Ms Stella Creasy
MP for Walthamstow · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“I thank the Foreign Secretary for his clear-sighted commitment not only to talk about a two-state solution, but to actually try to act to achieve it, as the only foundation of a safe Israel and a free Palestine.”
“Could he reassure the House that we will not acquiesce and bend to such pressure, and that the only action that could ever be acceptable to us to make us contemplate reversing this ban would be a halt on the E1 development and a permanent end to settler violence?”
“I start by paying tribute to the new Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), for all the work she did on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on these issues. I know that she will do a brilliant job in this role.”
“I do not really understand the technology, but I know that he does, and I understand and share his fear accordingly. We come here today to debate this Bill because we all know that trust is a bygone issue in our politics.”
“We would welcome her having that conversation, which might be more illuminating than whether she is concerned about Zach Goldmsith’s leaflets. I add my support to the amendments tabled by my hon.”
“From today, if we do not take a stand with this Bill to tackle the ways that money has infiltrated our politics, the risk is that they will think we are acting in the interests of our own back pockets.”
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“I know more than most how much work my right hon. Friend has been doing on this issue. As for rejoining the pan-European scheme, it already exists; it is not a bespoke scheme. On youth mobility, it would be very helpful for us to understand things from the Minister’s perspective, because there are a lot of issues to balance in the best interests of the British economy and British growth. May I bring him back to that point? When there are so many challenges in the world, it is wonderful to have UK leaders in Europe who do not question whether we are friend or foe to our colleagues there, but we also need to speak up for British interests. I hope he can set out a bit more about what he considers those to be.”
“Given that, and given the examples of funding sources that can be put together, will he organise an urgent meeting—we know about his conflict of interest—for all MPs whose constituents use Whipps Cross, to look at the criteria and possible new sources of funding? I know that he will agree that we owe it to our constituents not to give up fighting for the hospital that our community so desperately needs.”
“For nearly 25 years, I have been part of campaigns to either save or rebuild Whipps Cross hospital. For the last 10 years, I have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Secretary of State, so I know—let me put this on the record for him, because he cannot say it—his pain and frustration that we are now talking about eight years to restart the building works that have already started at Whipps Cross, and which will finally deliver the new hospital that we need and a thousand new homes in our community. It is devastating to us all, but we can see from the list that some hospitals have moved between the different waves.”
“I know that for the next couple of days everybody in this House will hold in their hearts my constituent Sharone, whose father Oded is the oldest hostage we are awaiting news on; we hope to hear some this weekend. Oded is 85. I hold out hope for him, because we do not know what has happened to him. Oded spent his life as a peace activist, campaigning for a two-state solution and driving Gazans to hospital. In the spirit of Oded, and the work that he has done, will the Foreign Secretary work with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care to offer young Palestinians who urgently need medical help the support that they need here in the UK?”
“That is why we ultimately need a financial inclusion committee to look at not just the costs of credit but how we stop people getting ripped off in the first place, and to be a consumer champion across the piece, whether on energy deals, finance or even local public service debt advice provision. In the end, if we join up the dots we really will save everyone money—the one thing that right now nobody has.”
“If we do not massively increase the funding for money advice services and ensure that their focus is on preventing debt in local communities, it will not just be personally devastating for millions of people but hamper our chances of getting economic growth. Ultimately, I am asking Ministers to introduce a cost-cutting measure. The National Audit Office reported in 2018 that debt problems are so detrimental to the wellbeing of the British public that they lead to higher public spending on both welfare services, such as mental health services, and state-subsidised housing to the tune of £900 million a year.”
“If we underestimate the number of people in debt because the bigger group are better at juggling, can we really say that it is not a problem to be constantly borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, Paul to pay Penelope, and Penelope to pay both of them? Millions of people in this country are one bad argument with their partner, one new school uniform item needed or one parking fine away from being unable to manage, and they have just been through a month when everyone spends, on average, an extra £700 because it is Christmas. These people do not need us to judge them; they need us to help them.”
“It separated out those people that it thought just needed money guidance—tips on how to budget—but those people were building up arrears, and were recognised to be at a tipping point. Some 8 million people are listed as needing debt advice, but a further 13 million are at that tipping point. Any of us who have had someone come to our constituency surgery in financial difficulty know that the sooner we intervene, the more chance we have of success. With 21 million people at a tipping point, let us not let them tip; let us help them now. Research by the Centre for Responsible Credit shows that such people are already under extreme financial pressure. They frequently borrow to make ends meet. They use “buy now, pay later”, have unauthorised overdrafts, and are already behind on their consumer payments.”
