Jess Asato

I also hugely thank the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for bringing forward such an important and necessary Bill, which has my wholehearted support. I declare my role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for children and as a member of the parliamentary advisory group for the 1001 Critical Days Foundation. I also proudly declare that, a decade and a half ago, I worked for Dame Tessa Jowell, who pioneered the transformational Sure Start programme that the spirit of the Bill echoes back to. When announcing the first Sure Start trailblazers in this very place, she said that we are not prepared to allow children’s opportunities to be set on the day that they are born. The nature of parental influence on babies was brought up with me recently, when my daughter stayed with a family friend, and on her return said, “Mum, she taught me a brilliant poem by a guy called Larkin.” It goes: “They”— mess— “you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.” As shocked as I was at hearing her use the vernacular, I was delighted that she had discovered Larkin, as “This Be the Verse” was also a favourite of mine as a teenager, but I know more now than I did when I was a teenager. We now have the brilliant research and evidence that shows that with support, parents can bond and love their babies. Breaking the stranglehold of intergenerational trauma is possible. There was a huge wealth of evidence that sat behind the need for Sure Start, so it was devastating to see that by the time I was having children, the strong political consensus built by the late 2000s around the value of investing in the early years had become undone. It is, after all, easy to make cuts to services supporting babies, given that they neither have a voice or a vote. It is also heartbreaking that the most recent evidence by the IFS, quoted today, shows that children who attended Sure Start had higher educational attainment, particularly those from the most-disadvantaged backgrounds. That was exactly the ambition and what underpinned the introduction of Sure Start by Tessa, David Blunkett and others, only to come to fruition after the whole programme had had the rug pulled from under it. However, I think Tessa would be delighted to see, through this Bill, the reforging of that cross-party consensus on the issue of support for babies and their parents. For that I thank Dame Andrea Leadsom, who co-chaired the 1,001 days all-party parliamentary group with Tessa, for her work on making the Bill a reality, and carrying the love for the smell of babies—which they regularly discussed in Tessa’s office—into her programme of work at the Department of Health and Social Care, alongside former Minister Will Quince. I also thank Jess Mills, Tessa’s daughter, and her organisation Start Strong, through which Tessa’s legacy lives on. It is our duty to not just to Tessa’s memory, but the lives of babies and parents across the country facing the stark inequalities at the start of life, to embed the principles behind the Bill in legislation, so that they can stand the test of time. I have a particular interest in safeguarding, and given that babies under the age of one account for a third of serious safeguarding reviews, and around three fifths of child deaths reviewed nationally, any Bill that makes babies more visible to multiple services is incredibly welcome. It is a stain on our idea of equality that so many babies in this country begin life already at a disadvantage, that babies in the top 10% most-deprived areas are more than twice as likely to die as those in the 10% least deprived, and that almost a third of parents cannot afford to provide balanced meals. The Bill will only succeed if it makes that scandal of inequality an issue that no future Government can simply ignore. It must be strong enough to hold successive Governments’ feet to the fire. For that to happen, the Bill must have the teeth to achieve it. I am slightly concerned that the strength of the accountability process set out by the Bill is undermined by the ability of any Secretary of State being held to account by it to define the scope against which they are assessed. To me, that is not strong enough. I would like to see in the Bill the specific outcomes that Governments must improve for babies and young children. There is precedent for that. The Childcare Act 2006, which helped establish the framework for Sure Start children’s centres, placed a duty on English local authorities to not only improve the wellbeing of children in their area but, crucially, reduce inequalities between young children across a number of named outcomes, including physical and mental health and emotional wellbeing. If we want successive Governments to work to improve outcomes for our babies, that requires us to be bold enough to say so in primary legislation. If we could place that duty on local government 20 years ago, surely we can ask the same of our national Government today. It is, of course, heartening to see the investment that the Government are providing and that they are rolling out more Best Start family hubs. I recently visited Kirkley Best Start family hub in Lowestoft to see its perinatal mental health support in action. While there, we met a mother who experienced a mental health crisis and found it difficult to bond with her baby. With support from the mental health worker, she and her husband were slowly able to build those blocks. When I met them, she said that things were still hard but she was able to love her baby, now a curious toddler, and she called her worker her rock. Relationships are the key. This is not just a service or intervention, but the very best of what Tessa would call the “relational state”. Perhaps man may not need to hand misery on to man, and this Bill can play its part in that.