Early Years Family Support

Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Andrea Leadsom

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes there is now overwhelming evidence of the importance of the first 1,001 critical days of a new baby’s life in determining his or her lifelong physical and emotional wellbeing; notes the work of the Inter-Ministerial Group led by the Rt. hon. Member for South Northamptonshire, the Thirteenth Report of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, HC 1496, on First 1000 days of life and the Eleventh Report of the Science and Technology Committee, HC 506 on Evidence-based early years intervention; and calls on the Government to take strong and decisive action immediately to ensure that every baby gets the best start in life.

I am delighted to have the chance to speak today on a subject that is a real passion for me, and one of the reasons that I got into politics. I thank the Backbench Business Committee, particularly the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), for finding time for me to hold this important debate.

It is a great pleasure to see good friends from across the House here to support the motion this afternoon. I am looking forward to hearing some excellent speeches on an issue that, if we get it right, has the potential to be truly life-changing for so many in our society. We are here today to share the overwhelming evidence of the importance of the 1,001 critical days of a new baby’s life in determining his or her lifelong physical and emotional wellbeing, and to call on the Government to take strong and decisive action right away to ensure that every baby gets the best start in life.

I want to pay tribute to some recent work that has been undertaken in this important area by the Select Committees chaired by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston). I know that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk was keen to speak today and I am sorry that his duties elsewhere mean that he cannot be with us this afternoon.

As many right hon. and hon. Members will know, until recently I was chairing a cross-Whitehall inter-ministerial group at the request of my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister, to look specifically at how the Government can best improve support in the earliest years, for families and their newborn babies. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for her prioritisation of this key issue—I believe it can provide a vital part of her legacy.

I am told that the inter-ministerial group I chaired was the only significant piece of cross-departmental work under way, with the obvious exception of Brexit. I am so grateful to the Prime Minister for tasking me with the enormous responsibility of contributing my own experience and knowledge in this policy area to fundamentally change our society for the better. I was proud that one of the last things I did before stepping down from my role as Leader of the House was to sign off on the detailed recommendations of the group.

Before we turn to the recommendations, I want to take a few minutes to set out the science behind the importance of the 1,001 critical days. From conception to the age of two—the period that is now referred to as the 1,001 critical days—it is the existence of a secure and loving relationship with a key adult carer that literally shapes the way a baby’s brain develops. It is amazing that, in the first year of life, more than 1 million new neural connections per second are being created in the brain. Secure attachment to a loving adult carer has a lifelong beneficial impact on the baby’s developing emotional health, and the developing brain will literally learn that the world is a good place and that problems can be solved.

Not only that, but secure attachment in the earliest period of life can have a positive impact on our entire social fabric. It is not about the impact on the individual; it is the positive ripple effect that secure attachment creates. It is the emotionally capable adults that those children become, able to make friends, learn, hold down a job, find a good partner and then become good parents themselves. It is the society that we could create if we fully address this issue.

Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that insecure or, worse still, disorganised attachment leads to all of life’s problems, at one level there is no doubt that it severely limits a person’s ability to cope with life’s ups and downs, and we know that in the most extreme cases a person’s earliest experiences can totally wreck their life. Negative early experiences create new generations of troubled and insecure young people and are often passed down to their babies by parents who themselves suffered insecure attachment. This is known as the cycle of deprivation. I well recall discussions with Dame Louise Casey when she was the troubled families tsar, who became convinced that intervening much earlier would be vital to prevent the later behavioural challenges that she was seeing, and the many discussions with my local police and crime commissioner, who recognises on the street every day the impact of a person’s earliest experiences on their tendency towards later criminality, addiction and violence, as well as depression and suicide.

It is clear that the science of brain development matters not just in our early years, but is a cradle-to-grave public health issue, the symptoms of which are evident in the years and decades that follow poor early experiences, which can cost the individual and society so much.

[Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Ind)]

Before the right hon. Lady moves on, let me say that I chair a multi-academy trust. We are trying, without additional expenditure, to use midwives and health visitors to work from schools, so that any feeling that they are hostile places might be lessened, and to seek funds for home visiting during the first two years, so that mothers and fathers can learn skills that are good for them and even better for their young children, as the right hon. Lady has highlighted. Does she agree that one of our pleas to Government should be to look at how they spend existing budgets, as well as to give this subject the priority it deserves?

[Andrea Leadsom]

The right hon. Gentleman and I have worked together on this subject for many long years. I pay tribute to him for his amazing contribution in recognising the importance of secure early interventions and everything we can do to make people’s lives more successful and secure. I am sure that some of his ideas will be, and are being, taken forward by Government.

Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Andrea Leadsom

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s contribution. She will understand that the House of Commons Commission looked very carefully at the options for a temporary decant, which could mean eight or even 10 years out of this place. She will also understand that, from a security point of view and from the cost-effectiveness point of view, the House of Commons Commission looked at the best combination of both those things. Temporary structures that are not possible to secure, and structures that are by their nature temporary and provide no legacy value, were also looked at carefully, but the decision that was taken to move to Richmond House provides permanent legacy value as well as the cheapest—or at least equally cheap—cost to the taxpayer.

[Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Ind)]

Most people must be in favour of something happening, but I question the timing. There are many people in all our constituencies who are hungry and face destitution. How dare the Government bring forward a Bill before we are out of austerity and have made good those cuts in the living standards of the very poorest? Surely we should not be considering whether this fire door or that fire door works and whether the scheme is temporary until we are out of the age of austerity and have rewarded those who have paid most, which is the poor.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I have the greatest respect for the right hon. Gentleman, and I completely understand his point. He will appreciate that the Palace of Westminster is in the state it is in precisely because Members have made those exact points for more than 150 years. The reality is that it is now costing us a fortune every single day—money is being spent by the taxpayer to patch and mend a building that is beyond patching and mending. Seizing this bull by the horns and doing something proactively about it is designed to give good value for taxpayers’ money, instead of what is happening now, which is spending more and more money to try to restore something while we sit here, which will be much more expensive to do.

Sure Start Children’s Centres

Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Andrea Leadsom

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). I feel at least as passionately as he does about the need for early intervention and about the need to support the youngest in our society, and I wish to use this speech to press for far more evaluation of what works. I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who I am pleased to call a friend, on the need for children’s centres to be far more at the heart of children’s services generally. I absolutely agree with his suggestion that people should go to such a centre to register for child benefit and for initiation ceremonies to welcome their child into the world. Such things are all crucial to ensuring that Sure Start children’s centres are at the heart of everything to do with infants and their families—that is incredibly important. I welcome the Government’s intention to introduce far more health visitors, because that will strengthen the ability of children’s centres to meet local needs.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) on his words and on his recommendation that the Government think carefully about whether we want this to be a purely localist agenda or whether there needs to be some universal, centrally driven remedy on children’s centres. I believe that localism is key, because local communities know best how to deal with the issues in their area, and I wish to talk a little about my experience of Sure Start.

[Mr Frank Field]

The hon. Lady talks about the importance of localism, but one of the report’s recommendations is that central Government ought to say that Sure Start ought to buy in more services from outside organisations. There is a balance to be struck between allowing local bodies to do anything, which might just be to keep things as they are, and an approach that engages some of the best organisations, which so far have not got much of a look in from Sure Start funding.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. As I said at the outset, I wish to make a plea for better evaluation of what works. My hope, although not my direction, is that more Sure Start children’s centres would therefore follow best practice.

From 2001 to 2009, I was chairman of the Oxford Parent Infant Project—OXPIP—which is a children’s charity operating around Oxfordshire. In the past year, it has become co-located with the Rose Hill Sure Start children’s centre. When I first became its chairman, OXPIP helped families who were struggling to bond with their newborn babies and provided psychotherapeutic support for families who were simply desperate. I am talking about people who are perhaps suicidal or about to harm their baby, who are desperately depressed and who simply cannot cope. OXPIP helps those parents to get over that, to build a secure attachment with their babies and to move on confident of being loving parents as part of a loving family. OXPIP’s results have been truly astonishing and there is a desperate need to evaluate quantitatively the work of such organisations, so that such best practice can become widespread in children’s centres.

In 2001, the Rose Hill Sure Start children’s centre was just starting out, as was OXPIP, and in those days it was all about creating a large building and it had a large budget. It was focused on outreach and putting lots of resources into play. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness made the good point that it has taken a lot of time to get children’s centres to the point where they are really effective, they know what works and they know where the best value for money lies, so it would be a great shame now to try to form any sort of revolution in children’s centres and end up throwing away all the good stuff that has come out of that long term of experience.

In those early days, OXPIP was a charity with very little funding, no statutory money whatever and only the money it could raise through its own efforts. We were successful in getting a significant and ballooning lottery grant, so we had three years of ever-rising income from which we could build on our platform. The sad fact was that the Sure Start children’s centre would not even cover the cost of providing a service. It wanted to engage OXPIP’s services, but only at a flat rate that did not reflect the true cost of providing it. We therefore had a ridiculous scenario in which a charity that was living hand to mouth and was totally dependent, in the early days, on the good will of volunteers was subsidising a Sure Start children’s centre that had a huge budget and that did not seem to understand that OXPIP’s work really defined what Sure Start was all about—providing children with a sure start in life.

From that day to this, 10 years on, we have gone from strength to strength. As I have said, in the last year OXPIP has co-located with the Sure Start children’s centre, and that has been a complete success story. They have many different approaches regarding the different backgrounds of the many diverse nationalities and cultures found in Oxford. They provide support to fathers, mothers, grandparents, foster parents and adoptive parents, and many different services. Now that OXPIP, of which I remain a trustee, is co-located with Sure Start, we can focus on providing psychotherapeutic support for families who are really in difficulty. That has worked very well. I wanted to share that experience with hon. Members because I feel that Sure Start children’s centres have come a very long way and it is terribly important that the Government seek to improve on that and to provide more evidence about what works best, rather than interfering with and possibly damaging it.