“The Community Reinvestment Act gives lenders an explicit obligation to meet the needs of all borrowers in their localities, including those on low incomes, to help stop them being the main meals of the legal loan sharks in the first place. That is why we need to ensure that the Money and Pensions Service does not become primarily a website and helpline. Tackling debt in communities means helping people in communities, especially given the variation in debt between areas. If the service is just online, that does not uphold the principle of helping those most in need, and especially the most vulnerable. That matters because of the number of people who would benefit. In 2021, the service defined those in need as people who were behind on one priority bill or facing bailiffs.”
“We also have to stop commercial companies that make millions of pounds from pretending to offer debt solutions and claiming that they are helping consumers rather than pushing them further into debt. At the very least, the Insolvency Service should regulate such companies. Frankly, I would prefer a law that ensured that excessive profits cannot be made from somebody else’s personal debts by capping the charges. Sickeningly, many “buy now, pay later” companies present themselves as a money management service. That is why I am asking the Government to develop measures on what lenders are doing not only to reduce financial exclusion but to ensure that they are not the cause of debt themselves through bad lending practices. Even America, that great bastion of communist thinking, does more.”
“Yet around one third of people who need debt advice have “buy now, pay later” debt.That is why I am urging the Government—especially in the light of delays in regulating companies, which had a windfall this Christmas and will have another one next Christmas—to consider a windfall tax on the BNPL companies to help pay for the debt advice that is so desperately needed. The companies have written to me claiming that they are not against being regulated, which is odd because I was at the Labour party conference where they stood on a platform and claimed to be so. They have also said that they are happy to contribute to making donations towards debt advice, so let us take them at their word, and squeeze them as much as they have squeezed our constituents.”
“Above all, it is scandalous, given how implicated the “buy now, pay later” companies—the Klarnas, Clearpays and Laybuys of this world—are in the debt problems in this country and the length of time it has taken to get even close to some kind of regulation of them, that they do not even contribute to this pot, because they are not a form of regulated credit. Not only are our constituents going without protection from the ombudsman when they are mis-sold products; these companies are not even paying for the damage that they do.”
“Exeter CAB has seen a £125,000 cut to its services, Woking CAB a £189,000 cut and Coventry Independent Advice Service a cancelled grant for £325,000. The numbers go on across the country. Funding will get harder too because of the cost of living crisis, as more and more people cannot afford to make a debt repayment plan in the first place. The CAB says that half of the people it works with have a negative budget, and 66% of Money Advice Service users were also in that position. Therefore, there is a risk that we will not get the funding to get people out of this hole. The Money Advice Service needs to get involved in cases earlier, but a consultation by the previous Government last year on the future of the service said that, looking at what the overall level of debt advice should be, the funding required was out of scope.”
“The total funding available for debt advice in this country in 2018 was £196 million, with about a third of that coming from the levy on financial services and the rest coming either from local government or fair share creditors—the payments that people can get in a debt repayment plan to pay for services. We now know that the financial services levy is raising about £78 million, but we have no idea what is happening to the rest of the money needed, not least because local government is on its knees after 14 years of Conservative cuts. My own local authority is cutting the support that it offers to people struggling with council tax payments, let alone providing any debt advice. It is not alone.”
“We need to prevent people getting into debt in the first place and move them off the high-cost credit that causes so much of it. However, so few people in the current environment get the help that they desperately need to get out of this nightmare. The 2018 independent Wyman review found that just 1.1 million people got debt advice, with just 13% of those considered indebted. By 2020, it was estimated that 1.7 million were getting help. The Government set a strategy of 3.7 million by 2030, but, just last year, the Money and Pensions Service only saw 2 million people. That is not through a lack of trying. Some 82% of debt advisers told MAPS that there had been a large increase in demand, while just over half of them reported a decrease in the resources to cope with it. That is the nub of the debate today.”
