply to this area the Government's obsession—as shown in so much other legislation—with testing and ticking the boxes, instead of letting children grow up and learn to interact socially with their carers and peers. We need to encourage a child to develop its own sense of self. Subject to the criteria that I have set out, the Bill will have our support where it genuinely extends more choice and flexibility to more parents and their children; where it improves quality; where it complements and builds on what is already there rather than duplicates and undermines it; where it creates a genuine partnership between local authorities and all other interested parties; where it recognises that a child does best when allowed to be brought up by a loving family and parents, where possible; and, above all, if it allows children to grow up as well rounded individuals, given the best start in life that they all deserve.

Beverley Hughes (Labour, Stretford and Urmston)

We have had an interesting debate, with some knowledgeable contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the House who clearly care about young children, early education and child care. I welcome the fact that Opposition Members support the Bill in principle.

Since 1997, the Government have introduced a new and unprecedented commitment to our youngest children and their families. I can tell the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) that we have invested more than £17 billion in early years and child care; guaranteed every three and four-year-old a free nursery education place; started to integrate education with care in every setting; committed to provide a children's centre in every community; extended services in schools; introduced the working tax credit, which is likely to be worth some £800 million this year, to enable low-income families to access child care; and established more than 500,000 new child care places.

We have done all that for two reasons. First, we know that good quality, regular pre-school provision has a markedly positive impact on young children and their subsequent development. Even after one takes into account the characteristics of the child, the family and the home, the evidence shows significant links between quality child care and better child outcomes. The research to which several hon. Members referred, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), suggests that the difference in child development between having pre-school education and not having it can be of the order of four to six months. For the highest quality integrated centres, the difference can be as much as nine months. That substantial difference is achieved in only a two-year period of a child's life, which is remarkable. Good quality, integrated child care is good for young children and it helps the most disadvantaged children the most. Committed as we are to ensuring that poorer children get every chance to reach their potential and to rise beyond the circumstances of their birth, giving them the best and earliest start is essential.

The second reason is, of course, that today's parents combine family and work—many choose to, but many have to—and need the reassurance of high-quality, reliable child care in which they can have confidence. Such child care is not only safe, but provides stimulation and the kind of developmental opportunities that every good parent provides at home.

The Bill brings child care into the mainstream of the local services that parents can expect to be available. It ensures that parents will get the information and help that they need to gain access to those services. It gives outcomes for our youngest children the recognition and status that they deserve for the first time, and it puts statutory force behind the drive to reduce inequalities among young children. My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband) was right to set the Bill in the context of the drive for equality in the interests of children, their families, our economy and, indeed, our social fabric.

A number of important themes have been touched on by many hon. Members during the debate. The first theme is choice, which was raised by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) in her opening speech. I was somewhat perplexed to understand her contention—I paraphrase, but this is more or less it—that there is less choice under Labour and that private, voluntary and independent providers are going out of business. The facts do not stack up with that analysis.

In 1997, 56 per cent. of three and four-year-olds were in some form of free nursery provision. The figure is 98 per cent. now. In 1997, there were just over 600,000 registered child care places; there are 1.2 million now—an increase of 95 per cent. In 1997, there was a registered place for one in eight children. There is now a registered place for one in four children. There were 6,000 day nurseries then; there are 13,000 day nurseries now. There were 3,500 out-of-school clubs in 1997; there are more than 10,000 now. Given the expansion in all kinds of provision, we can see that the choice available for people is much better now.

A number of hon. Members expressed concern about the position of private, voluntary and independent providers. Today, 75 per cent. of full day care is provided by the private sector; only 3 per cent. is provided by local authorities. Some 63 per cent. of sessional day care—playgroups—is provided by the voluntary sector; only 4 per cent. is provided by local authorities. Far from causing a diminution in the sector's diversity, we have been increasing its diversity, and we want to continue to do so.

None of the Opposition spokespersons picked up the point that, at least for England, the Bill says that local authorities can attempt to fulfil the sufficiency duty and fill identified gaps in child care themselves only as a last resort and when that is clearly the only acceptable thing to do. In other words, they must work with parents and providers to ensure that the gaps are filled outside the local authority sector.

The theme of choice ran through other hon. Members' speeches. The hon. Members for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) and for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) seemed to suggest that, somehow, the Government extending provision and choice is tantamount to pushing parents out to work. I want to say categorically that that is not so. We believe that parents can choose whether they wish to work and, if they wish to work, what child care they want to use. It is not for the Government to regulate the use of relatives or grandparents and subject them to Ofsted inspections. I am sure that the hon. Member for Reading, East did not intend to imply that, but that is what bringing them within the Bill's scope would mean.

Mothers and fathers are free to organise their lives and child care as they think best. I am glad that, in the end, a Conservative Member—the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett)—mentioned fathers. Of course, we know that many fathers—albeit perhaps not Conservative Members—increasingly want to take an active part in the upbringing and care of their young children, so we want to support that. My hon. Friends the Members for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) and for Burnley (Kitty Ussher) recognised the importance of choice to parents and the economy, and the fact that employers are increasingly recognising the business case for child care.

