David Blunkett shares some nostalgia of school days in Shrewsbury.

Shropshire Star

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.

Transcript

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.

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