David Blunkett was in town to support Cllr Julia Buckley as they visited Sunflower House in Shrewsbury. David went to school here and has many fond memories of the town.
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00:00 I've been out of town for a while, was the senior part, post-16.
00:06 It was when I moved to Brighton Hall when I joined the Labour Party here in the town.
00:12 And because the offer that they made in those days, bearing in mind we're going back a very long time,
00:20 was so poor, a group of us went down to the local technical college, which I was describing earlier,
00:26 and started to get what are now GCSEs. In those days they were called O-Levels.
00:32 And gradually, year on year, over three years, some of us accumulated enough to give us confidence to go on
00:40 and get a job and to do A-Levels in the evening, and I got a National Certificate in Business Studies as well.
00:46 But it took me six years to get to university, so it was a long haul.
00:51 But it started here, and here I am back, giving support.
00:57 Well, welcome back.
00:58 Thank you very much indeed.
00:59 Education Secretary, during the introduction of Sure Start all those years ago, how important are those services still today?
01:06 Early intervention, early years, is absolutely fundamental.
01:09 Everybody pays lip service to it, but too often it gets lost, and the resources are not applied early enough
01:19 to stop things going very badly wrong.
01:22 And that intervention, of course, is for the baby, for the child, but it's also for the family and for carers
01:29 and the wider community, which is what Sure Start was all about.
01:33 And the Centre here have hung on to the essence of Sure Start with what we've just seen,
01:39 with the multi-agency panel and people working together and sharing the challenge together.
01:47 And also the resource, so if health and social service, now children's services,
01:54 and the multi-academy trusts and the local authority are all working hand in hand,
02:01 there's a chance that you might actually be able to intervene early enough to stop things going badly wrong.
02:06 So it's that, but it's also not just about children who have got a very difficult start in life,
02:15 it's about the family generally, so that you actually can see the change it makes in the aspiration of everyone.
02:24 The great strength of the early Sure Start programmes was that it wasn't focused purely on the child,
02:30 it was focused on the family, and that made a difference.
02:34 If the mum, or if there was a dad around, got a job, it changed the whole aspiration for the child.
02:40 If they had confidence themselves, because they were learning, they would be able to pass that on.
02:46 We often preach to developing countries, as we did with the Millennium Development Goals all those years ago,
02:54 that if we educate the mother, then we'll educate the child, but we don't always apply it in our own communities.
03:02 So what we need to do is to turn the rhetoric into reality.
03:08 Obviously over the last 13 years, children's services have taken quite a hit.
03:14 What are your thoughts on the massive cuts?
03:17 There's been a major concentration on social care for elders,
03:23 but actually the support and the resource for early intervention and for children's services
03:31 has been reduced just as heavily as it has for social care, and that gets forgotten.
03:37 It's really important, for all the reasons I've just spelt out, that the resource goes in to put things right at a very early stage
03:46 and to give the life chance to every child that we would expect for our own children.
03:51 That is a priority, and I know that the Shadow Education Secretary, Bridget Philipson, who herself has two small children,
04:00 has early years as an absolute top priority in terms of investment.
04:06 It makes sense, we just need a totally different accounting structure,
04:10 so that we can see what benefit is gained from investment in the early years and in the family,
04:18 which then stops the expenditure further down the line, which often you can never avoid.
04:24 If somebody gets involved with the criminal justice system and they end up in prison,
04:28 it costs us an absolute fortune if a youngster has major mental health problems and behavioural problems
04:35 and they're not dealt with early, it can cost tens of thousands of pounds a year, if not more.
04:42 So it just makes sense to get it right from the beginning.
04:46 But it's a long haul. We did our best and we made some progress 25 years ago,
04:54 but then you think the water's closed again and you've got to start all over again,
04:59 putting the resource back in and making it work.
05:02 Well that leads me very nicely on to my next question.
05:05 What do you think are the chances of Labour winning in places like Shrewsbury at the next general election?
