Political opinion with Beccy Cooper MP: the best start for children
I was very pleased to hear last week that every community will soon have a Best Start Family Hub, as the government roll out plans to create 1,000 centres across the country by April.
Many of us remember the success of the Sure Start programme under the previous Labour government, which brought family services into the heart of our communities and delivered a wide range of locally-based support for families and children. The Best Start centres will build on that success, providing parents and carers with a local, one-stop shop for support.
The services that will be offered by Best Start are wide ranging, including activities for children aged 0-5, midwifery and maternity services, mental health services, birth registration, debt and welfare advice, health visiting, as well as support with SEND issues, domestic abuse, early language and development, nutrition & weight management and infant feeding, among many others.
This follows the approach taken within our ‘Fit For The Future’ 10-year NHS plan, which aims to bring health services back into the community. As a member of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, it’s good to see diagnostic services being taken out of our overstretched hospitals and placed into frontline local settings like GP surgeries, where a more personalised, holistic and preventative approach can be taken.
Best Start also forms part of the wider government commitment to give all our children the start in life they deserve. This includes rolling out 30 hours of government-funded childcarefor working parents, as well as creating and expanding new school-based nurseries. There has also been a large-scale expansion in free breakfast clubs, the ending of toddler top-up fees and a record upliftto the early years pupil premium.Free school meals have also been extendedto half a million more children and school uniform costs have been cut.All this means parents being saved potentially thousands of pounds each year and that tens of thousands more children will be school-ready by the age of 5.
Amid all the often frantic international and national news, it can be easy to overlook the incremental, everyday progress that is being made, particularly on issues around health and children’s wellbeing. There of course remains the thorny issue of the two-child benefit cap, the removal of which would lift so many more children out of poverty, and like many MPs I’m hoping to see movement toward this in the Chancellor’s budget next month.
In the meantime, not only as your MP but as a mother too, I’ll keep working to do everything I can to make sure our all children get the very best start in life we can give them.
As always you can contact me at [email protected]