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Sure Start Children's Centres

I take the hon. Lady's point. We can disagree on that. Let me get down to what worries me. Our report—which, if my memory serves me right, the present Chairman of the Education Committee voted against—suggested that children's centres should be maintained. We made some helpful comments. I want to spend a little time on the Government's response. Paragraph after paragraph, they keep saying how wonderful our report is, but when I look at their response in detail, I am worried about some of their reasons for agreeing with it. We can all agree that evidence-based policy is good policy, and this policy of ours was the purest example of that. In all my 10 years as Chair of the Select Committee, with some wonderful colleagues—many of us turn up at debates such as this—the best policies that we saw were those based on evidence, and of all the policies in those 10 years, the clearest evidence was on early-years intervention and redirecting expenditure to the early years. People carelessly think that we spend a lot of money on early years, but that is not the case. How much we spend increases as a child gets older. All the evidence shows that we have got it the wrong way round. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) often made that case, and made it to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The money should be piled in during the early years, for the reasons that the House has heard this afternoon. What worries me about the Government's response to our report is whether the commitment is still there. It is all very well having the commitment, but without the money and the resources, children's centres will start to go. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) said that his council has not yet made up its mind. I have it on good authority that my local authority, Kirklees, in which Huddersfield sits as the jewel in the crown, is reducing the number of children's centres from 35 to 17.