“Then they stick them with late repayment fees and charges before lending to them again, even though they cannot repay it, because they are stuck in a spiral of unaffordable debt. In all of this debt, the most important thing that a person can do is talk about it. That means that they need somebody to talk to, because it could be the critical difference between getting out of the hole that they are in and burying themselves even further. The Financial Conduct Authority imposes a levy on all regulated financial services companies to pay for such support, and that includes funding the Money and Pensions Service. Others such as the citizens advice bureaux, which many of us will pay tribute to in our constituencies, and StepChange have to fundraise for themselves. Ultimately, in this environment we cannot afford to keep funding failure.”
“That is because of the cost of living crisis: they just cannot get hold of the money to keep things moving. Our credit union movement, which has been promised so much by so many different Governments, just cannot grow to keep up with the need. Governments have promised to invest in it but failed to do so. It has been as ripped off as those who ended up at Wonga or Klarna to make ends meet. I pay tribute to groups such as Fair4All Finance, which provides funding for credit unions such as the London Capital credit union that works in Walthamstow, but no credit union can compete with the online lenders who are pummelling our constituents on their phones and on their websites, offering them unprotected credit to get through to the end of the month so that they can buy a pizza.”
“So sue me for saying so. The Government set up a financial inclusion committee with consumer groups and financial institutions to look at how to provide individuals who have poor credit histories with access to safe and affordable credit. In this target-rich environment, there is much for the legal loan sharks in this country to feast on—and feast they do. Low-income households in this country owe £23 billion in unsecured loans and credit cards. That is up from £19 billion just in May last year. A total of 2.2 million low-income families have high-cost credit loans such as payday loans or pawn shop arrangements. Three million people told Ipsos last year that somebody in their family had gone to an illegal lender in the last three years. Banks do not want to lend to these people because they are seen as a bad bet.”
“Some £2.3 billion of that is owed on bills that have a massive consequence if people do not pay them or fall behind, such as council tax, rent or mortgages and energy bills—the kind where people end up losing their home or with the bailiffs at the door. It is not hard to see why. This is not profligacy; there is just too much month at the end of many people’s money. High inflation since the end of 2021 has baked in higher prices in areas such as food, and energy costs are rising again. Private rents have continued to increase ahead of inflation, up 8.7% last year and higher in places such as Walthamstow. Interest rates might have seen two cuts, but the full impact of elevated interest rates is still feeding through into mortgages. Yes, the legacy of Liz Truss will be felt for decades to come, in the empty pockets and multiple evictions.”
“However, that is not the one person every four minutes who is declared bankrupt or insolvent in this country. The Registry Trust estimates that 4.6 million people have one or more county court judgment. They are issued at a rate of 2.5 times more in lower-income communities such as mine than in higher ones. At the end of last year, lenders wrote off £576 million of debt, of which £291 million was credit card debt. That is £3 million a day being written off because people will just never pay it back. Four million households hold a loan they originally took out to pay for food or housing—that is worth around £9.6 billion.”
“The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recognised in October that there were 7 million low-income families in this country going without the essentials in the previous six months, including 5.4 million who had experienced food insecurity in the previous month. That is a fancy term for starving themselves because they could not afford to put food on the table. Furthermore, 4.3 million low-income households are in arrears on at least one household bill or credit commitment, and 14 million people in this country have less than 100 quid in their savings. One piece of Lego stuck in the washing machine and they are done. Some would say that taking on debt in response to that is manageable—and it is for some people. That is how they have got through the crisis.”
““Follow that!” is the first thing to say. Let me try. I will start by saying that often the British public would rather talk about sex than debt. Both can equally cause a lot of trouble, though. A 2019 study showed that the majority of people in this country believed it was easier to talk about miscarriages than about money. How that has changed in recent years, when the cost of living has become the top topic of conversation for millions of people because they are drowning in debt. Indeed, they are now the majority. In my constituency of Walthamstow, nearly 55,000 people are in financially vulnerable circumstances. That is 58% of my local population and way above the national average of 38%. Yet the truth is that debt is suffocating millions of people in this country; it is not just a north-east London phenomenon.”
“We all value the debt advisers. As my hon. Friend has just said, “buy now, pay later” companies do not yet contribute to the levy that pays for those people, but the companies themselves have said that they would make voluntary contributions. Would the Treasury consider approaching them to get that money ahead of their being part of the regulatory landscape, so that we can have more of these brilliant debt advisers?”