The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham was right to say that the issue now is not quantity, but quality. That is of paramount importance, so I share that concern with every hon. Member who raised it, including my hon. Friends the Members for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) and for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who made an intelligent and detailed speech about the importance of quality. I welcome the support of the hon. Lady and my hon. Friends for the Bill and our drive for quality.

I can tell my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport that clause 7 provides the legal underpinning for free entitlement for all three and four-year-olds, including children in need. That is why we introduced the outcome duty, under which local authorities must pursue outcomes for children though integrated education and care. We know that such integration will drive up quality.

That is also the drive behind the early years foundation stage and the integrated regulation and inspection framework. Much of what has been said about the foundation stage has not been helpful. It will not involve formal education and there will be no tests or rigid timetables. It will cover the sort of things that good parents do with their children—I suspect that they are things that hon. Members did automatically with their young children—so people would expect such activities to form part of a good child care setting. The foundation stage will be play-based. Children will be provided with the experiences and activities that they need to grow, learn and develop.

We are building on existing frameworks. Although I do not want to detain the House, I recommend the "Birth to Three Matters" framework to the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham—I thought for a moment he had lifted sections of it and incorporated them into his speech. Practitioners will plan for each child. They will adopt a structured approach, but the experience of the child will be spontaneous and free-flowing. Practitioners will assess children by observation and discuss progress with parents.

Bringing together the existing "Birth to Three Matters" framework and the foundation stage will give providers a much more coherent framework to apply and follow. They are applying and following a framework now, but it is in two separate bits and it does not include the care standard. Our aim is to bring forward a coherent rationalisation of what exists at the moment.

Quality and affordability are also important. Quality depends on a qualified, trained work force, and developing the work force can have an impact on costs. As hon. Members have rightly recognised, it is difficult for us to square that circle. We have introduced the children's work force strategy and the development council that is now helping us with it. Local authorities will have to develop their own work force strategies because different situations will exist in different areas. We will be giving £52 million a year to local authorities from next April to develop their work forces. The money will be additional to that from the transformation fund to which several hon. Members referred, through which we will try to support the development of better qualifications among the work force.

On the demand side, the working tax credit is helping more than 330,000 families to afford child care. Of course, the free part-time education offer for all three and four-year-olds is also helping parents. The situation is complex, but with the strategy and the work force development council, and along with local authorities, we have put in place a mechanism by which we can try to ensure that we make progress. Indeed, the duty on child care is framed towards people claiming the working tax credit so that we can ensure that the child care provided is affordable.

A number of hon. Members mentioned the role of local authorities. I was pleased that the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) recognised that they are the appropriate lead body to develop sufficient child care and to be accountable for children's outcomes in their areas. Child care has to have a local dimension. Rural areas will be different from urban areas, and it will be different for different groups of parents. That is why it is important, in terms of pursuing the flexibility to which some hon. Members referred, that local authorities take the lead.

I do not accept that the burdens are unfunded. All the duties, in part, are already local authority duties under either the Children Acts or other regulations. Local authorities have received significant amounts in the general Sure Start grant for children's centres, extended schools and work force development. By 2007–08, they will receive £1.8 billion, which is double the figure for 2004–05. That is a substantial resource and is in addition to the £3 billion to fund the under-fives early education offer, which is going to all settings that meet the standards.

Disabled children were mentioned. I assure hon. Members that the focus on disabled children is a result of our determination to ensure that we improve the situation for them and their families. The duty on outcomes will focus on disabled children. The child care duty highlights the needs of disabled children. The early years foundation stage will contain explicit references to children with disabilities and those with special educational needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood was right. The findings of a recent Ofsted study show that in a majority of cases a positive attitude and a well trained team of staff make the difference between a disabled child being welcomed and included or not.

This is a landmark Bill. It is the first Bill devoted specifically to early years and child care. It reflects our commitment to give every child the best possible start in life, with enriching experiences that will enhance their development and learning throughout their childhood and the rest of their education. It is a major public service reform, bringing integrated early years education and child care into the mainstream of a modern welfare state. It establishes once and for all that the services will be available to parents, part and parcel of the locally based family services that parents rightly expect in today's society. It is a major commitment to disadvantaged children, with a statutory duty to improve outcomes for all young children and reduce inequalities between the most disadvantaged and the rest. It puts children and parents at the heart of the legislation, and it confirms the role of local authorities as champions of those children and parents. It will give fathers and mothers genuine choices on how best to balance work and family life, and the assurance that whatever choice they make, the system is working to ensure high quality and consistency.

I hope every hon. Member will join us in supporting these radical measures. We have the opportunity to transform permanently the shape, quality and availability of early years services for the youngest children and their parents. I hope that we can do so with consensus. I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.