'Giving every baby the best start for life,' Backbench Business Debate, 9th November 2021

It is a pleasure to follow the Honourable Lady in today’s important debate on giving every baby the best start for life. Firstly, can I thank the two Honourable Members who have co-sponsored the debate.

Despite the rough and tumble of politics, there are times where colleagues on all sides of the House come together. The early years is one such cross-party issue.

Over the last 11 years in Parliament, I have been proud to work with many colleagues on the early years. The Hon Members for Manchester Central, and Washington and Sunderland, and my stalwart longstanding friend for East Worthing and Shoreham and my Honourable Friends for Eddisbury and Winchester and Chandler’s Ford have all been amazing campaigners for the earliest years.

The former Member for Birkenhead, the noble Lord Field and the former Member for East Dunbartonshire, Jo Swinson, have been great allies, as have all those Members who have supported the APPG on the 1001 Critical Days, and ministers on the Inter-ministerial Group from 2018-2019. But what’s also fantastic, is that since the 2019 General Election, the early years agenda has received fresh support from new colleagues like my Honourable Friends for Penistone and Stocksbridge, and for Stroud, and for the Cities of London and Westminster, and for Truro and Falmouth, and for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner.

I want to pay tribute to the late Baroness Tessa Jowell. She and I worked together on the 1001 critical days agenda, and she campaigned for it to be introduced as part of the Sustainable Development Goals at the UN.

And also Mr Speaker, I must mention the superb work of the Royal Foundation and its Centre for Early Childhood. The commitment from HRH the Duchess of Cambridge and her team has generated fresh attention for ensuring every baby gets the best start for life.

This has been my personal passion for 25 years now, from chairing OXPIP to setting up PIP UK and NORPIP to establishing the 1001 Critical Days manifesto and the APPG on Conception to the Age of 2 and chairing the Inter-Ministerial Group in my RHF for Maidenhead’s Government.

But July 2020 marked a huge opportunity when the Prime Minister commissioned the Early Years Healthy Development Review and invited me to chair it.

Since then, we’ve been able to build on years of cross-party support and a wealth of knowledge and expertise from the early years sector to create a new vision for the 1001 Critical Days that was launched in March this year.

The Review has put the baby’s needs at the centre of all our work. Through meetings with parents and carers, and virtual visits to local areas, and through detailed discussions with parliamentarians, practitioners, academics and charities, we heard about the experience of early years services and support, what’s going well and where change is needed.

First and foremost, we learnt from every parent and carer of their strong desire to be the best parent they can, but we also learnt that as new prospective parents they often struggle to find the support they need.

We heard from many parents who had deep concerns about their own or their partner’s mental health and struggled to get support in a timely way. We heard from many mums who desperately wanted to breastfeed but gave up because support wasn’t there.

We had parents tell us how frustrating it was to keep telling their story over and over again to different people. Their cry was ‘why don’t you people ever speak to each other.’

And equally, we heard from professionals and volunteers who said it would have been so helpful for them if they had known before meeting a new parent or carer about previous issues of trauma or health challenges.

And we heard from many dads how excluded they felt from what they saw as ‘mum-centric’ services. For some they felt that they shouldn’t ask for any support for themselves and for others, they just felt side-lined and, in some cases, traumatised by what their partner had gone through in childbirth.

We heard from foster carers of babies how little information came their way when caring for a vulnerable baby and specifically, in 40 cases of foster caring for babies, only 2 arrived with their red book. Those carers knew nothing of that baby’s early traumas that has caused them to be taken away from their birth family.

We heard from same sex couples about unhelpful assumptions by early years professionals about their relationship and parenting roles.

We heard from black mums how particular cultural and health issues can be overlooked by busy staff.

And we heard from single mums and single dads how they can feel isolated and sometimes stigmatised at such a life-changing time.

And we also heard from parents with particular challenges such as not speaking English well, having concerns about disabilities, experiencing violence in their lives or other significant challenges. We heard that support is inconsistent and sometimes hard to access.

It comes as no surprise that the COVID pandemic has been an extraordinarily difficult time for new families, where through no fault of their own, they have not been able to access services or support in the normal way.

The Babies in Lockdown report from the Parent Infant Foundation, Best Beginnings and Home Start reveals that nearly 7 in 10 parents felt the changes brought about by COVID were affecting their unborn baby, their baby or their young child. 35% of parents would like to get help with their concerns about their relationship with their baby. The report also found that 9 out of 10 parents and carers experienced higher levels of anxiety during lockdown.

But despite the many stories of difficulty, we have also heard fantastic examples of good support for families.

