Sure Start Children’s Centres

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct that the interest we are paying on our debt is 39 times the Sure Start budget under the previous Government. If we really cared about our children’s future, would we have saddled them with a debt at that level? Clearly not. I am afraid, however, that the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues in the last Labour Cabinet were happy to spend, spend, spend without any thought to whether future generations would be saddled with an enormous debt. It is to the great credit of the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister that they were prepared to ensure that a coalition Government took the responsible steps necessary to deal with the dire economic mess, and it is to the discredit, I am afraid, of the current shadow Cabinet that not a single constructive suggestion has come forward for how to deal with the deficit. In just a few days’ time, when people think about how to cast their vote, I hope that they will reflect on which parties are acting responsibly in dealing with the national crisis, and which parties prefer posturing, irresponsibility and the emptiness of eternal opposition.

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

I would like to exempt one person from that stricture, however, and it is the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), to whom I am happy to give way.

[Mr Field]

The whole House welcomes the re-announcement by the Secretary of State that the number of poor two-year-olds who will receive nursery education will rise from 30,000 to 130,000. To ensure that it occurs, will the Government ring-fence the money?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I wish to pose a question at the beginning of my short contribution: why are we attaching such importance to today’s debate? I say that because Sure Start is part of a wider area of concern, which the Secretary of State rightly called the “foundation years”. There are two reasons why the House is concerned about this area and what is happening to it, how it will be developed and how it might be affected by any cuts programme. The first is that over the past decade or so we have been given a great deal of new knowledge about how brains develop. In the past, we looked to schools and universities to make good class differences, but development in neuroscience suggests that we need to start much earlier and take action as children develop from the womb and until the age of five. So if we are really concerned about widening life chances and ensuring that people can move from their early years into education and into work, we need to prioritise the foundation years.

Much of the concern of Labour Members has been about what has been happening to Sure Start, and I want to pose some questions about that and end with a suggestion. We are not going to persuade the Government to go back on their non-ring-fencing, much as we would like them to, and so I make a plea to them. Other programmes and public expenditure reviews will take place during this Parliament and I hope that before the Government embark on their second, and probably last, public expenditure review for this five-year Parliament, they will question whether, with hindsight, the non-ring-fencing of some of these key services has been a good idea. The Secretary of State needed all his skills to avoid answering questions from Labour Members today, because real losses are clearly involved when local authorities with reduced budgets have to make choices on what they think is most important in the area covered by the intervention grant.

If the Government are to make real sense of the foundation years during this Parliament, they will need to change their attitude towards non-ring-fencing. I intervened earlier to ask whether the money for the new initiative of very significantly increasing the number of poor children between two and three who will receive nursery education will be ring-fenced, and the Secretary of State gave us the good news that it would be. So we can conclude that although the Government are not going to say in public that, with hindsight, they were probably wrong not to ring-fence, it is clear that in any future settlement they will prioritise those areas where they believe the greatest gains for taxpayers can be got from spending their money. I suggest that, in the next review, foundation years spending is one area that needs to be ring-fenced.

The second question that I wish to pose applies particularly to Labour Members, but also to those on the Government Benches. We are all anxious to present Sure Start in the best possible light. It is true that it has established itself as a universal service that is non-stigmatising and offers help, but I question whether we have the information at our disposal to be so confident that all Sure Start centre budgets are being spent in the best way possible. When Sure Start began in Birkenhead 10 years ago, I sought in vain to gain from our four local centres information on the number of children in their area, the number of children that they were contacting and whether they were ensuring that the greatest help went to the most-deprived children—I never received answers. Now that Sure Start centres know that things are up for grabs and that, for example, the schools in Birkenhead are probably going to bid for the centres, people are of course anxious to talk about what their services might provide.

In an age in which there is less money in most areas for Sure Start, it is more important that the money is spent on the poorest children, not the richest. Adam Smith’s hidden hand seemed to work at the doors of Sure Start, in that the doors were opened most widely to those bushy-tailed mums who are confident about themselves and who saw what a wonderful service it was and went in—they have benefited fully. I still ponder about the number of mothers in my constituency who are very poor, who are suffering from post-natal depression and with whom nobody makes contact. That is the group that Sure Start needs to be most involved with.

[Dan Rogerson]

Does the right hon. Gentleman think we could ensure that the more resource-intensive activities that take place in the children’s centres could be targeted while also ensuring that they can still be used in other ways to encourage everybody to come in, to work together and to learn from each other and support each other? Does he think we can get the balance between those two things?

[Mr Field]

My report tries to suggest how we can keep the service universal while also concentrating help on those in greatest need. That is crucial if in the next 10 years we are to see not only a development of the Sure Start budgets, but a significant increase in the budgets for foundation years—that is where any new money should go. It would help Sure Start to meet that objective if the Government were to move as quickly as they could to ensure that foundation years provision overall, and Sure Start in particular, was paid by results. In that context, we need to consider whether more children are better ready each year to start school as a result of expenditure in this area. I have asked heads in my constituency, where we have had Sure Start for 10 years, and they have said that that is not so.

The collapse in parenting may be occurring at a greater pace in some areas than it is more generally throughout the country—this problem is not a particular one. One of the great reasons why we support the foundation years is that more children are less well nurtured now than was the case 10, 20 or 30 years ago. One of the great things that Sure Start is about is trying to ensure that those young people who did not have good parents and who did not learn the ropes from them find from somebody else the best way of ensuring that their children are really fit to start their first day of school.

I hope that the Government have learned the lessons about ring-fencing. We will see this in their actions, because I do not expect a Minister to say at the Dispatch Box, “I think our approach was wrong, but next time it will be played differently.” Secondly, I hope that we all agree that whatever our framework for Sure Start, we want to ensure that the most vulnerable children are helped most. I wish to make a brief suggestion about the next stage of this policy. The Government have accepted all the proposals that they could immediately accept from my report, but one proposal relies on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I suggested that each time the Chancellor considers whether to increase benefit rates for children, he should consider whether in that year it would be more appropriate to spend some or all of that money not on benefit increases, but on building up foundation years provision.

Some Labour Members are slightly apprehensive about that suggestion, because we have been committed to abolishing child poverty, as defined in monetary terms, by 2020. Those on the Government side are also committed to that and I think that Labour Members fear that if the Government decided to move moneys from benefit increases to services, we would lose that goal of abolishing child poverty as we defined it when we were in government. I wish to suggest that that clash does not exist. A couple of years ago, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation supported research examining the most effective ways to ensure that more children live in households with incomes above the target of two thirds of median earnings. It found that that was done not by increasing benefits, but by increasing the amount of child care. In fact, if we attended to that and ensured that child care was of high quality, up to half of those children who are now deemed to be poor would not be poor because their parents would be able to combine the work and tax credits that are available to give them an income that would take them out of our definition of financial poverty. I suggest that the Government consider significant increases in child care and that they finance that by holding back on some benefit increases for children in future years. We will not only achieve more quickly the goal of abolishing the numbers of children in financial poverty but, by ensuring that child care is of the highest quality, we will also ensure that many of those children are better prepared to start school and that their lives will be very different from those of their parents.

I chair the new academy in Birkenhead and we have been debating what should be in our contract with the town. I think that one part of our contract will be that we will run an academy that will ensure that children coming to our school will have the opportunity to get better jobs than their parents did when they had to start work. That is what most parents mean by social mobility, and I hope that I have shown today that if we consider the amount and quality of child care, we might not only lessen the amount of financial child poverty in our country but significantly open up the life chances of our poorest children.