Disadvantaged Children

Debate between Graham Stuart and Ann Coffey

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this extremely important and valuable debate. I believe that there is all-party agreement that early intervention in children’s lives is crucial to tackling not just the symptoms but the causes of deprivation, in order to prevent disadvantaged children from becoming disadvantaged adults and prevent cycles of deprivation from being repeated.

We all accept that it is essential to make the right interventions. Both my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) have made that point in their excellent reports. However, the key question is: how do we most effectively achieve such intervention and produce good outcomes?

In an earlier debate, I discussed some of the interventions that I believe can make a difference, such as outreach work with families. The pilot scheme in my constituency to provide early-years education to disadvantaged two-year-olds was extremely successful, and we also had a successful pilot scheme for family nurse partnerships. Both share a similar model: contact with parents; building relationships with those parents; giving them information; and getting them to use other support services to improve the quality of their parenting, which is a key factor in delivering better outcomes for children.

I want to focus today on whether the introduction of the new early intervention grant will help us to safeguard such achievements and move us further towards obtaining the outcomes for disadvantaged children that we all want. The main problems with the EIG are that it is not a specific grant—it is not ring-fenced—and that it represents an 11% cut on its predecessor grants. They, themselves, were cut last year, so the real cut is more like 17% in Government funding to Stockport. The new EIG is not confined to early interventions in children’s lives; it is for early interventions in a number of areas. The EIG will replace funding to a wide variety of 22 other schemes, including everything from the Youth Taskforce to teenage pregnancy programmes, the youth crime plan and young people’s substance misuse services. Those schemes give support to young people in need, but they will now have to compete against each other for resources.

The Government have said that although local authorities will be able to spend money where they want, they will be expected to continue to support Sure Start children’s centres and the free early education places for disadvantaged two-year-olds. Ministers have also reiterated that short breaks for disabled children, support for vulnerable young people, mental health work in schools and support for families with multiple problems should also be priorities. However, it is not mandatory that those services are prioritised, and I fear that there will be a lot of casualties in the local financial tussles for funding up and down the country.

As the Minister will be aware, there is much concern in the early-years sector about the removal of ring-fencing, despite ministerial reassurances that the Government expect to see early-years services protected. People know that, ultimately, without a sanction, the councils can choose to ignore the exhortations of Ministers. The Daycare Trust, the national child care charity, says that many local authorities are already considering diverting funding allocated for early-years provision, leading to the possible closure of Sure Start centres.

I do believe that Ministers have genuinely accepted the arguments about early intervention, and I welcome that. Such a view is supported by the fact that the Government set up the report by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead and this week’s report by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North. Both reports call for much more emphasis to be placed on the early years. It would be a shame if, having accepted the principle, Ministers failed to tackle the problem in a way that will make a real difference to the lives of some of the most disadvantaged and deprived families in the country.

As my right hon. Friend said in his recent report on poverty and life chances, which was endorsed by the Prime Minister:

“Later interventions to help poorly performing children can be effective but, in general, the most effective and cost-effective way to help and support young families is in the earliest years of a child’s life.”

It is vital that we continue the valuable work with young children that has been done so far, be it through children’s centres and early-years education, or through outreach work with hard-to-reach families, and that projects and services around the country are not damaged by the change in the funding process from having individual ring-fenced budgets to having one smaller communal pot of money, which has to be fought over locally.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful and thoughtful speech. I wonder where she feels savings could be made elsewhere within the educational budget in order to prioritise early-years provision. I hope that Sure Start’s increased focus on the most vulnerable children, albeit with a reduced budget overall, can still deliver more of the benefit that we were originally seeking. Perhaps she, like the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), would accept larger class sizes as the price for getting more money into early intervention. These are the choices that we need to make. I wonder whether she has any thoughts on that.

[Ann Coffey]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but the point that I am making is about the difficulty when ring-fencing is removed from grants from central Government to local government. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify what processes are in place to ensure that we monitor how much money continues to be spent on early-years intervention as the mixed picture of how local councils choose to spend the early intervention grant emerges.

I would also be grateful for clarification about what monitoring procedures will be put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the money spent in terms of outcomes for disadvantaged children. I can foresee two years from now a parliamentary question asking for information about early-years intervention receiving the reply, “The information is not kept centrally.” Without central monitoring, it is difficult for hon. Members to hold the Government to account for their stated policies.

Targets and some external assessments of local authorities are being abolished, so how will the Government monitor whether their emphasis on the importance of early-years intervention is shared by cash-strapped councils in the face of priorities set by a local electorate that might not be the same as those of the Government? The pressure on local councillors might be to maintain parks and street lighting and to keep roads and pavements in good repair. They have to be responsive to the needs of their electorate and early-years intervention might not be a priority for local people.

The Government have emphasised the importance they give to early years, but the chosen commissioners are councils so how, without statutory guidance and without ring-fencing, will the Government ensure that councils deliver on the coalition’s commitment to early interventions in children’s lives?

While I have the opportunity, I want to draw attention briefly to another disadvantaged group—children in care homes. They are the children who would have benefited from early intervention in their lives. As the chair of the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults, I am particularly concerned about the number of children who run away from care homes. I was shocked when I discovered that more than half the children reported missing in Greater Manchester are from children’s homes in Stockport. This is concerning, as research shows that children who run away are at serious risk, exposed to violence, criminality, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking.

Over the years, I have expressed much concern about the need to improve Ofsted’s inspection reports so that they reflect the numbers of children who go missing from care homes. We are awaiting the new national minimum standards for children’s homes, which I hope will tackle the issue. I am disappointed that the timetable for the publication of the new standards keeps slipping. In a parliamentary written answer in July last year, I was told the revised standards would be ready in November 2010. When they did not appear, I tabled another question and was told they would be ready “early in 2011”. I hope that the new standards will be published as soon as possible and will include in the inspections of children’s homes consideration of how those homes manage children who go missing to ensure that the highest quality of care and control is provided.

In conclusion, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said in his report about the importance of early intervention policies and programmes:

“The rationale is simple: many of the costly and damaging social problems in society are created because we are not giving children the right type of support in their earliest years, when they should achieve their most rapid development. If we do not provide that help early enough, then it is often too late”.

His words must not go unheeded.