early-intervention-next-steps

Foreword
In July 2010 the Prime Minister asked me to
lead a review on Early Intervention. I was glad to
accept. I have a long-standing personal interest
in policies to break the cycle of deprivation and
dysfunction from generation to generation.
I have witnessed this phenomenon repeatedly
as MP for Nottingham North – the area in which
I was born and grew up. This is one of the most
deprived constituencies in the UK, and it has
been heartbreaking to see so many children’s
lives and potential wasted, all the more so for
knowing that this could have been prevented by
small investments in the early years of those lives.
Getting this wrong has impacts way beyond the
individual and family concerned: every taxpayer
pays the cost of low educational achievement,
poor work aspirations, drink and drug misuse,
teenage pregnancy, criminality and unfulflled
lifetimes on benefts. But it is not just about money
– important as this is, especially now – it is about
social disruption, fractured lives, broken families
and sheer human waste.
Early Intervention is the answer: a range of welltested
programmes, low in cost, high in results,
can have a lasting impact on all children, especially
the most vulnerable. If we intervene early enough,
we can give children a vital social and emotional
foundation which will help to keep them happy,
healthy and achieving throughout their lives and,
above all, equip them to raise children of their
own, who will also enjoy higher levels of well-being.
In 2005 I became Chair of One Nottingham, the
local strategic partnership for my city. Over the
next four years we set out to fulfl this promise
with a shared vision of Nottingham as an ‘Early
Intervention City’, with 16 interventions to break
the 0–18 cycle of dysfunction. Nottingham has
coped heroically on meagre funds and incredible
personal and partnership commitment. But
my experience convinced me that our country
needed a more focused national efort. Both in
Nottingham and elsewhere we were still tackling
the symptoms of social problems and ignoring the
causes. Huge budgets were absorbed by remedial
or palliative policies and few resources were spent
on preventive policies.
People of all parties had reached the same
conclusion. In 2008 the Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith
MP and I co-wrote the book Early Intervention:
Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens, setting
out the stall for cross-party action on intergenerational
change and feeling our way towards
a national strategy.
Three years later, it is clear that our country can
take the next steps necessary to gain the full
benefts of an Early Intervention approach. Much
excellent work has been done, at both local and
national level, but new and additional lines of attack
are needed.
That is the purpose of this Report and no one
need fear its proposals. They will not threaten
any efective policies which are now in place, nor
provide any excuse or rationale for cutbacks.
Instead, they ofer sharper tools to measure and
expand the rewards of Early Intervention, to
improve the execution and impact of successful
policies, to make more efective use of current
public expenditure and to achieve lasting cost
savings in later years. The proposals will take Early
Intervention to a new and higher level.
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