No, I'm not surprised at all. When it started off, it was only available in seven local authorities. In terms of how the families found out that it was available, they found it out through the childcare providers, where they already had their children there. So it was absolutely what we would have expected, and that will continue. But, of course, we were not able to fully advertise the childcare offer until it was available in all the local authorities, which was last April. So we are planning, this autumn, quite a big push now to try to make it available to everybody—so everybody knows about it. So, no, this is the pattern we would have expected, and I think anybody who's involved in starting up something in childcare will know you have to wait a number of years before you actually see it being fully taken up.
I guess the question that it raises in my mind is: does this mean that, actually, it hasn't been an incentive to get somebody back into work, because they were already in work and already had childcare provision? What you've done is you've directed money to people who were already spending that money anyway. So it hasn't been a move towards getting people into work because they couldn't afford childcare.
Well I think that that is something that we are moving towards, because the take-up of the offer is actually increasing each month, which is why I call it a great success. At the end of July, we hit almost 16,000 children accessing the offer, which obviously means that there are 16,000 families benefiting from this, and the feedback that we have had from parents is that they have been able to—. They've got more money available, which is obvious, which is great, because obviously more money is available to plunge into the economy and carry out that sort of thing, and we've got examples of parents who've been supported into work through programmes like Parents, Childcare and Employment to begin with, and then have gone on to access the offer. So, that's again a progression. So, I think we are seeing signs that people are moving on, have got more ability to be flexible in the work that they're doing, but I hope that when we look at it again, we will be able to see people actually moving into work because of having the access to childcare.
Okay. Before—