Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
GRAHAM ALLEN
MP
9 MARCH 2009
Q1 Chairman: Graham, may I welcome you
to the Committee. If you remember, I told you a long time ago
I was very interested in your early intervention work and in what
you were doing on a cross-party basis. You and I have had a lot
of conversations about how applicable it is in other parts of
the country and about how it can be geared up and moved around.
Normally when we have witnesses, we give them a chance to say
something to open things up. Perhaps you could say something along
the lines of why you got into this issue. What motivated you to
get involved in this work in the first place?
Mr Allen: First, Chairman, it
is a great privilege to be here—it is a special privilege
as a Back-Bench Member of Parliament. Actually, I am here as Chair
of One Nottingham, the local strategic partnership—that
would be the best way for me to describe myself today. I was motivated
to get involved because, as Mr Heppell will know very well, Nottingham
has specific problems and difficulties: we are often at the bottom
of the league table in many areas. Some of that is due to demography,
because of the very tight city boundary, but there are some serious
problems in Nottingham, and we never gloss over those. I think
that there is an attitude now that we are going to take on those
problems. I thought that one of the ways in which I could contribute
was to be the chair of the local strategic partnership, which
was my first job interview in 20 years for which I have put myself
forward, and they were unwise—or wise—enough to select
me. We set about opening up a different sense of vision—I
think it was partly my responsibility to set it. Instead of tackling
symptoms with which members of the Committee are all familiar,
such as teenage pregnancy, drug and drink abuse, low aspiration
for work and low educational achievement, we wanted to figure
out the causes and start going for them, quite deliberately leaving
the firefighting to those bodies best equipped to do so, and setting
out our stall for a much longer-term approach. In essence, we
felt that the causes were the emotional and social capabilities
of our young people, and we wanted to try to give them the abilities
to make those life choices and to get involved and engage in education,
because we often found that young people, sometimes even by the
age of four or five, had lost that opportunity. It was already
too late: many of them did not have adequate parenting, and, as
Ofsted reported, came to primary school unable to speak in a sentence
or recognise a letter or number. We felt that it was important
to break into that very early, so our definition of early intervention
is slightly different from prevention—it goes a bit further:
it is to break into the intergenerational cycle. We often found
that that was something that went from family to family—often
single parent to single parent—but it certainly stayed as
a problem across generations. We felt that if we could equip our
kids with the abilities to break out of that intergenerational
cycle, they could start a virtuous circle of their own and in
turn raise good, productive young people, who would then become
parents themselves. That was the initial part of the motivation
for the local strategic partnership. We tackled it, I think, in
a number of innovative ways, and I am very glad to respond to
questions on that. Secondly, although we feel that we can do certain
things in the Nottingham context, which I am very happy to talk
about, there is also a national dimension. The problems of Nottingham,
I think, are evident in many constituencies represented by Members
around the table today, and across the country. That was one reason
why we attempted to be non-political and non-partisan, and tried
to build consensus. If we are serious about our policies being
intergenerational, we need all parties and, above all, people
across the social divides in the country to unite and try to form
consensus. That was, in a sense, why some of the things that I
have been doing with other people, such as the Smith Institute,
the Centre for Social Justice, the Dartington College of Arts,
and many think-tanks, has been done, hopefully, in a non-partisan
way. Looking ahead, I think that having achieved certain things
in Nottingham and set out our stall at the national level, the
third thing that I want to refer to is long-term financing. That
is something that I am looking into more and more over the next
year, as I am trying to figure out this problem: if we are going
to save billions of pounds in the long term, and do things such
as reduce costs for secure units, prisons and lifetimes on welfare,
that would be an enormous amount of money. Is there a way in which
we can borrow a sliver of those savings to initiate early intervention?
Again, I am working with a large number of people, from the City
of London to the voluntary sector, to try to work out and devise
financial instruments to make it last a generation. That includes
bond issues and looking at the possibility of raising monies locally
and digging into that. Finally, all governments, of all parties,
have tried their level best and have innovated. However, if we
are honest with one another, the past 50 years have not necessarily
been as successful as we would want. Looking at the symptoms alone,
firefighting—producing money for remedial action and late
intervention—has to be complemented with early intervention.
