
Statistics released by childcare minister Sam Gyimah in parliament on Tuesday show that in the first six months of 2015, there were more closures of children's centres than for the whole of 2014.
Responding to a question from Labour MP for Copeland, Jamie Reed, Gyimah revealed that there have been 99 children's centre closures between 1 January 2015 and 30 June 2015.
This compares with 83 closures for the whole of 2014, which in itself is more than twice the number for 2013 when there were 32 closures.
Details of the acceleration in closures comes just a day after the government published details of the location of all children's centres closures since April 2010.
Those figures showed that of the 250 closures recorded by the government, more than half occurred within just seven local authorities.
The most closures came in Staffordshire, which shut 43 children's centres.
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