This brings me back to the point I've just made, which is on early intervention. This encompasses all of that sort of work.
There are some interesting things about child care that we discovered. Again, if you have a chance to really go through this stuff you'll see there's a section on child care in here. Also, in the report that I've done with Graham Allen, the Labour MP, we looked very carefully at the early intervention models that exist around the world. We've done a huge amount of work on this. I recommend that you have a chance to look at that as a group, as an organization, as a committee.
What we do know is that there is child care and child care. The very best child care is of course the parents taking the decision to see that child through for a period of time and having that one-on-one care, with one of the parents responsible for the empathetic love and nurture that is critical at the beginning. But if that for some reason can't be done, if there are pressures of money, etc., and if there are two parents and they both want to go out to work, or if there's one parent who has to work, it's who replaces that. Then you have a hierarchy of child care, and it's worth looking at that hierarchy.
We think there's not enough done to support the functional extended family in this process. If you are a member of an extended family in the U.K.--I don't know what it's like here--you cannot receive any money for looking after your daughter's child, let's say, as a grandmum, or whatever. We think that's rather stupid and pointless. We think some money should be available for them, because after all they're doing a service, and if it's not them, then they're going to be paying a lot more money to go to a child minder anyway. So we know that therefore the figures show that really good support from the extended family--obviously where the family is functional and capable--has a very good effect on the child in the absence of the mother or the father looking after them. We think that works.
Failing that, we think that obviously very good one-on-one nursery care works. At the bottom of the pile, which people don't understand, are these multi-child nurseries, I have to say, which we found have very poor results. In some cases they may lead, even in middle class families, to difficulties later on. The parents place them there in the belief that they're giving a good service, but in fact because there are so many children in them and there are so few people who look after the children, they don't get this one-on-one development, which is vital, absolutely vital, to the child.
We think more work needs to be done looking at that multi-child nursery. We think that too often government is obsessed with health and safety. We in the U.K. have this big thing about that, so when they're inspected they look at whether they have fire exits, is everybody clean, and are there enough people here to look after them in a general sense. Nobody actually looks at the quality of care. The quality of care should really be looked at in child care. This empathetic, one-on-one care is absolutely vital, and it can be quite difficult if it doesn't exist.
So we do believe in that, but as I say, the hierarchy works. As for early intervention, if you can please have a look at that, it's critical.