Many health visitors went the extra mile to keep in contact with families who were struggling and many families found it incredibly reassuring to text or Zoom their health visitor at short notice.

Parenting programmes have been a huge support to many families, and we virtually visited Camden’s Bump to Baby programme where classes continued online throughout the pandemic and have proved incredibly popular with new parents and carers who are encouraged to make friendships with each other outside the programme.

Dads gave us positive feedback on services that gave them space to share their experiences without worrying about taking the focus away from the other partner’s health and wellbeing.

In lockdown, we also heard about excellent online and virtual services and how they came into their own. One such service, Parent Talk, provided by Action for Children, reported a 430% increase in the number of parents seeking advice online during the pandemic. The Baby Buddy app, produced by Best Beginnings has seen huge take up of its digital and virtual advice for everything from breastfeeding to nappy changing and from sleep management to mental health concerns.

And we know that many local authorities are determined to improve their joined-up offer to new parents and carers, so I certainly feel we are pushing against an open door.

Our report, the Best Start for Life: A Vision for the 1001 Critical Days was launched by the Prime Minister in March this year. It contains 6 Action Areas.

The first is that every local area should publish its own joined-up set of Start for Life services so that every parent and carer knows where to go for help.

Second, a welcoming hub for every family, in the form of Family Hubs. These Hubs will build on the excellent work done by the late Baroness Tessa Jowell and others on creating Sure Starts, but the benefit of Family Hubs is that they will be the place that every family will go for support and advice, including by midwives, health visitors, mental health support workers and breastfeeding advisors within their walls, and not only will be physically available they will be virtually available through the Family Hub model.

The third action area is a digital version of the red book which will provide parents and carers with a record of the baby’s earliest life from lovely moments like their first tooth, their first steps all the way to records of immunisations and professional support interventions.

The fourth action area is about the workforce. We all know how that health visitors provide critical support for new parents and carers but we also know that their caseload can be very heavy and parents and carers have told us that they really want more continuity of care and more frequent contact in the earliest years. So we are working with health visitors and local areas to consider resourcing levels, training needs and also whether a mixed skill workforce can provide that greater continuity of care.

The fifth action area is to continually improve the Start for Life offer. A key action will be to establish Parent and Carer Panels in every local area to make sure that the voices of families are heard in designing and improving services. We are looking at improving the collection of data, the evaluation of different interventions, and the need for proportionate inspection of the Start for Life offer in each area.

And a final but critical action area is to ensure that there is leadership both locally and nationally to drive the ambition to give every baby the best start for life.

I want to say a huge thank you to the Review’s sponsoring ministers, both past and present for their support for the Review. I am sure it was their commitment, combined with the support of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that ensured such a positive Spending Review settlement for the early years:

• £82 million for Family Hubs.

• £50 million for Parenting Programmes.

• £10 million for the Start for Life offer.

• £50 million for breastfeeding.

• £100 million for infant and perinatal mental health.

• £10 million for workforce pilots.

• £200 million uplift for the Supporting Families programme.

£500 million is a transformational sum that will allow many more parents and carers access to the vital help they need to give their baby the best start for life.

And why does this matter so much to our society? Well we know that it is in the period from conception to the age of 2 that the building blocks for physical and emotional health are laid down. Babies born into a secure and supportive home will usually go on to become happy children who do well at school, then grow into adults who cope well with life’s ups and downs and are more likely to hold down a job, have better health outcomes and form healthy relationships themselves.

On the other hand, for families under pressure, particularly where there is partner conflict, substance misuse, poor mental health or deprivation, the consequence for a baby’s developing mind, in that critical early period, can be far reaching and harmful.

And prevention isn’t just kinder but it is also significantly cheaper than cure. For example, for every one-year cohort of births in England, the NHS has estimated that the long-term cost from lack of timely access to quality perinatal mental health care is £1.2 billion to the NHS and social services and over £8 billion to society;

We know that up to 30% of domestic violence begins during pregnancy;

And we know that health issues such as tooth decay and childhood obesity cost hundreds of millions in health-related expenses every year, and we believe these could be significantly reduced by better education and support for new families.

With these action areas, we can transform our approach to early years support and services, positively improving the health outcomes and life chances of the youngest in our society. Just as we need to level up economic opportunity across the country, we must also focus on where it begins, that critical period of human life from conception to the age of 2.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the world in which we all want to live is one where every baby is nurtured to fulfil their potential, where good lifelong emotional wellbeing is the norm, where our society is productive and cooperative, and every one of our citizens has the chance to be the very best that they can be.