First 1,000 Days of Life

Jen Craft Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)]

On behalf of the Health and Social Care Committee, it is a pleasure to present to the House our fifth report of this Parliament, which is on the subject of the first 1,000 days of life. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this statement. We chose this subject because this period of life is crucial for long-term health, educational outcomes and life chances, and because child health in this country is in an alarmingly poor state. As the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has stated, our children have some of the poorest health outcomes in Europe. That is why this report is so important, and why it is essential that we get this right.

We know that investment in early intervention is highly cost-effective, yet we continue to see rising obesity, uneven vaccination coverage and persistent inequalities. We therefore welcome the Government’s expansion of the family hub network. However, we must be clear about the scale of the challenge those hubs are being asked to address—supporting a much broader range of children than the previous Sure Start system with fewer resources. That is why we have called on the Government to go further by ensuring access to family hubs in every community, underpinned by reliable, long-term funding. A single hub per county is simply insufficient and will leave families isolated. This must be matched by urgent action to restore the health visitor workforce, which is the backbone of early years care. Since 2015, numbers have fallen by 43%, leaving a shortfall of 5,000 posts. Caseloads remain dangerously high, sometimes exceeding 750 children. We have therefore called for a funded plan to recruit at least 1,000 additional health visitors.

The wider workforce is also critical. Health visitors are not the only key professionals involved in supporting children and their parents during that first 1,000-day period—midwives, children’s nurses, general practitioners, early years practitioners, speech and language therapists, paediatricians and others all play incredibly important roles. The Government’s forthcoming NHS 10-year workforce plan must include specific, funded targets for increasing the number of professionals working in early years roles, underpinned by updated modelling of future demand. However, we cannot focus solely on the NHS, as many of these professionals work outside it. That is why we have supported the call of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for a children’s health workforce strategy to address the staffing needs holistically.

Our report also addresses the serious decline in vaccination uptake. Vaccination is one of the most effective public health interventions, yet rates have fallen since 2012, with stark regional and ethnic disparities. It is indefensible that one child died of measles and 11 lost their lives to whooping cough in 2024. The Committee was also unimpressed by the Government’s unwillingness to revisit their vaccination strategy. The Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton), told us the strategy was “stabilising” vaccination numbers, but we need a strategy capable of reversing current trends. We have called on the Government to develop a new plan to reverse the decline and to reinstate the target of 95% coverage in the NHS planning guidance.

Finally, we need to ensure that the many agencies involved in supporting children at the start of life are all working towards the same goal and that it is easy for them to work together. Challenges in sharing data and the absence of a shared outcomes framework undermine accountability and strategic planning across local systems. We look forward to the Government’s plans to publish a shared outcomes framework in April this year, which they must use as a tool to drive better integration and joint working, including between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education.

Every child deserves the best start in life. Failing to support children and their parents properly during those first 1,000 days is short-sighted, as it merely stores up problems for the future. However, if we get it right, we will create a generation that is healthier, better educated, ultimately wealthier and, most importantly, happier. I hope that this report and its recommendations can play a part in making that happen. I commend the report to the House.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

It was a pleasure to serve under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend during our Committee’s inquiry into the first 1,000 days of life. I was particularly struck by how, at this crucial period in a child’s lifetime—for those who are not aware, the 1,000 days begins at the moment of conception and goes up until they are two years old—so many services that should basically be placing a hug around the family and around the child have instead been decimated. Those services come at a critical stage. I am grateful that the Minister for Early Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West and Mid Berkshire (Olivia Bailey), is on the Front Bench to hear the statement.

Does my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton) agree that if the Government does not grasp the scale of this challenge or accept our Committee’s recommendations—I urge them to do so in full—we run the risk of undermining some of our reforms in special educational needs and disabilities? By investing in the early years and by taking the action that that my hon. Friend has outlined—we must ensure early intervention and that we rebuild the health visitor network, so that the families who need extra support and care are identified early and can be got into the network of family hubs to receive that support—the rest of our reforms, including to the SEND system, can go ahead. Without that investment, and without the Government taking heed of what our Committee has recommended, we run the very real risk of all that work being undermined.