Children's centres are more important now than ever

Increasing prices, stagnating wages and benefit changes will undoubtedly continue to take their toll on family finances with 700,000 more children expected to go into poverty as a result. However, it is the announcement of a further 10 per cent cut in local authority income that puts a sharp focus on the challenges of delivering more support for families at a time when they need it most.

In anticipation of this, there is a growing debate nationally and locally about how money should be saved. Cutting the second phase of funding for two-year-olds and halving the number of Sure Start children's centres are just two of the unpalatable possibilities aired in policy forums over recent weeks. But these are the wrong options at the wrong time. Investments in childcare and early years have been hard-won gains to a still underdeveloped infrastructure for children and family services that need to be built on and developed rather than dismantled at the first hurdle. Services such as Sure Start represent a generational sea change in investment in early years, and rolling back from that would be a huge misjudgment.