Jonathan Todd

Earlier this week in the Times, Rachel Sylvester drew a similar conclusion to me on the lessons from Baby P and Karen Matthews by saying:

“To the extent that there is a wider lesson to be drawn by the Government it is about how to improve the way in which people bring up their children.

“Of course it is reasonable for Ed Balls to propose changes to social services departments – but social workers only get involved when something goes wrong. There must be more that can be done to stop it getting to that stage”.

She argues that, “this is, in fact, something the Government realised early on. One of Labour’s first decisions, when it was elected in 1997, was to set up Sure Start, a programme designed to help parents, particularly those in deprived areas. There are now 3,000 Sure Start centres, combining child care, health advice, employment training and parenting support for 2.3 million families. Labour has promised to create 500 more by 2010 at a cost of more than £1 billion a year”.

It’s nice to see someone other than Polly Toynbee extolling the virtues of the excellent Sure Start scheme in the mainstream press. However, Sylvester argues that middle-class parents are increasingly being shut out from Sure Start services. This risks them becoming “ghettos for the poor”, which she is keen to avoid.

This brings to mind the semi-famous maxim from Richard Titmuss that, “services for the poor were always poor services”. Titmuss wrote these words as part of a passionate defence of universalism in welfare provision; the notion that welfare services should be provided to all, not targeted upon select groups or areas. Only when social services are aimed at the community as a whole and so are seen as benefiting everyone, can they “foster social integration and a sense of community”.

There probably is a case for means-testing in the allocation of some social services but the principle of universalism seems attractive in the context of Sure Start. Indeed, this seems the essence of the long-term strategy behind the scheme. It must be hoped that it is this strategy, rather than “the ghettos for the poor”, which becomes a reality. If this were to make us a nation of expert parents, infused with “a sense of community” and only too happy to pay the taxes required for universal provision of the service, then the inevitable difficulties in recruiting social workers that recent events have precipitated will hardly matter. Of course, it would be preferable if social workers were in sufficient supply but improved parenting would cut more directly to the core of the challenge facing us than any number of social workers could.