Frank Field (Letters, 28 September and 5 October) and Sebastian Kraemer (Letters, 3 October) are right to highlight the £750m cut to services to support vulnerable families. This is indeed a national disgrace, but has gone under the wire partly due to Brexit.
Home-Start and Sure Start were truly progressive initiatives, now thoroughly undermined by these cuts. In 2011, Graham Allen and Iain Duncan Smith published a cross-party governmental report, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings.
This nailed the argument that early intervention to promote secure, happy parent-baby relationships saves millions in terms of the cost of later remediation with regards to school readiness, antisocial behaviour and mental health problems.
This is backed up by a wealth of compelling international research (see the Adverse Childhood Experiences study or the 1001 Critical Days manifesto). The key issue is that supporting parent-infant relationships when these are at significant risk gives babies the best chance to have happy, fulfilling lives.
As numerous studies have demonstrated, it is not cost-effective not to intervene early.
Peter Toolan
Clinical lead, Newcastle Parent Infant Partnership/Children North East
• In his latest letter advocating a greater investment in Home-Start, Frank Field rightly locates it within the wider Sure Start programme. At its best, Sure Start was the key example of a progressive universalist approach to reducing inequality. It was a service valued by all parents, building confidence and skills through common experiences, supporting connections between people across divides of class, wealth and ethnicity. At the same time it allocated the largest share of resources to those whose own assets were least.
The catastrophic cuts to Sure Start funding since 2010 have been accompanied by a destructive focus on identifying and targeting children deemed at risk, as if the only risk was a lack of parenting skills. This ideology, the enemy of social solidarity, is understandably resisted by parents and ultimately self-defeating.
Home-Start – home visiting programmes generally – can only work well at a population level if a key aim is to enable parents to leave their homes, to join with others in local activities, provide mutual support and avoid the stigma of individualised blame.
Paul Bywaters
Professor of social work, University of Huddersfield
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