Infants, Parents and Carers Bill

Meg Hillier Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

The Government removed the requirement to ringfence the funding for Sure Start, and because local authorities were not required to spend that money in that way, they made their choices accordingly. I accept that it was the wrong priority, and I hope the whole House is the better for knowing that.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Some Sure Start places in London were created before Sure Start was formally created, and having seen my children go through it, I saw its direct benefits. Sure Start was structured around hubs, and there was a desire to go out and visit people at home—indeed, many of us visit people in their homes. As the right hon. Gentleman says, Ministers will interpret this measure, but there is something about a home visit by professionals that reveals a great deal about the challenges that children face, whether before going to nursery or afterwards, and whether by a health visitor or a midwife. From his research in developing the Bill, does he have anything to say about the importance of that?

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

I remember with respect to my own children the importance of a visit by the midwife, even after birth, and that is essentially the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings was making about the importance of district nurses. I entirely agree with the hon. Lady.

Clause 1 lays a duty on the Secretary of State to make regulations to define these services, and the functions that the Secretary of State will carry out. Their primary duty is to work out what those services actually contain.

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[Helen Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right. I mentioned the need for early access to SEND support, and I would include audiology in that category. Those services are vital, as are speech and language services, which we know are all too often not available at the earliest possible opportunity. In a moment, I will speak about the importance of that very early intervention. That network is the village, and the village should be available in every community for every family, right across the country, every single week of the year.

One of the proudest achievements of the Labour Governments of 1997 to 2010 was the creation of Sure Start—a children’s centre in every community, bringing together a range of universal services for pregnant women, new parents and carers, and children under a single roof in local neighbourhoods. I once again pay tribute to my predecessor, Dame Tessa Jowell, for her pioneering work to establish Sure Start right across the country. The results of Sure Start were transformative, with long-term evaluations showing that integrated early childhood interventions significantly improved long-term health, especially for disadvantaged children; reduced hospital admissions; and improved GCSE results. The analysis also showed that investment in those services represented exceptional value for money and a positive financial return, with every pound spent on Sure Start delivering more than twice as much back in societal benefits.

My own daughters were born in 2005 and 2008, and we experienced at first hand the benefits of that investment in the form of antenatal and early childhood support. It provided a gold standard in community midwifery services, excellent health visitors, good breastfeeding support, a drop-in speech and language therapy clinic when one of my daughters needed that, and a wealth of other services. All of this was delivered a very short distance from home in our local community, so we also got to meet other parents and babies at the same stage and to build relationships with them.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend and I have had similar experiences of the system. For me, one of the important things was that it did not stigmatise going to seek advice, whether it be about child psychology or speech and language. Does my hon. Friend agree that when Ministers start working on how to flesh out this Bill and put it into practice, it is really key that it must be universal?

[Helen Hayes]

Later in my speech, I will make exactly that point about the importance of these services being available on a universal basis, for the reasons my hon. Friend alludes to.

It was a tragedy that Sure Start centres were one of the earliest and most extensive casualties of the austerity of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition Government of 2010. The funding was not ringfenced; in many cases, the services were not statutory; and the integrated service design model was not mandated. In many ways, the strongest argument for the Bill we are debating today is the experience of just how easy it was for Sure Start to be dismantled, ultimately resulting in the closure of 1,300 centres and the loss of that precious and vital integrated network of support for babies and their families, which had been delivering so much. Those closures were compounded by the covid-19 pandemic, when access to face-to-face services in early childhood was very limited. We have seen the impact of that, particularly the increase in the number of children with speech, language and communication difficulties coming through the system in recent years.

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[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Gateshead South) (Lab)]

It is truly an honour to speak in this important debate. I am happy to follow the excellent speech by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson).

This is such an important Bill, as we have heard. I thank the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for his work on bringing it forward; I have thoroughly enjoyed working with him on it. I also thank the 1001 Critical Days Foundation, which I have had the privilege of working with over many years, for its unwavering support for the Bill and beyond, and for its tireless commitment to ensuring that every single baby has the best possible start in life.

That thanks extends, in particular, to the former Member for South Northamptonshire, Dame Andrea Leadsom. She has been the biggest champion of this issue, whether in this place during her whole time as an MP—I worked with her on it—or from the outside, as now. I also thank the wonderful former Health Minister Will Quince, who is now the chief executive of the 1001 Critical Days Foundation, for his dedication and work on getting the Bill to where it is today. We all know how much work went into these important six clauses, as we heard from the right hon. Gentleman for New Forest West in his opening remarks.

Before I go into why the Bill is so important, it would be useful to contextualise how we got here—some of this we have heard in the other excellent speeches. I was extremely proud when the last Labour Government introduced Sure Start to reduce the impact of child poverty and address social exclusion by improving the life chances of children under five, especially those who grow up in disadvantaged areas. I pay enormous tribute, as others have, to the late, great Baroness Tessa Jowell. She would be so proud of the right hon. Gentleman—who is not actually listening to me at this point. She would be—he is still not listening—so proud of him for choosing this issue for his private Member’s Bill and of all of us for being here to support it. When I became shadow children and families Minister back in 2010, she explained the genesis of Sure Start, how important it was and how we got here. She said, “Sharon, you need to be able to smell the babies—the places need to be full of babies.” Metaphorically, this House is, in all our remarks, full of babies today. I am sure that she would be proud of us.

I also pay huge tribute to Lord Blunkett, as others have, Baroness Margaret Hodge, who also gave me the benefit of all her wisdom and experience, and our current Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley (Yvette Cooper), as well as the former Member for Nottingham North, the amazing and brilliant Graham Allen, who I had the pleasure of working with on early intervention. I still have copies of his excellent reports, written with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), and refer to them now; his work goes on in the work that I will continue to do from the Back Benches. I thank him for that. I also thank Naomi Eisenstadt, who has been mentioned. So many played major roles in driving the policy forward after the 1997 election.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend referred to the former Member for Nottingham North, Graham Allen. He not only had the idea, but implemented it through the Nottingham strategic partnership, which he chaired from 2005. He turned it into something that started pre-pregnancy, in order to tackle the high number of teenage pregnancies. He lived this, and set a real blueprint for what Government can do—I look to the Minister—when they take forward the Bill, which we hope will pass today.

[Mrs Hodgson]

The work on teenage pregnancy was a real blueprint, and the 10-year teenage pregnancy strategy fulfilled its ambition of reducing those numbers, following the great work of Graham Allen. I remember taking part in a Westminster Hall debate acknowledging 10 years of that strategy and its success. As for what the numbers are now, as we have been saying, when anything of that kind stops, there is backsliding, I am afraid. That shows that the job is never done. That is why it is so important that we get the Bill through Parliament and on the statute book.

While the initial roll-out of Sure Start targeted disadvantaged communities exclusively, the approach soon shifted to focus on the universal provision of children’s centres, as we heard in the excellent speech by the Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). At Sure Start’s peak, almost 3,500 centres were operating across the country. However, in 2010 came the change in government and Tory austerity, as has been discussed; we all know what happened thereafter. Within months, Sure Start funding was slashed, with cuts of up to two thirds, and the ringfence was removed. Hundreds of centres closed so quickly. I was shadow children and families Minister at the time, and our now Prime Minister was shadow Education Secretary. Together, we fought the battle against those cuts day in, day out. I was keeping a tally of closures, and when it got to over 1,000 closures the coalition Government stopped publishing the numbers, which made it so much harder for us to keep track.