Making the case for early intervention

Interview with Graham Allen, author of the government-commissioned early intervention report and Labour MP

Graham Allen, the Labour MP who today publishes a government-commissioned report into early intervention programmes for young children, has an enticing scheme for saving the taxpayer a lot of money.

His idea is simple: place the costs to the taxpayer of a successful child as he goes through life next to those of an unsuccessful child and calculate the difference; that figure can be seen as a profit. If private investors want to have a slice of that profit, all they need to do is agree to fund early intervention projects designed to prevent a child from going off the rails.

“Add up the costs of all the late interventions, all the remedial work, reading recovery, special needs teaching, schemes for job readiness, teenage pregnancy, drink and drug abuse, a lifetime on benefits; take into account that there will be no tax obviously coming from that individual,” he says.

“The difference between trajectory one and trajectory two over a lifetime is x, let’s say £1m.” Allen concedes that he does not have a clear idea of what the sum would be. “Whereas if we spend say £7,000 on little Johnny, funding a project that is proven to put him on a very different trajectory, then we could make x-savings over a lifetime,” he says.

Beguiling logic

The logic is beguiling, although, naturally, the devil is in the detail – of which, at present, there is little. But it is telling that in describing the contents of his report, Early Intervention: The Next Steps, Allen is at such pains to underscore how his proposals will fund themselves, costing the government nothing. And he has to make this point, since the government has made it clear that no funding will be forthcoming. His report, commissioned last June, opens with a letter to the prime minister, which starts with the reassuring aside: “I hope it will be helpful that there are no requests for legislation and no requests for immediate public spending.”

Allen is in the unusual, and potentially uncomfortable, position of being an opposition politician compiling a report for a government that is pushing through a programme of rapid deficit reduction that he does not support. His report focuses on the importance of early intervention schemes for the first three years of a child’s life, at a time when many council-backed programmes, designed to provide help in precisely this area – such as parenting schemes and pre-school provision – are being forced to close because of budget cuts. He proposes establishing an Early Intervention Foundation, a new non-government body, at a time when the government is committed to shutting down such quangos.

He shrugs at the suggestion that this is a difficult position to find himself in, remarking that he is determined to try to promote his belief in the importance of early intervention, regardless of the inauspicious political climate.

Allen has had an unusual cross-party relationship with Iain Duncan Smith, now secretary of state for work and pensions, for several years. Their alliance germinated when they found themselves working in nearby offices and spent a lot of time talking as they walked to the chamber to vote. Duncan Smith was no longer Conservative leader and had recently thrown himself into the study of poverty and failing communities. Allen – whose Nottingham North constituency has the highest number of teenage pregnancies of any constituency in Europe and the fewest school-leavers going to university of any constituency in the UK – had a lot to tell him. “If you wanted to draw a map of an area that totally defines deprivation, it would be my constituency,” he says.

The two men co-authored a pamphlet on early intervention in 2008, subtitled Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens, and their earlier partnership is what triggered the invitation to chair the coalition government’s review of early intervention.

For an area such as early intervention, aimed at breaking intractable inter-generational problems, cross-party co-operation is vital, Allen says, “to avoid the ups and downs of policy change that has bedevilled British policy making for so many years.”

In the report, he identifies 19 programmes that he believes have a proven effectiveness in helping children and young people to fulfil their potential, and would like eventually to see rolled out across the country. He has drawn on methodology, devised by US public policy expert Steve Aos, to determine how cost-effective and successful these programmes are.

“There’s no money around so we’ve got to try to attract new money, and we’ll only be able to do that if the policies we have on early intervention are really rock solid and really provable. That’s what I’ve set myself to do in the report,” he says.

Most of the programmes will focus on the first three years of a child’s life, Allen explains. “Nought to three is the really explosive bit of brain growth. If you can help at that point, it’s so much more effective, so much cheaper than at any other time,” he says.

Among the projects is, for example, the Family Nurse Partnership, which supports teenage mothers in the US and is being piloted in the UK. “By the time the children concerned were 15, it was estimated to have provided benefits, in the form of reduced welfare and criminal justice expenditures, higher tax revenues, and improved physical and mental health, which were over five times greater than the cost of the programme,” the report says.

Good parenting

But Allen also recommends other projects that help older children to develop good parenting skills, and wants to see the creation of a National Parenting Campaign. Projects would be financed by investment through social impact bonds.

He admits that he has not yet worked out how the social impact bond principle could be applied to funding this area, but he is optimistic that it will be possible and has promised the government a second report that will draw up the detail. He says he will be asking City bankers to look at “hard-headed investment opportunities in this area”. They would get a slice of the money saved by preventing vulnerable children from becoming lifelong problems. “After 10 years, we will tot up the savings,” he says cheerfully, although he concedes swiftly that he is “not there yet” in assessing “how you monetise the savings over those years”.

Allen says turning to the City for support is the only option when state funding streams are drying up, and he does not see this as a particularly ideological decision. “[The government has] made it absolutely clear that they’re not only not going to be funding [these projects], they’re going to be reducing funding for them,” he says. “It isn’t my choice whether government does or doesn’t reduce public expenditure, it is doing that.”

He laments the speed with which organisations in his own constituency are having to “shed projects and people who have done a great job”, but he feels he can be more constructive by offering the government his expertise than by wringing his hands on the sidelines.

But Allen remains frustrated at a collective failure to grasp the importance of early intervention. “Late intervention has dominated British administration and government for the past 40 years, and that requires a structural deficit where you set aside billions and billions of pounds for the cost of future failure. Early intervention requires small amounts of money, as far upstream as you can go, to produce massive economic benefits for individuals and society at large.”

There is still a disproportionate pressure on advocates of early intervention to prove that their projects work, he complains. “The hoops that I feel I have to jump through to demonstrate proven programmes are never asked of those people who shuffle billions of pounds a year into firefighting. I come along as a little guy trying to sell smoke alarms out of suitcases on doorsteps and I’ve got to prove (as if it were a rocket to the moon) that my smoke alarm works. Whereas, we can rattle off as many fire engines as we need, just on the off-chance, and no one requires that level of proof.”

Relations with Duncan Smith are less close now. Allen, 58, who is due to have a hip replacement in a fortnight, hobbles, in evident pain, across the Commons to try to catch a minute with the minister to discuss the publication of the report, only to be called on his mobile by a ministerial assistant when he is halfway there and told that Duncan Smith is too busy to see him. He shrugs again, unperturbed. “He’s just an important member of the government who I wish to keep onside.”