Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Debate between Tim Loughton and Lucy Powell(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lucy Powell
I will come on to say something about that, but as my husband is an A&E consultant I am all too familiar with these issues. As the IFS said, it was a golden
“sledgehammer to crack a very small nut”.
The realities facing our public services are not addressed in this Budget.
It is another Tory Budget so divorced from reality that it exposes, once again, who the party in government is really for—tax cuts for the wealthiest, tax hikes for the rest. The last Tory Budget had a cut to the 45p top rate of tax; this Budget has a pension tax cut for the top 1%. Government Members might groan and wail, but that is the reality.
Wealth managers already see the Budget as a bonanza, and not only a huge tax break for the super-wealthy but an inheritance tax wheeze for the super-rich too, with one wealth adviser describing it as
“a great opportunity for tax-free growth.”
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady has been quoting experts and the newspapers. Will she now admit that the figures that her colleague, the shadow Chancellor, gave about the benefit that the pension changes will bring was grossly miscalculated? A quote that appeared in the Financial Times said it was
“based on a muddled understanding of how the pension tax rules operate”.
Will she apologise for the calculations in the Labour press release or are they just muddled?
Lucy Powell
I will not apologise for those figures, and in the next part of my speech I will explain that the figures are perhaps worse than previously thought. There are issues for doctors, but only 16% of those who will benefit from this massive boon are doctors, and that is before all the speculators dive into this new wheeze. That is the political choice that this Chancellor and this Government have made—trickle-down economics, and tax perks for the tiny few. That is the record that they just will not be able to dodge.
Early Years Family Support
Debate between Tim Loughton and Lucy Powell(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Tim Loughton
Hold on a minute. I will give way first to the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and then to the hon. Member for Manchester Central.
Lucy Powell
I am grateful to my friend, because he has given me an opportunity to do what I did not do earlier—which was hugely remiss of me, because it was in my notes—and express my huge respect for his leadership and all the work that he does on Sure Start, children’s services and education in the all-party parliamentary group for families in the early years. I thank him for that. He is, of course, absolutely one of my favourite Members on the opposite Benches, and he will long remain so, even if I am no longer one of his.
Tim Loughton
I am completely recharged and relieved by that. The hon. Lady is my absolute favourite Member of Parliament for Manchester Central, and many things besides. But this debate is getting far too consensual, so I shall return to the points that I was trying to make.
The phrase “1,000 days”—or, for those whose glass is half full, “1,001 days”—is almost becoming common parlance as well, and it needs to. It needs to be almost a brand. People need to understand that those 1,001-ish days of life from conception to the age of two are the period that will have the most impact on a child’s future life. If we do not invest in the right support then, the cost of picking up the pieces later will be so much greater, both financially and, as I think everyone here recognises, socially.
I should declare an interest, in that I chair PIP UK—the Parent Infant Partnership—which was set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire. I became chairman of the trustees, and am proud still to be so. Our most recent report is “Rare Jewels”. I pay tribute to Sally Hogg, who works for PIP and who did a great deal of research on the scarcity of parent and infant mental health specialist support. That was a false economy.
I shall now be slightly unconventional, and talk about the motion. The motion is about the inter-ministerial group, and I want to talk about some of the experiences of that group. As I found during my few years as a Minister, joined-up government is a complete myth. What the group almost uniquely did, because of the vim and force of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire, was bring together key Ministers from half a dozen key Departments to try to create joined-up solutions. A child’s mental health, and those early years affecting the child and his or her parents, are not just the preserve of the Department for Education and of children’s social care. They touch on the work of so many other Departments
I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) is still here. She will remember that some years ago, when I was the Children’s Minister and Sarah Teather was also an Education Minister, we tried to put together the early intervention fund, which was largely intended to bring together different interests with a pooled budget so that we could work together on smarter solutions. However, that did not really fit the way in which the civil service worked.
We struggled for some months to pull together a plan that would involve various other Departments, and we were being frustrated at every turn; so we formed a pizza club, well before my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire was on the scene. My then colleague Sarah Teather and I rang other colleagues—Housing Ministers, Health Ministers and others. I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke was then a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions. We got together in “The Adjournment” restaurant, had a pizza, agreed what we wanted to do, and all went back to our Departments in the following days and told our civil servants what we wanted to do. The response was “Well, I’m sorry but that’s not the way we do things around here, Minister”, to which our response was “Tough, we’re now doing it.” That was the only way we could actually get through an important joined-up policy because the system just did not work. I do not think things have improved much at all.
Another innovation I set up then was the Youth Action Group. Again, there were problems and I tried to youth-proof all Government policy, which is something I still bang on about. There were many problems that transcended different Departments, and yet if there was a problem, it would go from one Department to another in a vicious triangle, as it were. So I got together six major charities led by The Prince’s Trust and Barnardo’s. I co-chaired it and, at one stage, I think we had nine Ministers from nine different Departments. Invariably most of those Ministers would turn up to those meetings and the children’s charities and youth charities would bring particular problems to us. One problem was about housing benefit for looked-after children who were care leavers, which was the responsibility of the Department for Education for care, the Department for Communities and Local Government—whatever it was called in those days—for housing and the Department for Work and Pensions for benefits. We got the three Ministers together with the three lead officials and said, “Here’s the problem; can you please take it away and solve it and come back with a solution that the children and youth workers can then take away?” Alas, that group no longer exists, but we need far more of that sort of rationale and mentality in Government. The inter-ministerial group showed how it could be done, and it is so important that the work continues. I hope that the recommendations that have been made are taken up and run with.