In the words of the old saying, a stitch in time saves nine. If
we can help to pilot—and I look to the Committee here—a
few more areas, self-starting, as we have managed to do in Nottingham,
we may find one or two ways forward, where we can break that intergenerational
cycle and thus save the taxpayer a lot of money and allow individuals
to realise their full potential. What we want for our children,
we should want for the children in Nottingham North, Nottingham
East and many of the other constituencies represented around the
table.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you. I shall
open by asking a question. We are familiar with sub-regional,
low levels of educational participation. You often find them in
areas where there has been a long history of high-paid, low-skilled
work—coal mining, ship building and so on. I know that there
was a coalfield in Nottingham, but is there a relationship?
Mr Allen: That is absolutely true.
The three lowest attaining constituencies—Nottingham North;
Bristol South, which is Dawn Primarolo's constituency; and Sheffield,
Brightside—and many others share that demography, where
there has been either one important, local industry, or many.
In Nottingham's case, we lost textiles, mining and Raleigh cycles.
Those easier-to-pick-up, traditionally white working-class jobs
are no longer there. What remains is often an anti-educational
culture that comes with the fact that you could get out of the
prison—school—as many regarded it, and go into earning
a good wage from a job and enjoying life. Unfortunately, that
no longer exists. It is important that we seek to support further
and higher education, and we are doing so locally. In Nottingham
North, the figures show that we were the constituency that sent
the lowest number of young people to university. We have increased
that low number by 85%, so I am proud that because of some of
the things we have done in recent years, such as work on literacy
and numeracy, that 10-year cohort is now emerging and going on
to college. The early intervention package, which we will discuss
today, is starting to have an effect. Those things are to be welcomed,
but we need to do more than act on a piecemeal basis, with good
schemes here and there. We need to see it conceptually, as the
way to bust open this intergenerational cycle and give those kids
a chance.
Q3 Chairman: A Committee member
who is not here today often takes the localist view, and would
say that you are the personification of a local initiative that
seems to work. It has leadership and partnership and it recognises
a unique, challenging problem in a city or city area. It is more
effective to do it that way than have governments trying to do
it top-down. What do you say to that?
Mr Allen: That is very flattering,
but unfortunately if it were true, then if that organisation or
individual were to disappear, we would be back at square one.
We need a better structure than that. One of the things that we
have done locally is that, whatever achievements we have managed
to come up with in the past four years, that has been because
of a sensational partnership. It has had its difficulties, but
we now have a leadership team across the city, which is the best
in my 20 years' experience as a Member of Parliament. The police
commander, the chief executive of the health service, the director
of children's services—right across the board, all these
people working together—the chief executive of the city
council, the leader of the council, the business sector, the voluntary
sector, the public services in all shapes and forms are united
around this particular theme. Some are more ardent than others,
and I do not pretend otherwise. However, the fact that they all
work together is the secret of our success, if you like, so where
I might agree with that person, whose name I do not know, is in
saying, "The greater the flexibility locally, the more you
are likely to allow people to come up with their own solutions."
I am an ardent decentraliser, and I think that what we have done
in Nottingham could be replicated in many other places without
necessarily needing the tremendous energy that we have all had
to devote to these things, sometimes despite government, rather
than because of government. I do not mean that in a derogatory
way, because the Government have been extremely supportive of
what we have done, but sometimes you have to fill out targets,
plans and strategies before you get on with the job you know is
necessary locally. It has not always been a help to have government
target setting, for example. However, it is one of those things
you do, and then you get on with the job as you see it. Having
that vision to say, "We want to try and do something serious
about early intervention" has been a great strength behind
all the themed partnerships locally that have worked incredibly
hard to produce whatever success we have had.
Q4 Chairman: How do you separate
out the different Government programmes? Sure Start, children's
centres, nursery education—four, now three. There has been
a whole pattern of early intervention coming from the Government.
In a sense, that has been supportive.
Mr Allen: Very much so. Those
particular ones that you mentioned have been extremely helpful.
They are bedrock programmes for us locally. Certainly, if I may
speak as the constituency MP, the impact of Sure Start has been
tremendous. We welcome the lowering of the age of young people
going to nursery. They have been wholly complementary to the other
things that we have brought in, such as introducing SEAL—the
Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning programme—at primary
schools earlier and faster than elsewhere. One Nottingham funded
all the training to get that going. The young people coming up
through Sure Start then went into primary and fell straight into
SEAL. They understood it; they knew what it was about. Over the
next year we want to, in a sense, take that further by looking
at 11 to 16 life skills, which I think the Government are looking
at over the next two years. We want to start in September, teaching
our young people—11 to 16—what the life choices are.
