Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Baroness Cash

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 183B is in my name and I support the other amendments in this group. First, I draw to the Minister’s attention that this is a probing amendment. It is very long and detailed but none the less intended to generate a discussion of something I feel is very important in a children’s well-being Bill. To exclude the early years seems a lost opportunity; the intention is to generate that conversation.

It is almost 20 years—I have shocked myself by saying how long it is—since I stood as a candidate in Westminster North for the Conservative Party. As an inner-city seat, it was a challenging environment in which to work and to meet people. Deprivation was not uncommon. I remember vividly knocking on a door on the Brunel Estate. As the door opened, the fug of cigarette—and, probably, cannabis—smoke surrounded me. Through the haze, there was what looked to be a very young girl with a baby, probably six months old—now I know better—on her hip. In my shock, in the smoke that emanated from the flat, I said to her, “Is your mum at home?” But she was the mum.

By coincidence, I had just come from an excellent Sure Start drop-in centre around the corner set up by the last Labour Government. I had this moment of clarity, of thinking, “That baby is never going to get to that Sure Start centre”, and that it did not matter who was in government and what was offered—unless we had a proper strategy around early years and a way of reaching that mum, that child’s chances were going to be severely impeded.

I have declared my interest previously, and I declare an interest now, as this was the inspiration for founding Parent Gym, which has run across the country in all the years since it launched in 2010. The intention of Parent Gym, like so many other programmes now like it, was to reach young mums who probably had not had any parenting themselves. The aim was to provide support that was not otherwise available, when reaching out for that support was usually taboo because it came via social services, and they were hostile to the whole prospect of it.

At around the same time, because of my interest in all this, I realised that the beginnings of research were being published into the effects of early life experiences on children. I am delighted to stand in this Chamber today, almost 20 years later, knowing that there is a consensus now around the importance of all the early years and their impact on children—in particular, the first 1,001 days, as we call it—which are so very formative.

We also know now that it is not just those very important years after birth. There is a wealth of research showing the effects of prenatal stress that a mother undergoes. There has been incredible research done in disaster zones, such as after flooding in Puerto Rico, where they have measured the telomeres of the cohort of babies born from the mothers who were in those natural disasters. Telomeres are part of the chromosomal profile that predicts your longevity and your health outcomes. They have found them to be shorter in those babies born in the wake of disasters. We know now that the environment—the family environment, the multigenerational environment—is so very important.

As noble Lords know, I have been involved in some earlier parts of the Bill. We have had important debates about looked-after children and foster care strategy, and so on, but we have not talked at all about the strategy for these families and these very young children. There is such a such a range of evidence now. There is the scientific evidence, but there is also the economic evidence that what we invest in these families comes back multifold for society.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor James Heckman did the analysis and found that the returns on early years intervention far exceed those from the remedial action, for which we all bear the cost much later in life. He found returns of $7 to $12 per $1 invested in preventive steps taken.

In this country, in 2018, the Early Intervention Foundation estimated that England and Wales alone spent £17 billion every year—I am afraid that I do not know the current figure but it has grown since then—on late interventions; for example, in social care, youth offending, mental health, special educational needs and criminal justice services. These are many of the things that we have been talking about in this Bill, in this Chamber, and yet we have not discussed, until today, the opportunity here to prevent some of these issues arising.

The numbers are not abstract; they relate to real lives: lives impaired, opportunities lost, families rent asunder, and public resources consumed by crises and situations that could have been prevented. We have looked at the numbers of children in care. We have looked at the numbers of child protection plans. We have not talked quite so much yet—it is in Part 2 of the Bill—about the persistent educational attainment gap that opens up before formal schooling even begins. Only 46% of disadvantaged children achieve expected language and communication standards at age five, compared with 69% of their peers. That is the Department for Education’s own data.

If it is a question of affordability, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether we can continue to afford not to do anything. There is plenty of evidence of what works, and we know that there are already plenty of charities and programmes out there, including some of the government programmes that we have heard referred to today, like family hubs and, previously, the Sure Start programmes. Governments always look at this and try to use piecemeal, locally funded, sticking-plaster solutions, but there remains a postcode lottery as to whether there is an infrastructure for these young families and these children who, through no fault of their own, begin life at a disadvantage.

There are a number of things that we know work. Parenting training works, not just in the programme that I founded but in many others: the Family Nurse Partnership, home visiting by trained nurses, health monitoring done by parenting training in the Incredible Years programme, parent-infant psychotherapy—we do not have any shortage of interventions to refer to about what works. I have not tabled the amendment to be directional about which intervention the Government ought to mandate or explore further, but to facilitate a conversation on ensuring that there is a universal approach to all the children in this country to ensure that they are given the right start and right support in life.

Many charities are already doing some of this work—the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Action for Children, the Parent-Infant Foundation—but that is no substitute for a national infrastructure. We know that Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, through her Centre for Early Childhood and the Shaping Us campaign, is working to draw attention to all this, but we need the Government to take this and grapple with it in a meaningful way to ensure that we have some way of identifying these children, and some means by which we place them all within the safety net of our society, knowing that how we treat our children is really a measure of what all of us are. I have placed emphasis on the exploration of this, and I hope that the Committee can engage today in a sensible debate to find the solutions.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the spirit behind all the amendments in this group. Amendment 486 is in my name, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for also putting their names to it.

I am assuming that we are, in effect, pushing at an open door in stressing the importance of early years to the Government. The noble Baroness the Secretary of State—sorry, she is not noble yet, though she probably will be when she stops being Secretary of State. I should say the current Secretary of State, together with the Minister, came to a Cross-Bench meeting before the Bill came to our House. A question was asked about early years, and the Secretary of State was very clear that it is an absolute priority. I am therefore taking that as read, and the question is not “Is it important?” but “What do we do about it?”

I should declare an interest: I was part of the parliamentary advisory team that worked with Dame Andrea Leadsom on the Start for Life initiative under one of the previous Governments—I cannot quite remember which one—which in many ways was a concerted attempt by a Government to do something about early years. Not least, we were trying to undo the unfortunate effects of what happened to Sure Start, which I think everyone across the House, regardless of party, would agree was one of the great achievements of the Labour Administration of the 2000s. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tragedy that we allowed it to wither on the vine.

Of course, the Labour Party did not allow it to wither on the vine; the people of this country, exercising their democratic ability to vote, which of course we in this House do not have, decided to put in place the Government who decided that there were other priorities, or could say that it was important but not give as much clear support and direction to it as before. Inevitably, what then happens is some parts of the country will continue to think it is incredibly important but others, for reasons that may seem good to them at the time, give it a lower priority. That is how you end up with such uneven distribution across the country. The lesson from that for our new Government is that, if a Government of whatever political persuasion are not crystal clear that this is a priority, and if they do not lay down clearly what that means in terms of what must happen and what is non-negotiable, the same thing will happen again.