PARENTS across Britain will be offered care for all schoolchildren from 8am to 6pm every day under plans for a third Labour term to be announced by Tony Blair and other ministers next week.

A guarantee that by the end of the next Parliament everyone will have “universal, high-quality, flexible and affordable” childcare will be delivered by the Prime Minister as he tries to lift the sights of his party and the country beyond the crisis over Iraq.

Parents will be able to drop their children off at breakfast clubs, where they will stay until they go to school, and pick them up at after-school clubs at 6pm, where they will have been since leaving school at 3pm.

The proposal is designed to show that Labour is focused on the needs of “hard-working families”. The guarantee will be that care is available in or around all local schools and that children will be under supervision for ten hours a day. During school holidays, working parents will be given the chance to send children to holiday clubs.

Ministers are also to promise greater flexibility and choice to the working parents of children aged less than 5.

At present, they are entitled to 2½ hours of nursery education daily. Under new plans parents would be able to send children aged 3 and 4 for two full days’ nursery education if it suited their personal circumstances, rather than sending them each day.

The cost of the childcare scheme when fully implemented across the country will run into hundreds of millions of pounds. It will be jointly funded by taxation and contributions from parents, but the cost will be set at a level that parents find acceptable. Senior Labour sources said last night: “When we say affordable, we mean it. It would be pointless having a scheme like this if people feel they cannot take it up.”

The plan will be one of several third-term ideas put forward next week as Mr Blair tries to show that Labour has not run out of steam.

Ian McCartney, the Labour chairman, will offer party members a bigger say in policymaking and Government decisions in a major organisational shake-up.

The proposals are intended as an olive branch to activists who complain that their views have been ignored by ministers since Labour took power.

At the same time, Mr Blair is concerned to address the fall in Labour’s membership, which now stands at little more than half the 1997 total of 407,000.

His proposed changes would mean activists and unions in the party’s national policy forum being given greater power to discuss “real-time” issues, possibly including the decision to invade Iraq, and get more feedback from ministers.

Mr McCartney, who negotiated a “peace deal” with trade unions at the party’s policy meeting in Warwick this summer, has been strengthened in his position as the party’s representative in Government after the failure of attempts to oust him in last month’s reshuffle.

He said last night: “The party should be able to influence the Government on issues which arise outside the manifesto-making process. We must be better at engaging with the membership.”

Although the document being published in Brighton acknowledges that it may not always be “realistic” for ministers to consult members on some decisions, Mr McCartney added: “We are all concerned to ensure that in a third term we work well together.”

He also hopes to reinvigorate local parties by getting conference agreement on rule changes allowing them to form more flexible organisations instead of being bound by Labour’s 100-year-old structure. That would mean ward branches being replaced by looser community-based forums, some of which could be specifically for ethnic minorities.

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