That will include personal, social and health education, sex and
relationship education, secondary SEAL and a number of others,
but, above all in our areas, teaching them what it is like to
have a relationship, what it is like to build a family and what
it is like to have a baby, so that when they come to make some
of those life choices they are genuinely making a choice rather
than just falling into cultures and attitudes that may be prevalent
on some of the estates.
Q5 Annette Brooke: May I just
ask, Graham—I ask because of the Apprenticeships, Skills,
Children and Learning Bill that we are about to do—how does
the strategic partnership relate to children's trusts?
Mr Allen: We do not have a children's
trust in Nottingham, although we are heading that way and should
have one shortly. The local strategic partnership includes all
the key players around the table, so, for example, on my board
I have not only the leader and the chief executive of the council,
but the lead member for children's services. In addition, I have
the chair of the crime and drugs partnership, the chair of the
health partnership, business representatives and representatives
from the voluntary sector, so, in a sense, all those big budgets
can sit around the table. As well as the magic dust, if you like,
of my own budget, which is now called the Working Neighbourhoods
Fund, the key thing is not the relatively small budget, which
is down from £15 million to £10 million, but how you
use that to bend the mainstream towards early intervention. You
can do that only because all the right people are around the table
and trying to reach a consensus on how we move that forward. The
trick is moving from a pilot to a sustainable programme, at least
in the medium term, and then, as I mentioned earlier, we have
to get our thinking caps on to sustain the funding for a generation.
We think that we have ways of doing that, and are working on them
at the moment.
Q6 Annette Brooke: I am hoping
that this new structure is not going to get in your way. The children
and young people's plan, which currently will be done by children's
services, will—assuming that the Bill is enacted—have
to be the responsibility of the statutory children's trust board.
I am not trying to put you in a difficult position, but do you
think that you can move smoothly into this new structure? It would
be awful to lose what you have achieved.
Mr Allen: Definitely, and again
I think that it is complementary. Let us consider the healthy
schools aspect of the plan. Healthy schools have been very important
to us and complement what we are doing, for example, on teenage
pregnancy and on developing life skills at secondary level. Again,
with the right people around the table, people can say, "Excuse
me, but we have been working on this for a long time; how does
that fit in?" We need additional assistance in that area.
Can One Nottingham, in this case, fund a teenage pregnancy pilot,
for example, in one of our teenage pregnancy hot spots? That would
be very helpful. The fact that we had all the players together
and signed up to the vision would mean that the activity that
took place should be complementary. I am not saying that we have
covered every angle. We clearly have to build and sustain relationships,
but that is partnership working, and I think that we have found
it to be very effective. It will be ever more effective, providing
we keep everyone in the loop and everyone has a place at the table.
We are examining our governance at this moment to ensure that,
for example, our two big universities can stay very much in our
thoughts and perhaps be represented in our governance. So, ensuring
that we have all the players around the table has been key.
Q7 Annette Brooke: I want to ask
about the tricky issue of universal versus targeted. Your action
plans switch from universal to targeted. It is a difficult balance
to achieve. Can you tell us about that balance?
Mr Allen: Yes. Locally, we have
our own version of universal and targeted, obviously, because
we try to cover, for example, every child in the five-to-10 age
group through our primary SEAL programme. We will want to cover
every child with our 11-to-16 life skills programme. We already
ensure that every 10-year-old goes to a full day of training at
the local Galleries of Justice and does role-playing to understand
about citizenship and respecting the law. There are many programmes
in which we expect everybody to be involved, although we will
have to hand on most of those programmes to the mainstream. Being
a relatively small organisation, both in our personnel and finance,
we can live in the long term only through our mainstream partners.
However, then there are more specific things, such as helping
the children of persistent and prolific offenders. That is a very
small group and most are doomed to replicate that intergenerational
cycle, so we must get to them and we do that very specifically
with that target group. Other groups that we are working on right
now are children in care and children who witness domestic violence,
who can be traumatised permanently unless we can get to them fairly
quickly. We deal with those specific groups, as well as the wider
and locally universal issues. Then there are things that fall
in the middle, such as the family nurse partnership, which I am
sure the Committee has looked at in some detail. Although we wanted
to fund that, in the end the Department of Health very kindly
did so directly for us—£700,000 to help one third of
single mums and their babies in Nottingham. We could do every
single mother and child for £2.1 million. Frankly, we want
to move from it being relatively selective to it being a Nottingham-wide
scheme. I understand that President Obama announced something
similar for mothers in the United States. I do not know what his
time scale is, but he has set an ambition for what they call the
nurse family partnership for every mother. Sometimes, we have
ambitions to go from the specific to the general. Because of resources,
we normally expect our mainstream partners to take the burden.
The comprehensive spending review period is three years and my
rule is that we will fund something for three years, with the
proviso that before you get a single penny from One Nottingham,
you tell us what your exit strategy to the mainstream is. That
seems to work quite well. We hand stuff on as it flourishes. Similarly,
if something does not flourish, we have to take the hard decision
and say, "Sorry, that didn't work. The funding has to end."
That can be very difficult, particularly if it is something you
are very committed to personally.
Q8 Mr Stuart: Thank you for coming
to see us today. What is the evidence base for the effectiveness
of early intervention? There seems to be more evidence of the
fact that early trauma and early disadvantage carry right on through
life and have a tremendous lifelong impact. What evidence is there
that that can be counteracted by early intervention? That would
have to form the basis of any case, whoever was in the Treasury,
to persuade it to spend more and bring forward the slice that
you talked about.
Mr Allen: If someone asks about
the Treasury, I will be glad to respond on the interaction we
are having with it. You are absolutely right that there is tremendous
evidence that early incidences of abuse, whatever form it takes—emotional,
sexual, criminal—have a long-term impact. In the little
book that I co-authored with Iain Duncan Smith, we give a lot
of evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. Although
not everybody agrees with that evidence, evidence can be drawn
down from other places, such as the Dunedin study, which is also
mentioned in the book. It seems pretty irrefutable that abuse
in the early years causes lots of problems; in the past, it has
been difficult to prove whether it can be counteracted by particular
interventions. We are now building up a tremendous evidence base.
If I may pull one out of the air, the most effective is probably
the family nurse partnership, which comes from the work of Professor
David Olds in Denver, Colorado. He has a 26-year evidence base
from his studies in New Jersey, Elmira and elsewhere. It is probably
27 years by now, as he has been talking about it for so long.
Professor David Olds's evidence is rigorously analysed. Having
worked with him to bring the family nurse partnership to Nottingham,
I am familiar with the importance of the concept of fidelity.
You cannot change any part of the scheme. If you do, you are not
allowed to call it nurse family partnership, or family nurse partnership
as we call it in the UK. It has to maintain that integrity, otherwise
the whole evidence base is disqualified. For example, if community
nurses call single mums into the centre rather than go to them,
he will say, "Sorry, that is not my scheme. My scheme is
about you visiting. The visits last 55 minutes and happen so many
times per month." He is very clear because he has to maintain
that integrity, otherwise his evidence base is threatened. There
have also been many other studies. The Treasury did a lot of study
before the last comprehensive spending review. There is stuff
by the RAND corporation. Not least because of the rather centralised
political system in this country, I grope for examples in the
UK. However there are examples in the States. I understand the
Committee might be visiting the USA, and the hot spot to go for
evidence-based thinking is the north-west, in Oregon and Washington
state. Steve Aos works for the Washington state legislature and
his sole purpose is to analyse preventive or early-intervening
policies and say whether they work or not—whether there
is a return for the state or not. He can be very brutal. Steve
Aos was over here two weeks ago and met a number of colleagues
from all parties. He can be brutal about what works and what does
not. If a scheme is at the bottom of the list, it will not be
adopted. He does not give a good review to the DARE—Drug
Abuse Resistance Education—scheme, which I had a great deal
of time for. If you cannot get people like him to say a scheme
is cost-effective, you will honestly have to say you will go with
something else that is. That is what legislators in US state legislatures
are doing.
Q9 Mr Stuart: I think you are
right: we have to be brutal because we must not let the aims,
which we can all share, to allow us to continue to pursue programmes
that do not have the evidence base. Serving on this Committee,
I often sit with Ministers and various others and say, "Here
we are, the Government have doubled expenditure since they came
in, begun Sure Start and made a genuine effort, certainly budget-wise
and in many other ways, yet the number of NEETs—those not
in employment, education or training—appears to have moved
not a whit." Flicking through a couple of other points you
made, you said that you welcome Sure Start and I know both main
parties do, yet there is a lot of evidence that it does not reach
ethnic minority groups, the hard-to-reach groups. You welcomed
children's trusts, which are about to be made statutory, which
you have welcomed, but, again, the Audit Commission says there
is no evidence that they have done any good. I know it is early
days, but that remains the biggest thing, does it not? You face
very hard people in the Treasury who will ask for the evidence
that it really is making a difference. With most policies of the
past decade, the expenditure, political will and commitment are
there, but the evidence of real change in society—the things
you would look for—is not. Why should we believe that early
intervention on the Nottingham model is going to provide us with
the key that those others have not?
Mr Allen: That is one reason why
I want a bond issue to support this over a generation. The hardest-faced
capitalists in the City of London do not give a damn about the
kids in my constituency, in Nottingham or anywhere else. If I
cannot convince them to put their hand in their pocket because
they will make a return, I am not producing enough evidence. This
is absolutely in the interests of those people who want to move
from a policy of late intervention to one of early intervention.
The evidence of late intervention succeeding is very thin; the
evidence of early intervention may be a little stronger than that.
There are several projects. Speaking entirely from a Nottingham
perspective, if you have only £10 million to help the problems
of a city and tackle the causes rather than the symptoms, you
become evidence-based very quickly. You are not about to throw
away £100,000, £200,000 or £300,000 on something
you do not think is going to be worthwhile. We are very strict
about the way we commission and about having the evaluation and
the assessment done as we grow, carried out by independent people.
For example, we have people from Nottingham University looking
at our whole package; we have people from think-tanks and other
academic institutions looking externally at what we are doing.
It is a constant refrain. At one level, the scheme had to be really
action-oriented early on to develop a concept and to give people
the necessary motivation and leadership, but as it developed it
was just as important to get proper assessment and evaluation
in place. Otherwise, we would be leading a lot of people up the
garden path. As someone born and bred in my constituency, I was
not prepared to see that happen.
Q10 Mr Stuart: In the light of
that, which interventions—if you can break it down to individual
ones—have been most successful? The other question to ask
you is about the regression to the mean, which is terribly dangerous.
You get somewhere that has a real problem—I assume that
in Nottingham there was a recognition of the problem. Outcomes
in Nottingham had moved sufficiently far from the mean that everyone
decided that they were going to do something about it. The regression
to the mean—I do not know whether you are familiar with
that—is where, typically, anything that moves sufficiently
far from the mean, which then tends to get intervention, will
move back anyway. There is also the danger that, whatever intervention
you use, there is a tendency to overemphasise the benefits of
the particular approach taken. Take a bad school, one that is
really awful: if you did nothing, it would stop being quite so
awful and eventually sort itself out a bit. I would be interested
to hear your views on those two points.
Mr Allen: There are a number of
things that I would love the Committee to feel that it could support
in some form or other—I do not know how you would do that,
Mr Chairman—such as the concept of early intervention and
asking for more studies, more pilots and more probing on that
concept. However, what I do not say is that the problems that
we have had in Nottingham are the average middle England problems.
So, I think you should be cautious, because the remedies that
we need may not be appropriate in Epsom and Ewell or wherever.
We are at one end of the spectrum on this. Having the highest
teenage pregnancy rate in the whole of western Europe in my constituency,
or the fewest number of young people in the UK going to university,
means we are out here. It means that all the efforts that we have
had over many years for specific projects—welcome and important
as they have been—have not cracked it yet. Therefore, the
different thing that we are doing is looking at the causes. In
looking at the causes, you immediately have the difficulty that
if a problem is generational, it will take a generation to sort
it out. So, patience is really important. While I always ask government
to be patient with us as we prove our worth, I also insist that
we try to show people progress as we go, even in the short term.
The introduction of literacy and numeracy, although clearly not
a One Nottingham programme, took time, but it is having a serious
impact on results at 16 now—that cohort is coming through.
That is one of those things that proves that Government and Parliament
can be patient and see results. That does not mean that we cannot
tell you things in the short term—for example, on primary
SEAL being taught in every primary school. We have the world's
experts on that as consultants—they can measure after two
years that this child has blossomed and is now capable of interacting.
The one who sat in the corner and said nothing, or threw things,
we can measure their interactivity—the questions are clever
enough to gauge that. We can assess as we go, and any evidence
of that nature I can make available to Mr Stuart and to you.
