16 May 2007
Mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds will be given more support by a scheme unveiled today by the PM.
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Prime Minister:
Good Morning everyone. First of all can I thank you all for coming to this morning’s discussion. Let me just try and set the background for it and then I will let Hilary say a few words and then we will hear from David …
You know over these past ten years we have done a lot for families in respect of Sure Start, and children’s centres and early learning and early years development and there has been a huge amount of provision put in place and indeed a lot of money spent on it. And you know as I saw for myself when I was visiting various centres on Monday, there is no doubt that for many, many families it has benefited them enormously and that is great. However, what we have increasingly become aware of is that there is a section of families or people in particular situations who the general run of provision doesn’t seem to reach, and they are often people with a multiple set of problems, hugely challenging lives and if we are not able to bring them into some form of structured framework or discipline then they end up in very difficult circumstances indeed. And you know it is easy to get into this argument about whether you are stigmatising people or not, and actually it has got nothing to do with that really, it is to do with what is the best and most appropriate form of help that gives them a chance of making something of their lives.
We have been doing obviously the parenting provision, and I think it is 50 different projects that are going to be run up and down the country. This is another type of extension of the same idea, the idea of the sort of nurse/family partnership which is really designed to reach the most vulnerable and the most difficult at an early enough stage to make a difference. And people often say how do you manage to identify people, and I think that it is easier than people sometimes think. In other words I think it is fairly obvious if for example you have got a very young mother-to-be who is 15, 16, 17 years old, is actually not living at home, it is pretty obvious that that is someone who has got a certain challenge about to confront them in their lives. And I think we can be far too sort of prissy about deciding how we intervene and not, and the important thing is just to realise that of course we are going to have to take action in circumstances where the family-to-be will need that action and where if we don’t give them the help and support then actually it is bad for them and it is bad for their child, and then we spend much, much more money, quite apart from more time and energy, trying to catch up later.
But anyway let me ask Hilary to say a few words and then we will hear from David.
Mrs Hilary Armstrong:
OK, we also today are going to launch two documents that come from the Policy Review - The Role of the State and Building on Progress Families - which sort of set out where we have come to in our Policy Review, thinking about family policy and the wider role of the state in supporting families. So I am sure that certainly some of the journalists will find those interesting at some stage in the day.
But I was very keen that when David was visiting us to have a look at the initial setting up of the pilots around the country, that we have the opportunity to come together with the Prime Minister just to spell out a little more just what these programmes, what the potential is and what we want to be working with you all around the country on in the next few months and years.
Prime Minister we do actually have a nurse/family partnership in Durham. I am not sure that there is anyone here this morning from there. I was very, very heavy on civil servants to make sure they weren’t putting it in Durham just because of you and I, so I did make it even tougher for Durham to get through the qualifying than would have been otherwise the case. But we do have ten pilots around the country.
Early intervention is really what it has seemed to me, from having a look at in my job, having now been in it a year, having had a real look at what has happened to the most disadvantaged in our society over the last decade, how things have moved, but how there is still that group who in many senses haven’t moved because they have not been effectively accessing the services that are available. I know that one of the things that David finds is that we have universal services that he would love to see in America, but that even with those universal services they do not work to enable everyone to make the best of their potential, and that is really how I see this programme, that it is a very clear way in which we will be able to make the best of people’s potential and allow them to gain the confidence and the wherewithal to actually just turn their own lives around.
But I am delighted that David is here with us this week. He has got a very busy schedule this week, we are sending him all over the place, and I would like to ask him just to say a few words.
Prime Minister:
And David thanks very much indeed for coming. Sorry, I should have mentioned, these two policy documents that are here we will distribute to the media later, but they take us through the whole range of family policy, including what we have been doing before.
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