£500 million pounds investment in early years
I am absolutely delighted that £500 million was announced to transform the support available for new families and their babies in the Spending Review today.
Funding will include:
£82million for Family Hubs. This funding will provide transformation money for 75 selected upper-tier local authorities to create or develop their Family Hub network, including helping local authorities to upgrade existing premises and facilities.
£50 million for Parenting Programmes. This funding will ensure parenting programmes are available in those local authorities, alongside additional targeted support to families most in need.
£10 million for the Start for Life offer. Local authorities will receive funding to bring together their joined up Start for Life offer, ensuring that parents and carers understand what services they can access and where they can access them. Parents and carers themselves will be involved in designing the services they need.
£50 million for breastfeeding support. Local authorities will receive funding for a comprehensive offer of advice and support around breastfeeding. The options will be tailored to local context but will include services such as specialist antenatal breastfeeding classes, tongue-tie services, additional breastfeeding peer supporters on postnatal wards and home visits from lactation specialists. This will ensure support is available face to face, over the phone and digitally, including at antisocial hours, and that it will reach families where they are.
£100 million for infant and perinatal mental health. Local authorities will receive funding for bespoke parent infant mental health support.
£10 million for workforce pilots. In a small number of local authorities this funding will be used to develop ideas around a modern, mixed skilled workforce. It will bring together teams with a range of skills to support families under the clinical leadership of health visitors. With the right training and supervision structures in place, health visitors will be able to draw on this additional resource within their teams to improve support for families.
£200 million uplift for the Supporting Families programme, bringing total investment in the programme over the next 3 years to nearly £700 million.
This significant financial package will be transformational for the early years – it will enable many more parents and carers to have access to the support and services that they need.
The vision for the 1001 Critical Days is that every new family should be supported to give their baby the best start for life. We know that it is during the period from conception to age 2 when the building blocks for lifelong 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. 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.
This investment in the early years will transform access to services and support for parents and carers in England, and I believe it is fundamental to the Prime Minister’s levelling up agenda. Just as we need to level up economic opportunity across the country, we must also focus on where it all begins, that critical period of human life from conception to the age of two.
