Lucy Rigby is to be thanked for reopening the debate on the merits of Sure Start (Sure Start worked. So why is Theresa May out to kill it?, theguardian.com, 6 February). Sure Start began its life with an impressive focus on the most important aspects of the relationship between low-income mothers and their young children that play such a crucial role in determining those children’s life chances.
It then morphed into an extension of the then Labour government’s welfare-to-work programme to help parents into jobs. During this second stage of its life, there was nowhere near enough attention paid to the impact of Sure Start on poorer children’s life chances. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that it is mothers’ mental health, the bonding between mothers and their children, and the home learning environment in the first five years of life – the foundation years – that determine whether poor children will grow up to become poor adults.
Whether Sure Start or other bodies are best placed to deliver interventions along these lines remains up for debate. But if it is to prevent poverty being passed down from one generation the next, the prime minister’s social justice strategy will need to deliver a significant increase in funding for such an intervention programme.
Frank Field MP
Labour, Birkenhead
• Sure Start has been an expensive failure, and the current scaling down of the programme (More than 350 Sure Start children’s centres have closed since 2010, theguardian.com, 2 February) is completely justified. At its launch in 1998, the then government set up the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS), headed by Professor Edward Melhuish, to monitor the programme’s performance. In June 2012, after spending £10m on tracking a well-intentioned initiative which by then had absorbed £10bn of taxpayers’ money, NESS published a report stating that by the age of seven, it had found “no impact on child outcomes”. As Sure Start was specifically created to produce “outcomes for children”, very large sums of taxpayers’ money had been wasted, and its replacement by more effective alternatives is well overdue.
Maritz Vandenberg
London
• When will governments learn that outsourcing does not work? Concentrix is yet another company sacked for not being able to do the job it was contracted to do. It caused hardship for thousands of benefits claimants, by wrongly stripping them of tax credits (Case review for families stripped of tax credits, 6 February). Just imagine the effect of this on the daily life of many low-income families. The work has now been taken back in-house by HMRC. Meanwhile George Osborne and others pursue additional lucrative work, as they obviously consider being an MP to be a part-time job.
Mary Walker
St Albans, Hertfordshire
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