Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right that the healthcare and support that families receive through the 1,001 critical days from conception to age two and beyond can have a lifelong impact. That is why our colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care are also focusing on ensuring that every child has the healthiest possible start in life, including by improving maternity care, strengthening health visiting services, increasing access to vaccinations and taking steps to reduce tooth decay in children. As the noble Baroness said, strengthening the health visiting services is particularly important for those parents bringing home their bundles of joy, with all the challenges that they bring with them.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare that I am a councillor in central Bedfordshire. I too welcome this Statement; I think we all recognise how important it is to support families and the early start in life.

The Minister made reference to Sure Start. When I became a council leader, I had to deal with Sure Start. It was great because we had these shiny new buildings, but they lacked long-term funding, which put councils in a very difficult position when that funding ran out after three years. The second point I discovered was that they were very much stand-alone and did not integrate with other services such as schools, health, various support services and, as I think somebody else mentioned, the wider age range. When we took over Sure Start centres, we started doing more of that: we took them out of some of their shiny buildings and put them in places where they were much more accessible.

Given what the Government are now proposing and the real-term cuts that they are making to the local council funding that they provide, can the Minister assure the House that there will be long-term funding for family hubs into the future? Can she also assure the House that the Government will enable local councils and local partners to have the flexibility to tailor their approach to their local area and its needs, to deliver for their communities? As my noble friend Lady Barran said, will the Government build on the previous Government’s good work with family hubs and look at the wider age range? I do not want to be in a situation where you can bring your newly born baby along to the hub but not your three year-old or five year-old, which actually stops you going.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am sorry that the noble Lord’s experience was that Sure Start funding was not guaranteed over a long enough period. It certainly was not guaranteed after 2010, was it? That was the problem in the last 14 years.

But to take up the noble Lord’s point about how you ensure that these centres bring together a whole range of services, we are establishing these best start family hubs, building on the lessons of Sure Start. But it will be very important that, in doing that, we bring together parenting, healthcare and education support services to ensure that all babies, children and families have access to both early intervention and the support that they need throughout children’s lives. Alongside that, it will be important to bring together professionals not only from health and education but also working with nurseries, childminders, schools, health services, libraries and local voluntary and community groups and connected to other local services such as relationship support, housing and job support. It is by bringing those services together in an easily accessible way—either in a physical building or through the development of the digital access to best start advice, which we are also working on—that we believe that our expansion could reach an estimated 500,000 children.