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Sure Start Children's Centres

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right, and if I suggested otherwise I did not mean to. I meant to say that the main driver was not the need to provide a universal service, but the need to reach poor children wherever they were. In rural constituencies such as mine, which may in general contain high levels of wealth, there are still many people from poorer families. The aim was to provide a universal service that would reach those people, but the Committee concluded that the policy had not been as effective as we should have liked it to be. I hope that we shall learn from Ministers today about their vision of the future of children's centres. We know that the Government agree on the importance of early intervention, and we know that they see an important role for children's centres within that. We also know that they have rolled funding for children's centres into the early intervention grant. They say that they are providing enough funds to keep all the existing children's centres open, but they have not insisted that local authorities do so. Moreover, the larger fund in which they have included the funds for children's centres has itself been reduced this year from about £2.7 billion to £2.4 billion, and from 1 April it will be 10.9% lower than the 2010-11 notional figure.