Early Childhood Development

Debate between Steve Brine and Fiona O'Donnell

Thursday 30th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), whom I thank for the age check. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) on securing this debate and on the manifesto. She knows of my interest in this area, and she sent me a copy hot off the press. I read the manifesto avidly, and I am totally impressed with her work. She spoke eloquently about the cycle of deprivation, and she set out the case as to why, in many ways, society is broken. I will not go on about that, but I think the family unit is the answer that holds so much of this together. Some of my comments will probably tie together the interventions that we have had over the past 15 minutes.

Many Members will be familiar with the work of the Centre for Social Justice, which was set up by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when we were in opposition. The CSJ produced a report last year called “Fractured Families: Why stability matters,” which built on the seminal 2006 work “Breakdown Britain” and the 2007 work “Breakthrough Britain.” Basically, “Fractured Families” re-examines how family breakdown continues to plague our society, and it is blunt in saying that, despite the scale of the problem continuing to increase, Government action has been extremely weak. The report shows that the outcomes for children and adults who suffer from family breakdown are often terrible, and that there are huge costs to society. Someone mentioned a huge figure earlier, which I will repeat because it is so staggering. Family breakdown is currently estimated to cost the country some £46 billion a year, which is set to rise to just under £50 billion a year by the end of this Parliament. That is more than the Government spend on the defence budget—talk about ideas for deficit reduction.

The report also says that

“governments have chosen to ignore this problem, they have done so despite the public’s views.”

Those views are striking:

“89 per cent of people agree (52 per cent strongly agree) that ‘If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start’…81 per cent of people think that it is important for children to grow up living with both parents.”

I think that it is time, and the report clearly agrees, that politicians on both sides of the House acknowledge that family breakdown is an issue that matters to the vast majority of people in this country and take whatever action they can to reverse it. The report makes a series of recommendations to all political parties in advance of the next general election, which people can read in their own time.

I want to restate something that my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire said. Earlier, I mentioned the statistics on speech and language difficulties among inmates. Some 80% of long-term prison inmates have attachment problems that stem from babyhood, which is staggering evidence. The good thing that must come out of that is to find a way to help families form the loving and secure bond that she talked so much about. That bond should come naturally when there is a new baby in the house but, as we know, post-natal depression, problems with conception or birth experience, domestic violence and the issues of poverty and deprivation set out by my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire can, and so often do, get in the way.

That is where Home-Start UK, which I mentioned earlier, has to be part of the toolbox. Its formula of parents helping parents has been incredibly successful over the course of my lifetime—40 years, as we have been reminded. In August 2013 I spoke at the annual general meeting of Home-Start Winchester and Districts, which has been going for a long time and does so much to help families through the really tough times.

When my wife and I had children, people said that children throw a hand grenade into marriages. I think that is nonsense; it is more like an atomic weapon. We had marriage preparation classes before we got married. The vicar who married us said that his one piece of advice was to share the teaspoon moments—the things that get on each other’s nerves. Ten years on—we celebrated 10 years last year—we still regularly share the teaspoon moments, more of them coming my way than going out. There is nothing like children, supercharged after a night of poor sleep or on a whiney day, to create teaspoon moments and to exaggerate them into whopping great soup ladles.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

I join the hon. Gentleman in praising Home-Start. I have experience of using its services in Banbury and it was the only group that came and said to me, “What do you need? What can we do for you?” Every other service said, “This is what we do. Is it of any use?”

[Steve Brine]

Absolutely. There are so many similar examples throughout the country. I urge all hon. Members who do not know their Home-Start people to get to know them. They work with families, and can share the teaspoon moments when they are there, or sometimes just shine a light of perspective. When new parents are exhausted, perspective is hard to come by. My experience of seeing Home-Start at work is that it helps parents to learn to live together after children. Learning to live together is hard enough, but doing so after children is a whole new skill.

Home-Start has been demonstrated to work. Its volunteer support and positive impact on parents and families have been shown to work. A three-year research project by a team at the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht a couple of years ago revealed that children are still benefiting up to three years after their Home-Start volunteer stopped visiting. The good thing about what Home-Start is able to do here is that it is being copied: the Incredible Years programme and the family nurse partnership are both maternal and early-years public health programmes providing ongoing, intensive support to mums and dads and their babies.

The family nurse partnership is of particular interest to me. It is welcome that the Government have recently agreed to increase the number of family nurse partnership places to 16,000 at any one time by the end of this Parliament. I saw its inspiration at work last summer in Houston, Texas, where it is called the nurse family partnership. I was there with the Justice Committee and saw the partnership at work in Harris county. We were there as part of our major inquiry into crime reduction policies and the data we were shown were very impressive. The programme is expensive but the outcomes are good, with 60% fewer arrests and 72% fewer convictions among children of mothers participating in the programme than among those of mothers in a similar demographic and income bracket who did not. The number of days babies were hospitalised was reduced by around one third among programme participants. The figures are impressive.

It goes without saying that any remarks about early intervention in the first 1,000 days would not be complete without mentioning the troubled families programme. I am a big fan, and despite some mixed messages in the June 2013 spending review, the Government gave a commitment to extend the programme through the next five-year parliamentary period and confirmed £200 million from several Departments for a wider focus in 2015-16. That is sensible. I am regularly updated by Hampshire county council and Hampshire troubled families mapping, which have confirmed that 70% of client families are located in the top 30% of wards for health deprivation in the county. That laser-like focusing at a time of shrinking resources must be right. I know that it is bearing a dividend in Hampshire, as it is throughout the country.

The early years are about the state, but they are also about the big society, the third sector—the voluntary sector—and, ultimately, about creating more stable learned environments where those early years count, so that babies have a chance of normal development. The prize for us is absolutely huge, as all hon. Members who have spoken today have said, not just in money value, but in the value of human life. Ultimately, that is what we, as Members of Parliament, are about.