When the Labour Party introduced Children’s Centres in 1999 they chose to make them available to people in all areas of society. The coalition and now this Government have since closed down over 1000 of them and is now claiming as this article indicates, that the current provision covers the most disadvantaged areas in our nation. When it comes to measuring disadvantage, there are many challenges and sadly Governments tend to ignore the evidence that their own way of making such measurements are a poor way of understanding need in geographical areas. Many years ago I had the privilege of chairing a committee in the Wealden areas of Sussex called the Local Strategic Partnership or LSP. We focused on issues relating to local need which would be missed by Nadhim Zahawi who spoke about the closure of children’s centres to the science and technology select committee. One can only hope that people like Norman Lamb and Liz Kendall on the Committee are willing to challenge such arguments.

Most of the statistics that are used to detect poverty and need are based on specific elements and the measurement of these is calculated using averages over a large area, rather than a more sophisticated median measure. In communities that are large enough to be detected, where the majority of families live in need as measured using the elements that feature on the Government list, their community will feature on the data that Zahawi claims to be aware of. In the same size communities where the majority of families do not live in measured need, the community will not be seen to be need based. The problem is that society is not a monochrome scenario and living in Brighton where many of the Victorian houses have servant quarters, it is clear that one individual household would have been a mixture of poverty and wealth 100 years ago.  The intensity of small pockets of need in very wealthy communities is something that emerges primarily via anecdote and to small charities such as foodbanks and places of worship. However the Government is not willing to try to detect such matters. A second element of the poverty that our LSP focused on was the cost of living in rural areas. When it comes to measuring poverty and need, the fact that as Action in Rural Sussex identified back in 2012, that living in a rural setting would cost on average £3,000 a year more is ignored by the Government. The lack of bus routes (or regular buses) and shops and GP practices in rural settings means that poor people in rural areas will experience even greater need than people in urban settings. Yet denying provision to rural areas even though they don’t appear on Government statistics, in part due to their hidden poverty elements and in part because there are usually some very wealthy residents as well as those lacking in wealth is a mistake. The value of investing in such communities is that they then become sustainable and grow stronger and they help to ensure that society as a whole is balanced and that when students from schools in the nearby large towns and cities meet students from rural schools, they discover that society as a whole is similar. The risk of not investing in such communities is that our nation becomes even more polarised and wealthy rural people would be obliged to bus in workers to help them run their estates, in the same way as Gatwick Airport buses in cleaners from communities such as Hastings and Eastbourne.

A classic example of a positive balance is where I work, in the Wealden area of Sussex. Our company has donated storage space to the local foodbank which has a small number of beneficiaries and a large number of donors. If it existed in isolation, the impact of such surplus donations would isolate still further the small numbers of people who are recipients of the charity. However in nearby larger towns the balance works the other way where there are more recipients than donors. The surplus from one foodbank helps to support the deficit in its neighbouring location. Of course if the foodbanks were to use Government statistics to determine their value, the foodbank where I work would get closed down, and then the people who rely on it would be forced to travel many miles to the nearest large town where they would be at the back of the queue. If this metaphor was applied to children’s centres, the fact that the provision was a bonus to advantaged people in the town where I work would mean that disadvantaged people would gain enormously. However simply measuring the numbers of disadvantaged people (based on how such measurements are defined) will leave the town without any such provision.