Conservative conference: Pay mums to attend parenting schemes, MP suggests

Andrea Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire, said professionals must be “far more creative” about engaging the most disadvantaged parents, by “thinking about paying people to attend” schemes that improve the way they interact with their babies.

Speaking at a Conservative party conference fringe event, Leadsom argued that the cost of paying parents to improve their early relationships with children would save the public sector money in the long-term.

“If you’ve got a programme that starts with 10 mums and ends up with two, that was a complete waste of public money,” she explained. “For someone who needs the incentive, it would pay us as the public sector to pay them, so that they actually turn up and get the benefit of the programme, rather than throwing money down the drain.”

Leadsom founded the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Project, which provides therapeutic support to parents and babies through pregnancy to age two. She is also joint vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sure Start Children's Centres and was chair of the Oxford Parent Infant Project for 10 years.

She argued that support for families should be more responsive to individuals’ needs. “The problem with a lot of those programmes is getting people onto them and keeping them on them,” she said.

“There’s no point in having a programme that is fixed at rigid times of day when you’ve got a postnatally depressed mum with a baby who doesn’t actually realise that now’s the time we’re supposed to be going off to this programme. We have to recognise that families don’t work to those timetables.”

Leadsom added that a greater proportion of early years spending should be concentrated on the first two years of children’s lives, in order to get the best value for the public purse.

“Children’s centres need to refocus themselves so they are 80 per cent focussed on the earliest relationships up until age two,” she said. “That’s not something for government to do; it’s for children’s centres and local authorities. They could decide to do that.”