The Tories put British children’s prospects of escaping a poor background into reverse. This is Labour’s chance to fix that, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee
As the budget approaches, outrage from the Tories and their media outriders at any mention of proposed tax rises is reaching boiling point. Never a word of what they would do about collapsing public services. Misleading claims about what the well-off pay already (no, the top 1% doesn’t pay a third of all tax) and harangues about tax at its highest since the war never admit that Britain raises less than most of our more successful neighbours. The chancellor, undeterred, needs to raise all the billions she can, harvesting most from those “broadest shoulders” now in full blustering defence of their capital gains, private school fees, private equity loopholes, agricultural tax hideaways and inheritance tax escapes. People need no reminding of the crippled state of Britain’s public realm, how it declined while the best-off enjoyed rapid increases in wealth in the past decade.
To keep a grip on that reality, I visited Seashells children’s centre in Sheerness, Kent, destined to be closed soon. About 49% of children in Sheerness are living below the poverty line, but the purpose-built Sure Start centre still stands as a model of Labour’s best social programme: Seashells was visited by Gordon Brown as prime minister. It is a rare survivor: most closed in Kent long ago, with those remaining rebranded as family hubs by the last government. Kent, like so many councils in deep debt, is burning through its reserves: this is just one example of the last government’s continuing legacy, as council cuts will go on. Jim Duncan, director of Seashells, working here since its 2002 opening, is heartbroken at all that will be lost to this community. The nursery for 200 will stay open, financed by state-funded fees, but everything that made Sure Start succeed will be stripped out.
He takes me round rooms full of children deep in activities, buzzing with life, with stay-and-play and singing for parents and babies. The posters tell the story of warm wraparound care for families. Midwives and health visitors are based here, with parenting classes from “understand your teenager” to baby massage, mental health help, reading, literacy and social skills, helping mothers to talk, read and play with small children. Those fleeing domestic violence know they get help here. The food bank and food pantry stop local children going hungry. Parents can get advice on education, employment, benefits and budgeting. There are fun days, outings and parties for families that can afford few treats, with swimming lessons at the local pool and secondhand clothes swaps. In all about 2,000 families come to Seashells for something here at the heart of a community that has very little else. All these Sure Start staff and their expertise will go, along with most of these services, lost to next year’s cohort.
Does it work? When Sure Start was axed in George Osborne’s first cuts, its meticulous monitoring ended too. But now the Institute for Fiscal Studies has analysed its lasting good results: Sure Start children, especially the poorest, had significant reductions in hospitalisations up to age 15 and better grades at GCSE. Research found that the positive effects were six times higher for children eligible for free school meals than for those ineligible.
Writing with trenchant indignation, the director of the IFS, Paul Johnson, concludes: “Sure Start achieved its aims, then we threw it away.” He notes “a big positive effect on the language, communication, numeracy and social and emotional development of five-year-olds from poorer families” that persisted through to GCSEs. “It is great that we now have such good and robust evidence,” he writes, and lands a hard punch on the last government: “It is also a tragedy and a study in how good policy can be lost.” This was a case, he suggests, of “‘not invented here’ syndrome. If the other lot brought it in, then we’ll get rid of it.” As for the money, he says: “It almost certainly delivered benefits significantly greater than it cost.”
Instead of Sure Start, the Tory government diverted funds to childcare aimed only at getting parents into work, with nurseries staffed by poorly paid people, often with few or no qualifications. Child warehousing was the complaint of those who saw the difference between mainly private for-profit nurseries, and what Sure Start once was.
Now the great question hangs in the air. When will Labour bring it back? The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has always made early years her top priority, as she rolls out urgently needed nursery places for all, mainly in primary schools with extra space. She rightly puts the emphasis firmly on education and early development, not mere childcare. But she never lets the words “Sure Start” pass her lips, though I have visited the best of them with her. I hope this is not a case of Paul Johnson’s “not invented here syndrome” extending even to the previous Labour government. More likely it’s for fear of emitting an uncosted spending pledge. If all goes well, if the chancellor does indeed grow the economy and yield more spending money, Labour will surely follow the facts and restore the best thing it did last time.
But none of this will happen in time to save Seashells now, even as it hopes to deliver a 5,000-signature petition to the council this week. Councils expect no bonanza from this budget, though as for all Whitehall departments, “no return to austerity” promises staying level with inflation. It’s cold comfort for public services to know they have at least escaped the vandalism of the last chancellor’s planned cuts. Just six surviving Seashells services will be sent away to premises in council offices that Duncan warns are badly unsuitable, with no outdoor space, not open every day, mixing toddlers with often angry adults, including addicts, queueing for other services.
Labour has set up a child poverty taskforce reporting before the spring spending review. It will find no shred of new evidence, since every aspect of child poverty, and its causes and remedies, has been analysed to death over many decades. Johnson concludes: “We know that poor children grow up with poor life chances. We know how to ameliorate that. The choices are ours.” What we don’t know is how to stop the revolting lobbyists for the wealthy and their media protesting against and misrepresenting even moderate tax rises, when the gap between the richest and poorest in Britain is among the highest in Europe, the chance of a child escaping a poor background has gone into reverse and birth is destiny more surely than it was.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist