The claim 
“On Sure Start, the budget is going from £2,212m to £2,297m – that budget is going UP, that is what’s happening”
David Cameron MP, Prime Minister’s Questions, February 9, 2011
Cathy Newman checks it out
To hear the prime minister talk, you’d think Sure Start was set for an era of expansion. But that doesn’t quite tally with dire warnings from charities that 250 of the children’s centres across England face closure because of spending cuts. So has the government spared Sure Start from the austerity drive or did the prime minister just mislead parliament?
The background
Labour refuses to drop the claim that the Tories are cutting the Sure Start budget, and Ed Miliband pounced on the issue in prime minister’s questions again today.
He reminded MPs that a survey from the Daycare Trust warned 250 Sure Start centres could close as a result of government budget cuts.
In the run-up to the election, Labour claimed that Sure Start faced £200m in cuts that would lead to the closure of one in five of the 3,500 centres across England.
While our FactCheck-ometer swung to a fiction for that claim, we did warn that the Tories had not promised to protect Sure Start.
Lo and behold, in October’s Spending Review, the Chancellor announced that Sure Start services would only be protected in cash terms, rather than keeping pace with inflation, and the programme “refocused on its original purpose”.
The analysis
In the current financial year, £1.1bn was spent on Sure Start – this is the figure Mr Osborne said would be “protected in cash terms”.
Education secretary Michael Gove then revealed that the £1.1bn would be wrapped into a new Early Intervention Grant (EIG).
That grant, he said, would replace a slew of funding schemes for mental health, crime, pregnancy and other youth and children’s schemes – including Sure Start.
For the current financial year 2010-11, a total of £2,482 million was allocated to all these schemes.
Mr Gove disclosed that the grant would be “…worth £2,212 million in 2011-12 and £2,297 million in 2012-13″.
Those were the figures quoted by the prime minister today. But they relate to the multitude of services covered by the grant, not just Sure Start (see the list here).
Worse, although there’s a tiny increase in the grant between 2011 and 2012, the total amount allocated in 2010 was £2.5bn – so this year’s allocation is actually a cut of 11 per cent.
What’s more, the Department for Education says the early intervention grant “is not ring-fenced, nor subject to conditions, and local authorities are free to decide locally their priorities for its use”.
In other words, although the money has to be spent broadly on early intervention projects, individual schemes like Sure Start could be cut in favour of others like teen pregnancy initiatives.
FactCheck put the figures to Downing Street today and was told only that the £1.1bn Sure Start fund was protected as part of “the new supersized Early Intervention Fund”.
Mr Cameron dug himself into a deeper hole by going on to say that Anand Shukla, the boss of the Daycare Trust, backed him on the fact that the government was “maintaining” its spending on Sure Start.
Mr Shukla responded by saying he is currently writing to Mr Cameron to “clarify our position”, adding that the Daycare Trust “is concerned that the removal of the ring-fence within the local government settlement in the Comprehensive Spending Review may mean money lost to Sure Start Children Centres.”
Cathy Newman’s verdict
David Cameron slipped up today by confusing the Sure Start budget with the broader early intervention grant. On that, FactCheck believes he misled the Commons.
But he was also less clear than he should have been by omitting to mention that this year’s early intervention grant has been cut by 11 per cent – choosing to focus instead on the very small increase in next year’s figures.
And that’s even before we get into the fact that none of the money in the early intervention grant has to be spent on Sure Start.
Councils have been given a free hand to close as many centres as they wish. The Prime Minister may find himself having to clarify all this before too long.