We need a Minister for early years children and families at Cabinet level. It should not just be left to civil servants to people those committees when what we need is a co-ordinated ministerial response. This needs to be led by a high-profile Minister who has the clout, enthusiasm and drive to bring all the relevant Departments together and come up with a cross-departmental solution. I am afraid that we are still a long way from that in common practice, and that is partly what is wrong with Government and with our civil service. So that is my main plea.
On the investment equation, I am not going to repeat everything that has been said, but we know that healthy social and emotional development in the first 1,001 days means that individuals are more likely to have improved mental and physical health outcomes from cradle to grave and children will start school with the language, social and emotional skills they need to play and explore and learn. Children and young people will also be better able to understand and manage their emotions and behaviours, leading to less risky and antisocial behaviours and the costs that these bring to individuals and society, and they will have the skills they need to form trusting, healthy relationships—something we heard about in the Chamber earlier. If they had that, we would not have to spend such a lot of time teaching it to them at school because it would come naturally, and they would know what a proper quality, trusting relationship actually is. And if they know, they are much more likely to be able to hand it on and nurture their own children as they become parents in the future.
The cost of getting this wrong is huge. Some years ago—although it is still as true and important today—the Maternal Mental Health Alliance calculated the cost of getting perinatal mental health care wrong for the one in six women who will have some form of perinatal mental illness. The cost of that was £8.1 billion each and every year, and the cost of child neglect in this country is £15 billion each and every year; so £23.1 billion is the price of getting it wrong. A fraction of that spent on early intervention—well-targeted, well-timed, well-positioned by well-qualified and trained professionals—could save so much personal grief and so much financial and social grief later on.
It is not rocket science, as I constantly say; it is technically neuroscience, but it really is something we should have been doing so many years ago. The troubled families programme is the model here, and it is essential that the troubled families programme is not just retained, but expanded in the comprehensive spending review. I have always said that we need a pre-troubled families programme, because in the troubled families programme we are dealing with the symptoms of getting it wrong earlier. If we prevented those symptoms in the first place, working in those very early years, so that we have a well-balanced parent or parents with well-balanced children, they are more likely to arrive at school eager and able to learn and be contributing members of society. That is so vital. Some 28% of mothers with mental health problems report having difficulties bonding with their child. Research suggests that this initial dysfunction in the mother-baby relationship affects the child’s development by impairing the baby’s psychomotor and socio-emotional development.
Postnatal depression has also been linked with depression in fathers, and with higher rates of family breakdown. We forget the impact on fathers of not knowing how to deal with a mum—a partner—who all of a sudden has some form of postnatal mental illness. A lot of fathers are affected by this. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on fatherhood, is going to talk about this. It is essential that we look at all parents, when both parents are on the scene, and give support to the family as a whole.
Maintained Nursery Schools
Debate between Tim Loughton and Lucy Powell(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lucy Powell
As always, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is probably a consequence of Brexit—among other things—that the spending review has been pushed back and pushed back without people realising the impact that that is having on organisations that have been waiting for funding decisions, and especially on maintained nursery schools.
I have taken a number of interventions, so I will cut out some of what I had been going to say.
Lucy Powell
Yes, I will take one more intervention, because I have cut my speech down.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is being terribly generous. It took us only nine minutes to get to Brexit, but let us get back because this is the subject that we need to talk about.
There is an outstanding nursery school in my constituency, Boundstone in Lancing, which is in a deprived area and does a fantastic job. Because of cuts, it is now having to curtail the number of children under two whom it takes for day care. It is co-located with a children’s centre. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to look at the bigger picture? The impact—the knock-on effect—of not offering that care, which is respite care in some cases, on the safeguarding, social care and disability support offered by the local authority will be serious. It may well be a false economy, financially let alone socially, preventing the advancement of children who benefit from an excellent service in many nursery schools.
Lucy Powell
I could not agree more. As I said earlier, it would indeed be a false economy. Very few maintained nursery schools are merely providers of early education, high-quality though that is. Nearly all of them provide holistic support services for families in the early years. I believe that that is the direction of travel of Government policy, given a new review by the Leader of the House, and I know that the Minister and the Secretary of State are very committed to this agenda and have made a number of interventions recently. It would be a crying shame for the main institutions that support this work in some of our most deprived communities to be lost by stealth and through inaction rather than as a result of a deliberate strategy.
I do not want to pre-empt the Minister, but I know what he is likely to say today, because we have had this conversation many times. I am sure he will want to emphasise to local authorities that he does not want them to close nursery schools, but we must be honest: local authorities do not have the slack in their budgets. They are facing huge cuts themselves, especially in many of the areas where these schools operate, and further cuts are coming up the track. It really is the Government’s responsibility—as they have recognised in the past with their transitional funding arrangement—to ensure that the funds are there and secure for the long term. The Local Government Association has found that 61% of local authorities fear that maintained nursery schools will close unless the Government provide additional funding, and that fear is echoed in a report by London councils. I sent both reports to the Minister before Christmas.
We have heard time and again that Ministers are committed to keeping maintained nursery schools open, but those schools cannot wait for decisions that now look like not being made until the autumn. They need certainty this financial year. In the grand scheme of things, £60 million a year, for what these nursery schools offer, is a very small amount of money. I know the Minister agrees it would be social vandalism of the worst kind to let them go by default, even though we do not want them to go, simply because we cannot find the pot of money to keep them open.
The Minister has my full support in taking this case to the Treasury. I am sure that every speaker today will support him in making the strongest possible case to the Treasury. If he wants to come back to the House and ask for more support, I am sure we will give it to him. I hope he will take away today the very strong message that the transitional funding, which is about to run out, needs to be replaced this financial year.