Sure Start: IFS Report

Debate between Tracy Brabin and Anne Milton

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) for asking it.

The IFS report showed that Sure Start reduces the hospital admissions gap between rich and poor children by half. Put simply, thousands of children are ending up in hospital because of cuts to Sure Start. Sure Start was the jewel in the crown of the Labour Government, and politicians, policy makers and the public have long understood its benefits. Even back in 2010, the Conservative party pledged to recruit 4,200 Sure Start health visitors for exactly that reason. It was a Conservative election manifesto promise, but what is the reality? A cut of two thirds in funding and over 1,000 Sure Start and children’s centres have been lost since 2010.

Will the Minister join me in welcoming the report and commit to responding in detail to each of its recommendations before the summer recess? However, it should not be the IFS that marks the Government’s homework. In 2015, the then Conservative Government promised a consultation on Sure Start, but nothing has materialised. When will that work be completed and will the Minister commit to a publication deadline today? At a time when NHS budgets are stretched, should we not be investing in preventive measures such as Sure Start to keep children from ending up in hospital? Will she make that point forcefully in the spending review?

Tory leadership candidates are scrambling over themselves to make pledges to reverse their cuts, but if they are genuinely serious about social justice, now is the time to show that by pledging to reverse the scandalous cuts they have made to Sure Start.

[Anne Milton]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. Being fixed in a dogmatic way on Sure Start children’s centres is not necessarily—[Interruption.] Perhaps she will let me finish. It is important that anything we do is evidence-based. As the report makes clear, statistically the IFS cannot necessarily be confident that the effects that it highlighted on hospitalisation are not due to chance. We need to make sure that we get the right services in the right place, in the right setting, for the families who need them most. Public Health England is currently looking at the healthy child programme, which is 10 years old. It wants to modernise that, focusing it on the first 1,000 days, and she has been involved in that. Looking at the team around the child and at solutions to make sure that vulnerable children and families get the help they need means that we need universal reach and a targeted response where it is needed most.