Tonight we’ve had the first Full Council in over 3 months – the first opportunity for me to hold the Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Learning to account. However, so lengthy has Labour’s waffle and filibuster been this evening, that the opportunity was denied on the basis of running out of time.
The question that I would have asked is:
"Croydon has recently consulted on severely reducing its Best Start provision, a consequence of the Labour Administration's financial mismanagement.
Did you genuinely believe it to be appropriate to leave a whole swathe of the south of the Borough with zero provision, with the closest centre over an hour’s walk or several bus-rides away, and given that deprivation was a key criterion, how could you have considered it correct to suggest the closure of the Shirley Centre that serves the Shrubland Estate and is situated in an area shown on your own map as having one of the highest levels of deprivation in Croydon.
Do you agree that leaving such large areas with no provision is storing up future costs, both in human and financial terms?”
Over the past few months, I have met with children’s centre staff, school pupils, parents, carers and teachers to discuss with them how important the Best Start centres are in view of how they allow parents and centre staff to build a trusting relationship which creates opportunities for help to be asked for and offered, for problems to be prevented and opportunities to be presented. We know that many families receive help in the early years that means that they don’t need more extensive and expensive help in future years.
The Consultation exercise, which we can only hope was more than window dressing, closed on 20th June - extended by a week because the Council was not satisfied with the representativeness of the responses as they were predominantly from women in their 30s, living in the south of the Borough. As it is primarily female parents who use the centres, the average age at women give birth in England and Wales is 30.7 years, and greatest dent to the provision is in the south of the Borough, it strikes me that the responders were representative of those who will be most negatively affected. One can only assume that the responses did not support the proposals and the Council felt the need to seek out more agreeable responses.
My submission to the consultation can be found in the attached PDF. Clearly, I could not agree with the proposals and I would hope that the team running the consultation seriously considered the points that I submitted.
It beggars belief that the Labour Administration thought that a reasonable proposal for the future of Best Start would be to entirely remove provision from a huge swathe of the south of the Borough and to close the centre that serves the Shrubland estate which itself was much mentioned in tonight’s meeting. I wanted to hear from the Cabinet Member herself how she could possibly justify these proposals – because I don’t believe they can be defended. The proposals simply save a small amount of money in the short term, storing up future and greater expense.
Children’s Services serves and protects Croydon’s children, covering a range of issues from childrens social services to caring for unaccompanied asylum seeing children. It isn’t good enough that the opportunities to ask the Cabinet Member to justify her decisions are so few and far between.
