Giving Crawley’s children a strong start in life

Crawley residents may well remember seeing a Facebook ad like the one above during the run-up to the 2021 County Council elections. The picture is of what was once the Northgate Children and Family Centre and as a local party we were trying to make residents aware that the town was about to lose almost all of our remaining Sure Start centres.

This wasn’t just a rumour, it was a stated plan of the Conservatives in Crawley and across West Sussex going in to that election and yet the Conservatives gained county councillors in the town and what we had said would happen came to pass.

Sure Start was one of the big projects of the last Labour Government, designed to ensure that all children got a great start in life, because we know that the first two and a half years are the most important if we want children to unlock their full potential. With Crawley having the lowest social mobility in the entire South East, these centres were sorely needed and the generation of parents who used them guarded them fiercely.

There was no suggestion in the Conservatives’ 2010 campaign that we would lose our centres, in fact I got into an argument with the Crawley Conservatives’ Chair in that General Election where he objected to my suggesting that they might be at risk and made it clear that they would be safe under the Conservatives.

The rest of the story isn’t hard to work out, but new figures just released do put the reality into stark contrast, revealing that 76% of the Sure Start centres in West Sussex have been shut from 2010. So much for being safe under the Conservatives, so much for Conservative election promises.

Out of the 50 children and family centres once covering the county, just 12 now remain, two of which in Crawley, leaving the vast majority of Crawley without any provision. Over a third of the children in Crawley are growing up in poverty, we are in desperate need of more support for these families and under the Conservatives it is clear that this will never happen.

Labour is increasing its focus on developing an ambitious childcare offer to support families from the end of parental leave through to the end of primary school, after the party identified it as a major cause of concern to families in target seats during the cost-of-living crisis.

We have already unveiled plans to offer breakfast clubs for every primary school child in England and announced that we will remove barriers to councils opening more maintained nurseries, as a first step on the road to delivering this ambition and will continue to work to have the policies necessary to give all our children the best start in life.