“Many of us, who are so delighted to see a Government that are prioritising tackling the pay gap, are equally concerned to ensure that we do not miss this opportunity to make the progress we need: to give dads back the time they need to be brilliant dads and employees, and to give mums the opportunities in the workplace denied to them, because too often society thinks that they put themselves out to pasture by having children. Only a Labour Government can understand the challenges that we face, but only a Labour Government can live to the highest standards, which Barbara Castle called us to, because it is her legacy that we are here to fight for and her legacy that will deliver for this country.”
“The answer is, therefore, not to reduce those rights, but to give fathers and second carers in a relationship rights to equally paid and protected leave, so that everybody of a certain age who might be looking after children is equally discriminated against. PAPa, paid and protected leave for fathers and second carers, is something that we could do through this piece of legislation. I will not tell the Minister how long it should be, but the principle that fathers need protected time in their own right is possibly one of the greatest tools for equality and improving productivity that we could bring into our economy.”
“There is a lot of evidence that even those women who do not have children experience discrimination in the workplace because employers think they might go and have children. The concern I raise with the Minister is not only the need to introduce a “right to know”—that 2020 legislation was not written by me, but by a brilliant woman called Daphne Romney, who is a fantastic QC on these issues and who worked with the Fawcett Society. I hope I can encourage the Minister to have a look at it and see if there is anything she might want to pick up. However, I also want to bring to the Minister’s attention my concern that if we only strengthen mothers’ rights in the workplace, we might reinforce the idea that it is only mothers who look after children, and therefore the gender pay gap could get worse and not better, and people will be left out.”
“What on earth are we doing as a nation, if we think that when someone is able to juggle looking after a family, they are somehow less rather than more capable, and when we do not recognise that we are asking men to do something impossible, which is to not be around their children at an early age and be the guy that they want to be, because we are asking women to pick up the slack for men’s employers? I am proud of many aspects of the Employment Rights Bill. I am proud of the equality action statements. They will be part of shining the light of disinfectant on the problem of the pay gap. Yet when we talk about the tools to tackle this, we have to recognise that if we inadvertently reinforce the stereotype that only women look after children, we may make the pay gap worse.”
“I pay tribute to women such as Carrie Gracie and Samira Ahmed, who took on major household names who were not paying women equally. This problem is widespread in our society. I want to return to the issue of the motherhood pay gap, because it is not just that women face a penalty when they have children, it is that men receive a premium. The evidence from workplaces is clear that even when women do return to work after motherhood, they are undervalued, underpaid, and considered to be less committed. The reverse is true for men. What a waste of talent in this country.”
“The lack of fines and the previous Government’s cavalier attitude towards the gender pay gap and ethnicity reporting—which they promised us, but never delivered—in tackling productivity and highlighting that lack of talent is a real challenge for us. We need to give people the tools, because there are no fines. One reason why I proposed the Equal Pay (Implementation and Claims) Bill was to give women the right to know the incomes of their male comparators, so they could bring an employment tribunal. We know that this has been one of the few ways that people have actually made progress on this. Last year’s figures show that the average award for sex discrimination was £50,000, while for race discrimination it was £10,000, and for disability it was £17,000, but some of the awards went up to nearly £100,000.”
“Women ask just as often for a pay rise; men are four times more likely to receive one. There is segregation within industries and it is increasingly evident that the biggest part of the pay gap is to do with motherhood, which I want to come on to. I take a very different view to the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden) on the Employment Rights Bill, which is why I think we need to address this issue. Five years ago, in October 2020, I put forward the Equal Pay (Implementation and Claims) Bill, because of the challenges that we are facing. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) is absolutely right that we have had pay gap reporting for many years now, but it is one thing to know there is a gap and another to have the tools to do something about it.”
“One of the answers is that we do not make the best use of our people. Let us kill the myth that when we talk about equal pay, or the gender pay gap, somehow this is women asking nicely for something as a treat. This is cold, hard economics we are talking about today, which is why it also matters when we do things that may inadvertently increase the gender pay gap. Today, I want to raise some concerns with the Government about that. When we kill the myths, we need to be clear: it is really not us, it is society. Data from the Fawcett Society shows that even when men and women work in the same occupations, in the same industries, doing the same working hours, and are the same age and ethnicity, two thirds of the difference in their income cannot be accounted for. That is discrimination. Let us be honest about what it is.”