Q11 Chairman: Reading your book,
you seem to be very interested in the exotic.
Mr Allen: It is not that sort
of book, Sir.
Chairman: I said exotic, not erotic.
Mr Allen: I am sorry.
Q12 Chairman: A lot of your data,
a lot of the analysis and your cohort studies are outwith the
United Kingdom, which is very interesting, but there is an awful
lot of cohort work and studies that have been done in the United
Kingdom—very reputable universities, long-term pieces of
research—and I wonder why there was not more use of those.
A number of universities run them, first-rate universities with
all sorts of material that would support your early intervention
case, but you almost seem to want to look abroad, rather than
look at home.
Mr Allen: I think that some fantastic
work is going on in the UK—Professor Sammons' work, which
you are very familiar with, from Nottingham University. There
is now work going on in Birmingham on prudential borrowing to
fund this sort of activity, and in Manchester, too. There is work
in Tower Hamlets in a number of early intervention areas. In April,
we are holding an international conference—if I may advertise—to
bring together domestic and international sources. Although here
is not the place to talk about the issue, some of it is due to
the over-centralisation that we get in the UK. For example, it
is easier to pick up and understand something that has been developed
in the United States, because Leicester and Derby have not had
the discretion, or have not had a local strategic partnership
or a dynamic local council, to produce some of those examples.
I am not saying that there are no examples—
Q13 Chairman: We have had evidence
in this Committee from Bristol University, which has been running
these things for 30 or 40 years, and from the Institute of Education
in London—how long has the Institute of Education been doing
it?
Fiona Mactaggart: It is a millennium
study, so just since the millennium.
Chairman: Yes, there is the millennium
study, but there is an ancient study that goes back many years,
tracking children over a very long time. That adds to your case.
Sometimes, reading your stuff, we think, "Why have the authors
gone there, rather than looking at the London study or the Bristol
study?"
Mr Allen: It has nothing to do
with my foreign travel plans; it is entirely to do with what becomes
available. We take advice from anywhere, and as you know, Mr Sheerman,
I have found the conversations that you and I have had very helpful.
We are trying to create—it may already be there—a
brains trust on early intervention, not least made up of local
authorities and universities, so that we can do a lot of networking
and ideas swapping in the UK. So, the more I understand about
those other places, the happier we will be.
Chairman: John Heppell. Nottingham speaks
to Nottingham.
Q14 Mr Heppell: My hon. Friend
ought to be congratulated on his work. One Nottingham was an organisation
that nobody took any notice of or had anything to do with until
Graham became involved. He has certainly heightened the role that
One Nottingham—the local strategic partnership—plays.
I have some worries, though. The document is very worthy, but
I do not accept some of the evidence. I am not sure what the word
is—it is not psychobabble; perhaps it is medical-babble
or something else—but I am pretty convinced in my own mind
that the stuff about the brain would not stand up to real scrutiny—children's
brains shrinking and dying off. But in some respects that does
not matter, because the conclusions are the same as the ones that
have been reached, as the Chairman says, by many other studies
across the United Kingdom. The document is worthy and it identifies
a problem that has been known for some time, but it is lacking
in that I am not quite sure where it takes us next. I can see
some of what you are saying, but some of it is a contradiction.
You concentrate on saying that a child's real development is from
the age of nought to three, but interventions in that period are
very small and, in fact, already exist—Sure Start for example.
Okay, there is an extension with the family nurse visits instead
of the ordinary nurse visits, but those things pretty much exist.
What you seem to have are interventions at five, seven and 11.
We had John Bercow here the other day and he argued strongly—bravely
I thought—that we could scrap all the things in prisons
because they do not work and that we should put all the money
into the early years. It would take a brave man to do that. I
am not sure where your solutions come, because I cannot see where
the extra resources come from, unless you are identifying something
at the other end that is coming out.
Mr Allen: There are a number
of points there. First, on the brain stuff, there is no question
but that people can have different views on that. I have found
extremely persuasive George Hosking at WAVE Trust, and Bruce Perry,
who did those MRIs of the brain. One of those brains was that
of a loved, cared for, nurtured child with two parents, and the
other was that of a child from a Romanian orphanage, whose only
personal contact was with a face that appeared for 10 seconds,
during which something to eat was dropped into the crib, and then
disappeared. Bruce Perry wrote a book called The Boy Who Was
Raised as a Dog, and if you get any time in your next recess
to read it, it will make you laugh and cry in alternative measure.
