Meeting of the Parliament 11 March 2020
I welcome the opportunity to open the debate for Scottish Labour. We have long supported the ambitions behind the early learning and childcare expansion to 1,140 funded hours. With only five months until the expansion’s deadline, the Audit Scotland report is a timely intervention.
Scottish Labour welcomes the finding of the follow-up report into early learning and childcare, as we welcomed the initial report in 2018. Both reports show the scale of the expansion of funded ELC and the challenges to be faced then and now. We thank the Conservatives for using their debating time to discuss the Audit Scotland report and the overall expansion, once again. We will support the motion this evening and we ask for support for our amendment, which seeks to raise a crucial issue surrounding payment of the living wage.
The Audit Scotland report highlighted a range of risks and issues with the expansion, on which the Tory motion reflects. However, we believe that it is vital to close what we see as a loophole, which Audit Scotland highlighted. Legal advice shows that private providers may not have to pay their staff the living wage. We want the Scottish Government to acknowledge that loophole and set out how it plans to address it in the coming months.
The Audit Scotland report includes a range of recommendations based on its findings. We hope that the Scottish Government and councils act on the recommendations to minimise consequences that put the expansion at risk. The most significant challenges to the expansion are recruitment of staff and building of infrastructure projects. With only a matter of months until the August 2020 deadline, it is disappointing that those problems continue to be raised, which shows that the initial policy—welcome as it was—was hastily thrown together by ministers and introduced without any real action plans behind it.
In the next four to five months, the number of additional staff that will be required in council settings is estimated to be more than 2,200, which is about 27 per cent of the number of full-time equivalent staff required for the whole expansion. That is a major challenge for councils, but it is not the only recruitment challenge. Partner providers have reported a series of problems with recruitment and retention; councils expect them to play a larger role in the expansion, which means that those challenges have become more problematic.
In the West Scotland region, I have heard anecdotal evidence that some private nursery staff are leaving for council-run nurseries, and that is not restricted to my region. The Audit Scotland report points out the worries of funded providers, which they and other organisations have reported many times in the past few years.