Sure Start Children’s Centres

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Stephen Twigg

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) has talked about the services that the centres will provide. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) not agree that it is all very well keeping the buildings open, but that that will not be much use if the services have been scaled back to a point at which they are unrecognisable?

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am not familiar with the details of what has happened in Medway, so I do not know whether that has happened there, but that is precisely what is happening in other parts of the country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) has said. In Liverpool, the day nurseries attached to two of the centres in my constituency, at Croxteth and Knotty Ash, are closing down. Keeping centres open is an important indicator, but it is not the only one. What matters is what goes on inside the centres and the services and outreach that they provide.

Liverpool city council is seeing the greatest cuts of any authority in England. Birmingham council, a Conservative-Liberal Democrat council, has produced a fascinating graph showing the relationship between the cuts in Government grant and the average level of need in an authority. There is a remarkable relationship between how deprived an area is and how big the grant cuts are. Liverpool is right up at the very top with the biggest cuts and the highest levels of deprivation. We accept the need for cuts, but we do not think that they need to go as far or as fast, and even if the quantum of cuts can be justified, their distribution between different authorities absolutely cannot be.

In that context, Liverpool city council, which has placed a strong emphasis on children’s services over the past decade under Liberal Democrat and now Labour control, is having to cut children’s centres. It is not cutting them on the same scale as Bromley, but, of our 26 centres, four are earmarked for closure, which is four more than I want to see. It is also four more than my hon. Friends the other Liverpool MPs want to see, and four more than all the parties on Liverpool city council want to see.

One of my first engagements as the new MP in West Derby last May was to attend the opening of the West Derby children’s centre. A week ago, I went back there to attend a meeting to discuss its proposed closure. It is heartbreaking for the children, the parents and the people working at the centre to see that fantastic new facility, which was created for that community, facing closure. Even at this late stage, I am working with people at the centre and councillors to consider every possible option for safeguarding it, even if it takes a different form in the future. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield talked about mutualisation and social enterprise options. There might be options for at least some of the services at that children’s centre to be retained, but it would have been much better to keep the whole centre open. It opened only a year ago to provide all those services for the local community, and what is happening now is a direct consequence of Government cuts.

I also visited the Knotty Ash nursery last week, and I want to mention a woman whom I met there. Lisa Dempster is the mum of a child at the nursery, and she is happy for me to mention her. She left school when she was 16, which was 24 years ago. Throughout those 24 years, she has been in work. She has never claimed unemployment benefit, and she has paid her tax and her national insurance. She has two teenage children and a toddler. Both her teenagers want to go to university, so that they can get on in life. Her daughter, who is in the first year of the sixth form, is losing her education maintenance allowance this year, and her son, who starts sixth form this September, will not receive EMA at all. Her children are losing their bus passes, and they fear that they will face enormous debts in the future. On top of all that, her little one’s nursery place is going to be lost. She is a good example of someone who has been very badly let down by this combination of policies from the Government. The latest blow for her and her family is the closure of her local nursery.

I apologise again that I might not be here to listen to the Minister’s response to the debate, but I shall read the Hansard record. I urge her to think again, in two respects. First, I really believe that the ideal would be for the Government to re-impose the ring fence for Sure Start children’s centres. That is the best way for us to ensure that there is a universal entitlement, which goes hand in hand with local decisions about how that entitlement is implemented in each community. If she cannot agree to that today, or thereafter, I ask that she, her colleagues in the Department for Education, and particularly her colleagues in the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government look again at the unfairness of the distribution of the cuts, which are hitting children’s centres in some of the most deprived areas of the country much harder than those elsewhere. All those who have contributed to the debate agree that Sure Start has achieved some amazing things over the past decade. We also all agree that a focus on the areas of greatest deprivation must be at the heart of Sure Start in the future. I fear, however, that the broader picture of the cuts will undermine all the Minister’s personal good intentions.