It takes you into neuroscience, not psychobabble. It is probably
psychobabble when I do it, as I do not understand the detail of
neuroscience. However, some of those that do—although not
many—have a very eloquent way of expressing difficult concepts,
and George Hosking and Bruce Perry are two of those. That aside,
where we should go next is a very good question. In many senses,
what we have done in Nottingham has almost pushed to the boundary
what we can do under current constraints. That is why at the back
of the booklet there are 10 points that we would like people to
consider regarding whether such things can be taken a little further.
I, along with Iain Duncan Smith, presented those to all three
party leaders, and I had a positive and warm reception. However,
there are questions about how we move forward in terms of manifestos
and what additional research we need to do. We would like the
Treasury to help us with some of the financial issues. I am happy
to do that as a constituency entrepreneur, and no doubt the select
committees can also do good work. However, even in terms of due
diligence, if there is a possible saving of many billions of pounds
and lots of human misery, I would have thought that the Treasury
could invest £250,000 in a complementary study. The booklet
also includes information about what local government might do
and how it could be drawn into this, so that we can have more
local examples. There are many possibilities for the way forward,
but they cannot take place only in a Nottingham context. It either
happens on a national scale or does not happen. Lastly, perhaps
this is a Nottingham Robin Hood analogy, but I see the nought
to threes as the bullseye. We need to get to those little ones
so that they can have the skills around them from effective parents
and can become attuned and develop attachment, empathy, and the
social and emotional bedrock that is the key to what we are trying
to achieve in Nottingham. The inner area around that bullseye
is what happens to people aged nought to 18, that allows them
to become decent and good parents, and promotes that precious
nought-to-three period in their children. I am sorry—I have
not explained that particularly eloquently, but that is the concept
that we are trying to get across.
Q15 Mr Heppell: Can you explain
further? Your co-writer, the right hon. Gentleman, Iain Duncan
Smith, supports this.
Mr Allen: Yes. He was my co-author.
Q16 Mr Heppell: Can we count on
him to ensure that the Conservative party does not decide to remove
Sure Start?
Mr Allen: I have no idea about
that.
Q17 Mr Stuart: The Conservatives
have made a statement on that. Michael Gove said in the House
of Commons last week, or the week before, that categorically,
definitely, 100%, an incoming Conservative government would keep
Sure Start. Please stop repeating your own propaganda.
Mr Allen: This consensus building
is already working.
Mr Heppell: I am very pleased. I hope
that is on the record.
Mr Allen: It might be a good idea
to invite Iain Duncan Smith to speak for himself; I am sure that
he could. However, I do not think that there will ever be complete
agreement on the detail of policy, even on the very important
points that were mentioned. If something is to last a generation,
it must become part of the social consensus, rather like it did
in Sweden. If we chop and change, those kids in your inner-city
areas, Mr Heppell, and in my outer-city areas and the isolated
spots that we all have, will be the ones who suffer. It is worth
swallowing a few things, even though some of us may choke on it.
Mr Heppell: You can call me John. I keep
looking behind us to see if my dad is there when you talk about
Mr Heppell.
Mr Allen: This is my first time
in front of a select committee.
Q18 Mr Heppell: Let us move on.
The real problem is one of resources. You are doing certain things
with One Nottingham because the council has not done them. The
council has not done them because when it looked at its resources—this
is written by somebody who has never directed a large budget.
With a large budget, you pick all the things that you want to
do. At moment, the city is still under that budget. The idea that
things would appear that they are not too sure about will only
arise from One Nottingham doing a pilot study and funding that.
That is the reality. People will always look at their budgets
and ask, "What can we afford and what can't we afford?",
and some things will drop off. My experience in local government
is that people can always find ways to save money in two or three
years' time. If you put something in the budget to do something,
at the other end there is always a bit of resistance. I agree
with you. The early intervention work needs to be done. I am simply
wondering how we get there, because it is a question of finding
the money. What has been taken away and put into the mainstream
that you have done as a pilot study? Have you got examples of
when people have said okay to things? Will that work stay the
course, or will it just be done to keep you happy for a year or
so, when it will disappear from the budget?
Mr Allen: We have taken many of
the things that we have done from other people, as best practice.
