Family hubs scheme is a Sure Start rip-off, says Labour MP
Ministers have been accused of trying to reinvent one of Tony Blair's flagship policies with the £300m roll-out of family hubs.
The £300m Government scheme will see centres open in 75 areas – including Wolverhampton – by 2025, offering support to struggling families.
But Pat McFadden, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East, says the policy is a belated attempt to reinvent his party's Sure Start scheme, which was cut by the Conservatives in the post-2010 austerity years.
Sure Start was brought in by Mr Blair's government in 1998 and targeted services and support at families in some of the country's poorest areas.
Mr McFadden, Labour's Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: "This is basically Sure Start reinvented.
"The Labour government introduced these centres to help families many years ago then a lot of them, including the local one in Bilston market, were closed down after the Tories came into office in 2010.
"It's good to see the idea coming back but we could have made a lot more progress in the intervening years if they hadn't been closed in the first place."
In Wolverhampton centres will open in the eight existing Strengthening Families hubs.
According to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies around 13,000 admissions of children to hospital each year were likely to have been prevented by the work of Sure Start centres.
They were brought in with the aim of closing the achievement gap for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and initially targeted at the 20 per cent poorest council wards in England.
Around 2,200 centres remain open after more than 1,400 were closed down over the last 13 years.