“The first recorded instance was in Robert Owen’s labour exchange and, as a Co-op MP, I am sorry to say that it was not received favourably. I hope that we can address that today. Nor should we ever forget Barbara Castle’s contribution as a champion for equal pay. She paid for it with her career because, frankly, people in the Labour movement did not appreciate the argument that she made. Yet her argument was the argument that we always have to make, which is, first and foremost, about our economy. Pay gaps, whether to do with gender, ethnicity, or disability, represent productivity loss and loss of talent. We have to ask ourselves why this country is languishing in the bottom half of the OECD rankings when it comes to productivity and why we have stagnating living standards.”
“It is, as ever, a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger and I wish you a happy new year. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler), who has been a consistent champion of equalities for the entire time that we have been in Parliament. We could forgive ourselves for feeling that we have been here before, not only because it is wonderful to see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in his place at every Adjournment debate, but because we have been asking for equal pay and for pay gaps to be addressed in this country for the entire time that I have been in this House—15 years. We are latecomers to this debate: women have been asking for equal pay since 1833.”
“I am pleased to hear that the shadow Minister thinks that gender pay gap reporting is something that should drive change. Does he therefore want to apologise for the fact that the only business reporting that his party’s Government abolished, during the pandemic, was gender pay gap reporting? If he thinks the gender pay gap is such an important metric, does he now recognise that that move sent a terrible message about this data?”
“I absolutely welcome the commitment to look at these issues, but I want to put on record that many of us believe that shared parental leave has set us back in terms of equality between the genders. It has been a disaster in terms of who has taken it up, because it asks women to give up their maternity leave and men do not pick it up. We need to give men leave that is paid and protected in its own right if we are ever to have equality between the sexes. I put that on the Minister’s table as something we need to look at, because shared parental leave is not the answer here.”
“I am sorry that the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) is no longer here because he is right that Hamas are terrorists, but we need to be clear in this House that this is not being done in the name of the hostage families. The hostages’ families do not want to see babies freezing to death in Gaza, and they know this will not bring their loved ones home. The Minister was clear with us earlier that he had seen aid piling up at the borders and that Israel controls the borders. Impeding access to humanitarian aid is a direct breach of international humanitarian law, so for the avoidance of doubt, is it his testimony that Israel is impeding access at the borders by the way in which it is controlling them? I think he needs to be clear on this point, because it does have ramifications for us.”
“I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to tackling the backlog of appointments—all our constituents would benefit from that—and his honest recognition that there is a risk, because there are not two separate workforces. Unless we have sensible safeguards, we could end up paying the same NHS doctors more to do operations in the private sector. The Secretary of State for Education set a cap on the profits that can be made in the children’s care sector. Is the Secretary of State considering a similar cap to protect the NHS and ensure value for money in his work with the independent sector in the NHS?”
“He is right that the common story we hear time and again from victims of abuse—whether from grooming gangs, in care homes or in their own homes—is that they were not believed; nobody listened to them. How can we have the national conversation that we need to have about the culture of belief, putting victims first and finally ending the silence that has meant so many have been the victims of these perpetrators for so long?”
“May I just say, on behalf of every decent-minded MP across the House, how powerful and important it is to see the Safeguarding Minister here on the Front Bench with the Home Secretary? It is a testament to their commitment to getting this matter right and not being deflected, however hard other people try, from what really matters, which is the victims of these horrific crimes. I am proud to sit behind them and to support the work they are doing, and I welcome what they have said about bringing in a victims panel. In the spirit of the cross-party working that we will need to do on this, may I also welcome the words of the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare)?”
“The previous Government’s decision to prioritise fake tax cuts over sustained investment in our public infrastructure has cost us all dearly. Those who are sceptical of what I am saying should stand in an A&E and see the trolleys in the corridors, as 7.9 million people still wait for operations. They should talk to the schools with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, to the councils barely clinging on to provide social care, and to the police who just do not exist on our streets.”
“The damage lies at the door of the previous Conservative Government. This Government are devolving meaningful powers to local government and generating clean electricity, which are just two things that the previous Government could not even understand, let alone get a grip of. We are certainly developing a better approach to our infrastructure. In their final years in office, the Conservatives passed tax cuts that the country could not afford. There may have been genuine shocks around the world, but we can see the damage the Conservatives did, and we can see that they chose to compound it with bad choices. They did not just break Britain; they slashed it and burned it to the ground. That means this Government’s first year in office is a salvage operation.”
