Sure Start centres need to be renewed – not cut

The Thomas Coram Foundation in Bloomsbury was once deeply unpopular with the inner city London residents it was supposed to support. Today Coram, as it is now known, offers early learning help to more than 15,000 of the most vulnerable children and their families. In February 1999 it was the location for the launch of one of Labour’s flagship schemes; Sure Start. Sure Start was at the heart of Labour. One of our proudest achievements, the 3,500 centres built across Britain by the Labour government were based on proven evidence. The poorest children fall behind in language and cognitive skills long before they ever walk through the school gates – and they never catch up. The first few years of life are crucial for the formation of a child’s abilities, and therefore life chances. Aid them early and give them intensive encouragement, with expert advice for their parents, and you can change their lives forever. It was, and still, is the easiest way to improve the life chances of the many.

These centres were beacons for Labour values in action. They weren’t just bricks and mortar, but tangible examples of Labour striving to help the most disadvantaged – creating life opportunities for the many, not just the few. It’s what makes us Labour, and we should always be proud of it.

Today though, Sure Start is under threat. When questioned the day before the last general election on whether the Tories were pledged to protect the scheme, a visibly irritated David Cameron replied:

“Yes, we back Sure Start. It’s a disgrace that Gordon Brown has been trying to frighten people about this”.

This would, it seems, appear categoric. But figures unearthed by the Sun newspaper last week reveal that 281 centres have closed since May 2010. This follows on from a speech in early July from Conservative MP Nick Boles, a loyal Cameroon and key Conservative thinker, who, in a speech to the Resolution Foundation, suggested the Sure Start budget had largely been “wasted” and based on “lazy sentimentalism”.

This is not to say that the scheme has been an unqualified success. It hasn’t. Indeed Blair in 2006 unexpectedly said that Sure Start had been a disappointment. The multi-billion-pound project had, he said, failed to make sufficient progress in improving the lives of Britain’s most marginalised families. His central criticism was that the most socially-excluded people, by their very nature, were “not going to come to places like Sure Start”.

More needs to be done to iron out the inefficiencies in the patchwork coverage of Sure Start centres across the country. But the mission should be to renew, not cut, them. A distinctive element of Sure Start has always been its willingness to allow projects to be developed locally, leading to wide regional variation between the types of services. A Sure Start centre in Bloomsbury will not be the same as one in Birmingham.

The argument over Sure Start cuts will come down to, partly, the mismatch between the political timetable and the timetable for sound policy. It takes years to set up a new Sure Start centre and decades for reliable empirical evidence to formulate. Politicians who want to keep their jobs now need to prove to voters that they have made a difference within four or five years. But it will also come down to ideology. Cameron was so wrought up about the questioning over his Sure Start support because it played to his, and the wider electorates deep fear, that the Tories simply do not care about anyone else but their own.

The concept of breaking a cycle of deprivation and inequality, of providing the very best, free, childcare and parental support, whilst enhancing life chances of the many, is one that all Labourites should be able to subscribe to. In an act of perverse redistribution, the Tories have signalled their intent and it has been the poorest areas that have already been hit the hardest. As Labour slogans so often say: don’t let the Tories get away with it.