Perhaps people can then look at us and say that we have best practice
in some ways. We do not pretend that we are a big, mainstream
player. The council in Nottingham has a £1 billion budget,
the PCT has £650 million and the police have £300 million,
so we are a minnow at £10 million. One Nottingham should
not pre-empt any of those big players, but it should bring them
round the table, which it does. With a little bit of the magic
dust, we can pilot one or two things and be innovative. Above
all, when we have all those organisations together, we can present
a coherent vision of what we would like to see in Nottingham.
It is worth a lot of money to get all those organisations moving
in the right direction. I hope that many of the things that we
have done will be inspirational to other people, not least in
the way that we have done them. I do not claim that we were the
only people doing a SEAL project, but we were the first people
to do primary SEAL across a whole city, and the first to train
people thoroughly before they embarked on doing it as primary
teachers. People have said that that is a good thing and it is
rolling out across the whole country. Right now, we are having
a coherent 11 to 16 life skills plan, which no one else will be
doing for at least two years. Instead of a having bit of RSE and
a bit of PSHE and a bit of something else, and a teacher being
a little bit embarrassed on a Friday afternoon giving kids photocopies
of something, we will have trained people who know life skills.
We are going to spend £250,000 this year to train teachers,
even if it is not very glamorous. Unless we do it, the people
will not be confident in their ability to get their message across
to a bunch of giggling teenagers. That is quite important. I hope
that within two years, the Government, who are now reviewing PSHE—Sir
Alasdair MacDonald is reviewing the matter and is coming up to
Nottingham shortly—will say, "The way they did it was
okay. We'll take that bit, and leave that bit." In that way,
in a sense, the initiatives will have been piloted. Among a number
of things, we would like to be the first to pilot Roots of Empathy
in the UK. If we do so, we may prove that bringing a baby and
its parents into a classroom has a really big impact on the kids,
which it does exotically in Canada. Even if they have siblings,
those kids really love and look after their class baby. The evidence
says that it has a very positive effect on their emotional capabilities
when they are teenagers. We trial stuff, but I hope we also get
credibility by saying that the drug programme in the county was
perhaps not as good as it could have been. I was its most ardent
supporter, so it is hard for me to say that. We are now running
the Home Office pilot from East Anglia and running it out across
the whole city. We now have a drug awareness programme, based
on the East Anglian Home Office Blueprint programme, that affects
every child in Nottingham. We may not get everything right, but
I hope that people will be able to draw out some good stuff from
our experience.
Q19 Chairman: I just want to extrapolate
something from what John said. I find the stuff you are doing
in Nottingham fascinating. That is why I wanted to have you here,
so we could get this on the record. How far are Departments such
as the DCSF evaluating in a serious way what you are doing—whether
it is a good spend and which programmes work better than others?
Mr Allen: That is a vital question.
We are getting support from Government and Departments. As well
as our local partnership, we have what we call our national partners,
which are Whitehall Departments. Just two weeks ago, they sent
one representative each to Nottingham to meet us locally and to
see where we were going, but I honestly do not think that even
the effort that we have put in is good enough. One of the proposals
at the end of the little book is that we have a proper national
assessment centre in the UK, which again there is in some states
in the US. As with the Steve Aos work I described, those people
go through stuff with a fine-toothed comb and decide what works
or not. The great thing about that is you do not get anybody reinventing
the wheel.
Chairman: That flies in the face of all
historical analysis.
Mr Allen: Less likely to reinvent
the wheel, perhaps I should have said. Colorado has the centre
for the study and prevention of violence. The people there were
given 700 schemes by the US Department of Justice and told, "Take
those away. Tell us what the best dozen are." It took them
forever, but they have come back and they have what they call
the dozen blueprints, which include, for example, family-nurse
partnerships. If you want the best in terms of value for money,
local applicability and comprehensiveness, you can go to those
12. You do not have to invent your own one, as we all do. When
we are working with our community, we all do it, me included:
"Oh, it would be nice to do that", "If we only
had so-and-so employed doing this." No. Look at the whole
list—these are the dozen. Steve Aos does that in Washington.
I would love us to be able in the UK to draw all those people
you talked about, Chairman—all those people who are already
doing bits and pieces—into one place and say, "The
thing that Nottingham is doing is down at 550; don't even think
about it. The one that Glasgow is doing on anti-violence is in
the top dozen."
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