“It is extraordinary to follow Opposition Members, with their short-sightedness and, frankly, short memory of the damage they have done to this country. Indeed, it is the very definition of chutzpah. I have been in this place for 14 years, and I watched what happened unfold in my constituency and across the country. That is how we got to this Bill today. New MPs may wish to rewrite history, but many of us can give testimony to the damage the Conservatives did. This country should be grateful that we now have a Chancellor who is facing up to the fantasy public finances that we inherited from the previous Government, and who is trying to rebuild this nation. We finally have a framework for improving our rail services. Anybody thinking about getting on a train this Christmas knows how far we have to go.”
“For donkey’s years, I listened to the right hon. Gentleman try to claim that this country was on the up. I have seen the alternative. Please let him justify that.”
“In rural areas, there are 31% fewer childcare places compared with inner cities and town centres. The most deprived communities have 32% fewer places per child, compared with affluent areas. Of the poorest fifth of parents with young children, only a third use formal childcare, compared with 73% of the highest earning households. The previous Government reinforced that inequality, rather than addressing it in their childcare policies. That is why in my constituency there are still three children chasing every single childcare place.”
“As we make tough choices, it is important we do so in a way that means our productivity improves, which means looking out for parents as well as potholes. We are in the middle of the biggest expansion of childcare this country has ever seen, to try to get to a point where every parent can access 30 hours of free childcare for all under-fives. Under the last Government, some parents were paying more for childcare than for their rent or their mortgage. The previous Government repeatedly failed to invest, and then they made promises that they knew they could never keep, pushing up demand without increasing supply. We must not make the same mistakes. It is vital for our economy to make childcare more accessible and affordable, and we know we have a way to go.”
“Infrastructure is not just about roads and rail, but about the services people need every day to be able to get to work and to manage their commitments, including childcare. As somebody who spent 14 years urging the previous Government to invest in childcare, I will brook no lectures from the Opposition now they have had a damascene conversion to the idea that it matters. Childcare is economic infrastructure. [ Interruption. ] The right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) is chuntering from a sedentary position, but time and again he voted against proposals to make childcare a matter of economic infrastructure. New clause 4 is about how best we invest in our people to be able to grow our economy.”
“Worse, the public cannot be distracted from the problems they see by being given someone else to blame—trans people, refugees, immigrants, women or foreigners generally. That is a fantasy the British public did not buy at the last election, and they should not be promised it again. They know we have a difficult road ahead and difficult choices to make, but they will back those choices if they can see there is a reason to do so. Above all, the British public understand that this country needs investment and growth. I am chair of the Labour Movement for Europe and I think there needs to be discussion about our future relationship with Europe, but that is for another time. We also need infrastructure, which is why I have proposed new clause 4.”
“I will tell the right hon. Gentleman what this Government are going to do differently: they will make a difference to all our constituents by getting waiting lists down with the money provided to invest in our NHS. The previous Government were all vandals, and we have seen the damage they have done. The challenge before us in the Bill is to ensure this Government do not make the same mistakes, but instead address head-on the need to build the necessary foundations. To deal with the expectations of the public—our constituents—we need to talk more openly about the fact that having better services requires better funding through taxation. The broken Britain we now see will not fix itself with a bit of time.”
“We need to ensure that we save what is there and encourage those nurseries that can expand to do so. If we do that, we will reap the rewards, both in the Exchequer and in society. That is why early years provision matters to the future of this country. Research by the Education Policy Institute shows that 40% of the disadvantage gap at the age of 16 has already emerged by the age of five. Equally, investment in early years means we could save £16 billion a year later, according to the London School of Economics. It also means we will get more money, because more people—mothers, fathers and carers—can make the choice to work and pay tax.”
“Let me reach the hand of co-operation across the House to the hon. Gentleman, if he wants to finally work on what would be a genuinely affordable and accessible childcare system in this country. However, I will temper his enthusiasm, because his party made things worse. Under the previous Government, there was a 50% reduction in childcare place. We saw nurseries closing time and again because of the changes his Government made. We are starting from a foundation where the places simply do not exist. For the places that are there, too often it is those who can well afford childcare who are taking them. If we are to get to a position where we have the childcare places we need, so that every child can get the best start in life in this country, we need to invest.”