Hansard

I thank Jamie Hepburn for bringing this motion to the chamber, as it raises a very worthy issue. I also thank Save the Children and the Daycare Trust for their excellent report, “Making Work Pay—The Childcare Trap”, which I think everybody should look at in some detail. From reading the report, it is clear that there really is a trap—Malcolm Chisholm and Jamie Hepburn have put much about that on record.

I want to deal with an issue that Jamie Hepburn touched on in his opening speech: the UK Government’s cuts to the working tax credit, which have been a real attack on many families and have further damaged those who are trying to stay in employment and meet childcare needs. Those who previously received the 80 per cent support were most likely already experiencing in-work poverty, even with 80 per cent of childcare costs being met. We can see very quickly what the impact of cutting that support to 70 per cent will be—Malcolm Chisholm fleshed that out with some figures. I hope against hope that the UK Government will look again at that matter and realise that the long-term effects of what it proposes will be completely counterproductive, both socially and economically.

Save the Children believes that to guarantee 80 per cent of childcare costs under the universal credit would cost £405 million across the UK, which would represent a mere 0.45 per cent increase in the total welfare budget. I suspect that that would be a wise investment, given the long-term effects of having children grow up in fully benefits-dependent households. We are only too well aware of the damaging intergenerational poverty that can be created. There are communities in Scotland that are still benefits dependent because no support was put in back in the 1980s. We do not want to see that happen at this time of crisis in the UK economy. That is an important thing to say.

In the information provided by Save the Children, one of my constituents describes better than I could the problem that parents face. They say:

“I feel that the government is making it extremely difficult for ordinary people with children to earn an honest living. The current situation is encouraging people to give up work and go onto benefits as many people are better off that way. This is surely not the correct way to go about things. I enjoy working and would not be happy on benefits, however this is becoming increasingly difficult to manage.”

If that individual finds themselves on the dole, perhaps their grandchildren will think that being on the dole is the normal existence for human beings—it is not the normal existence; we have to support people in employment and into employment.

There are challenges not just for the UK Government, but for the Scottish Government and for this Parliament. I do not deny that the extension of entitlement to two-year-olds is a huge challenge in the current financial climate, as is providing out-of-school care for five-to-14-year-olds. However, something that we could achieve more speedily is getting the commitment to provide 15 hours a week for three and four-year-olds to work better. I do not think that local authorities are flexible enough in their approach and I do not think that they use partnership nurseries as effectively as they could do. Some people just cannot take up the entitlement because they cannot put their son or daughter into a nursery at 10 o’clock in the morning, leave their job and pick them up again at half past 12. That just cannot be done, particularly if people do not have wider family support. We must look at reforming that area to make it work better for families.

I will finish by looking at the cost of childcare. Costs are too high, but I was interested to learn that costs in Scotland are higher than they are in the rest of the UK. I have spoken to Save the Children about the issue, and I wonder whether we are comparing apples with oranges rather than apples with apples. I want us to look at the quality of the childcare and the educational experience that are provided for children when they start to follow the childcare pathway. It might be the case that the like-for-like costs are quite similar, but that, because of the involvement of more highly skilled staff, a better outcome in qualitative terms is obtained in Scotland. That might explain the differential, but more efforts need to be made to look into that.

I again commend Jamie Hepburn for bringing the debate to the chamber.

17:20