Hefin David AM: So, given the point you've made about grandparents and family, wouldn't it be sensible, then, to offer a subsidy to grandparents to provide this kind of care?
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: Unregistered grandparents?
Hefin David AM: Well, through some kind of analysis of that.
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: Well, we don't think so and there are good reasons behind this.
Hefin David AM: Is it because you say that they wouldn't be registered as carers for their own family member?
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: Yes, but there's a deeper reason behind that registration as well. The childcare offer isn't only to just provide childcare; it's the wider aspects that come with this. This childcare offer ties into the foundation years offer. There's an element of education linked to the childcare offer—there's that 10 hours of the early education foundation years as well. The two tie together. So, there's an issue here with quality, about socialisation and how children learn in an environment, as opposed to purely—as great as all our grandparents and aunts and uncles are—simply child-minding. That's one important distinction. So, the focus of this scheme is very much on registered licensed providers, which could be, by the way—because we do have them, and we're discussing this at the moment internally and with the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years and others—grandparents who are actually registered and inspected by the care inspectorate? We're having those discussions.
Hefin David AM: How many of them are there?
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: We don't think there is a huge number, but we're trying to bottom this out at the moment. We haven't got the exact number, but we don't think they are huge numbers, but there are, in our constituencies, registered, licensed, inspected grandparents who look after other people's children in a little group of four or five or six or seven, but also their own grandchildren.
Hefin David AM: So, they're a kind of grandparents club.
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: Yes. Now that, I would say to you—and I know that Darren raised this on the floor yesterday as well—is markedly different in the nature of it, because it's registered and licensed, than simply informal grandparents or aunts or uncles. I say that as well because we also get people who will say to us, 'I don't want to be paid for looking after my grandchildren; I look after my grandchildren because I look after them'.
Hefin David AM: And what about the view, given that you said that capacity wasn't an issue, of the National Day Nurseries Association, which says that Wales has the most fragile childcare sector in Great Britain?
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: I don't agree we have the most fragile, but the childcare offer gives us an opportunity to make it more resilient and more robust. We know from the early piloting, and as we roll it out, that there is the immense diversity within the childcare sector, and we're talking about everything from those very small terraced homes that have been licensed and registered to take six or seven children, to large, complex environments that perhaps are on maintained premises within school premises, provided by a voluntary or third sector organisation. So, there's immense complexity and we know that that differs across Wales, and we also know there's immense regional variation in the scale and the type of childcare offer. What the roll-out allows us to do, backed by £60 million of capital money behind it, in terms of capital development of childcare facilities, backed by a 10-year workforce development plan for childcare—and bear in mind this is bolted in as part of our foundational economy approach as well—that means, by 2020, we get to the point where we're putting the money into the capital development but also to the workforce development, because in some areas we're finding it's not to do with lack of provision and facilities, it's to do with lack of staff. In other areas, we're finding there are plenty of staff but not the adequate facilities. We've got to get it right.
Hefin David AM: That's fair enough, but is it realistic to think that there's going to be capacity growth in the next two to three years to deliver the product? Is that realistic to think that that foundational sector can provide that level of staffing?
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: Yes, I think it is, absolutely, because, again, what we're finding is we've got several things going on at once in terms of how we monitor and assess the development of this roll-out. One is the work that we're doing on the ground with the phased roll-out, so we're literally learning live time, and I have pretty much weekly or fortnightly updates on how things are going, but also there is a termly update as well. We've also commissioned additional work from Arad to look at this first phase of the roll-out that we've done to see what that tells us as well. But the feedback that we're getting from the childcare providers themselves, on the basis that we're now identifying where either the gaps in the workforce or the physical facilities are, is that, 'Yes, we can do this', because we're putting the money in, we have the strategy for the workforce development, and it's not going to be the same in all parts of Wales. It's not as if what we're saying is, 'Here's what we're going to do all of a sudden—flick a switch and we have a universality of the same type of provision everywhere.' So, let me give you one key example. Alongside this, alongside the £60 million capital fund, alongside the workforce development, we've also identified a separate strain of money into cylch meithrin. We know that there is a shortage in parts of Wales for Welsh language childcare development. We're specifically putting money into developing that, and, in fact, the first one of those will be, from that new tranche of money, opening up, I think, in September. They anticipate, as part of our big strategy with Welsh language development, we'll have an additional 40 of those by—
Jo-Anne Daniels: Thirty.
Huw Irranca-Davies AM: It's an additional 30 by 2020, and an additional doubling of that in the 10 years after that. We can't take this for granted, Hefin. This is difficult. This is hard work, but we have everything in place to make it happen.

Summary: Huw Irranca-Davies first talked about the registration of grandparents. Next, Huw Irranca-Davies denied the statement that Wales has the most fragile childcare sector in Britain, pointing out that childcare offers can make the section more resilient and robust. To continue, Huw Irranca-Davies mentioned that there would be capacity growth in the next several years to deliver the product.