'We must bring back Sure Start to help stop the cycle of child poverty'
Sure Start needs to be revitalised to tackle a child poverty pandemic, former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has said.
His call comes as Households Below Average Income statistics revealed that 4.3 million children were in relative poverty in the year ending April 2023 – the highest in 30 years.
Outlining the need for better early support, Brown highlighted how 3.4 million “austerity children” born after 2010 only know a life of poverty.
In a paper entitled Partnership to End Poverty, he warns: “Britain is beset by a hidden emergency, whose forgotten and voiceless victims include hundreds of thousands of children behind closed doors, in homes without heating, bedrooms without beds, kitchens without food – and even toilets without toilet rolls, bathroom sinks with no soap, and showers without shampoo.
“Long years of austerity have been followed first by a pandemic with a locked-down economy, and then by extraordinarily rapid rises in energy and then food bills.”
Brown called for a “coalition of compassion” between charitable foundations, corporate investors and government to fund a new approach to Sure Start.
He warned the recent move to end all government emergency heating support, and the forthcoming end of the £1 billion Household Support Fund along with further caps on benefits will see “the UK child poverty rate rise from today’s 4.3 million to beyond 4.5 million by Christmas”.
From late 90s to now
The Sure Start programme was launched by New Labour in 1998 - when Brown was chancellor - to provide a holistic “one-stop shop” of support to parents of children in their all-important first five years.
Focused initially in the most deprived areas, the aim was for a centre to be in every locality in a bid to address the attainment gap.
By 2010, Sure Start centres had grown to a network of 3,500. However, subsequent austerity cuts and an end to ringfenced funding forced more than 1,000 to close and others to reduce services.
According to Brown, two million children benefited from Sure Start, which saw a reduction in child hospital stays of 13,000 a year, paying for nearly 40 per cent of the total cost of the scheme.
A recent report by Institute for Fiscal Studies shows a child on free school meals living near a Sure Start centre expected to be awarded DDD in their GCSE grades would be more likely to get three Cs.
The government has in recent years recognised a need to focus on early support. Its strategy is to rollout ‘family hubs’. But the £130 million budget for 2020-25 is a fraction of the £2.5 billion in today’s money that Sure Start enjoyed in 2010.
BASW's Election Manifesto call
Policies aimed at reducing poverty are a key call in BASW’s recently launched election Manifesto for Social Work.
It says the next UK government should:
- Scrap the two-child limit and benefit cap
- Continue to uprate benefits in line with inflation
- Invest in family and community services across the UK
- Extend the debt breathing space to 180 days
- Ban no-fault evictions
Speaking earlier this year, BASW chief executive Ruth Allen urged political leaders to “listen to the evidence” from social work to turn the tide on worsening poverty in the UK.
She said there was a need for “brave and compassionate politicians” in the wake of statistics showing a fifth of the population are living in poverty.
Allen said: “As a profession, we do not accept the inevitability or acceptability of such high and worsening levels of poverty and the blighting of people’s lives.
“Much of our politics, particularly in Westminster, is about cutting taxes and further reducing services and support. The irony is, we cannot afford this poverty. We cannot afford the lost potential, stored up health needs, the next generation failing to thrive, and mental health crises associated with intractable want.”