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Labour's child care plans under fire [GB]

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Author: 
Batty, David
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Article
Publication Date: 
6 Jan 2005
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The government's child welfare reform programme is "all smoke and mirrors", according to the architect of its much-vaunted early years child care programme.

Norman Glass, the creator of the Sure Start programme, said plans to provide universal affordable child care and integrate children's health, education and social services were underfunded and "tremendously incoherent".

Ministers were deluding themselves if they thought they could transform children's services without significant further investment, he added.

The comments came after Mr. Glass accused the government earlier this week of quietly scrapping Sure Start in all but name.

The Sure Start programme - announced by the chancellor, Gordon Brown, in 1998 - consists of 550 independent local projects providing health, early education, play and family support to under-fours in deprived areas.

But management of the projects will now be transferred from independent boards made up of parents and volunteers to local councils. Funding for the schemes will also no longer be protected.

Mr Glass said this amounted to changing, if not abandoning, the ethos of the programme. And he cast doubt on claims that the government's child welfare reform programme would transform children services.

Mr Glass, who headed the Treasury working group which first proposed Sure Start, said there was no evidence that new organisations such as local authority children's trusts could bring into the mainstream the Sure Start approach of early intervention and prevention, especially when the health service was not obliged to cooperate with other local agencies.

Although Mr Glass welcomed the government's recent 10-year child care strategy, which aims to provide affordable child care for all, he said the funding did not appear to add up and raised fears that the least well-off would lose out.

He said: "We're mysteriously going to transform into a Scandinavian welfare state without putting up taxes. This either demonstrates a capacity for self-delusion or a hope to get away with it without anyone noticing.

"They're going to open 3,500 children's centres with no extra money. Mostly what will change is the name on the front door, it will be the same existing facilities under a different name. It's tremendously incoherent. I can't see how it's going to work."

The Daycare Trust agreed that "significant further investment" would be needed if the government was to meet the aims of its child care strategy.

But the charity's director, Stephen Burke, said ministers' aim of making child care available to all families, not just those in the most deprived areas, was to be welcomed.

- reprinted from the Guardian

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