05:11 I'm being cautious because I'm always optimistic when other people are pessimistic
05:17 and I'm slightly more pessimistic when everyone's optimistic.
05:21 And I think that we've got to fight on for every single vote.
05:25 I don't think there's any complacency about the challenge of turning round the result of the 2019 election.
05:34 But with boundary changes here and with the kind of theoretical majority that the Conservatives have here,
05:45 we have every hope, every aspiration of being able to take the seat, which will be crucial.
05:51 But we took it back in 1997 and we can do it again.
05:56 If I may ask you to don your former Home Secretary hat for a second.
06:01 I'm really interested in getting your opinion on something that we've been reporting on over the last week.
06:05 The government's confirmed it's going to be stopping using one of Shrewsbury's hotels to house asylum seekers.
06:11 It would be interesting hearing your approach on the government's approach to the current migrant crisis.
06:17 There's a contradiction here because they very strongly attack asylum seekers and rule them out as being even legal
06:25 on the grounds that they may draw down on scarce public services, including housing.
06:33 And then they seek to move people into much-needed housing without seeing that they've actually contradicted themselves.
06:43 In the end, we need to get those who have a legitimate asylum claim processed through the system
06:51 and get them into the labour market so that they can earn a living and contribute back into the community
06:59 and thereby look for and rent and eventually perhaps buy their own home.
07:05 And that should be where the resource goes.
07:07 The National Audit Office came out with a report just two or three weeks ago
07:13 showing that the idea of putting asylum seekers in camps or on barges was by a factor of three more expensive
07:24 than accommodating asylum seekers in hotels.
07:28 It isn't a long-term solution, but nor is 100,000-plus in the waiting queue for being processed.
07:40 So we need a dual approach.
07:43 And I'm a strong believer that we've still got a long way to go in reaching agreement with the French.
07:48 I think we could reach agreement over licensing the purchase, the transportation of the sailor boats in France,
07:56 which would be transformational in stopping the traffickers being able to use those boats to transport people across.
08:03 And we could do what we did when I was Home Secretary, which was to massively reduce the backlog
08:10 so that we could actually deal with the system properly.
08:13 We reduced by two-thirds unauthorised arrival in the country.
08:18 I refuse to use the word 'illegal' because it's a term that was invented in order to disqualify people coming to this country
08:27 from even claiming asylum.
08:29 So the people who are coming now are not even counted as asylum seekers.
08:34 They will be sent to Rwanda for processing.
08:36 And should they demonstrate that they are legitimate refugees, they're not allowed to come back to the country.
08:44 Not even the right-wing Prime Minister of Italy has put forward such a proposal.
08:49 Their offshoring results in legitimate asylum seekers being able to return to Italy.
08:55 So we're in a class of our own in terms of the way we're dealing with this.
09:00 Go on Jules, when you're ready.
09:02 It's been such a privilege today to host Lord David Blunkett back here in Shrewsbury,
09:07 the town where you were partially educated all those years ago.
09:10 It's been 60 years, almost to the week, since I joined the Labour Party here in Shropshire.
09:15 It's lovely, not just nostalgia, but lovely to come back on the cusp, let's put it no stronger than that,
09:23 of winning the seat again because we won it in '97 and you can win it again.
09:28 But it's going to be an uphill struggle and nobody's taking a single vote for granted.
09:33 And I'm just receiving a text from Keir Starmer saying, "Don't overdo it."
09:39 What a great place to bring David Blunkett as well to the original Sure Start Centre,
09:43 the actual scheme that David launched when he was the Secretary.
09:46 And we've just heard from the staff how they're keeping that legacy going.
09:49 Really difficult circumstances amidst all the cuts.
09:52 Here we've got that little chink of light where they're working with families.
09:55 They're working their guts out, they're working together,
09:58 they're making as much as they can of the resource that's available.
10:01 And we've got to build on that in the future. Rebuild, I should say.
10:06 Thank you for coming.
10:07 Oh, you're very welcome.