Yvette Cooper announces wider Healthy Babies support in England’s family hubs

Yvette Cooper announced at Labour’s conference in Liverpool on 30 September that the government plans to expand Healthy Babies services across family hubs in England. The health and social care secretary said support with infant feeding, parents’ mental health and bonding with babies would reach up to 1,000 hubs over the next two years, extending help that is currently absent from many communities.

“We will bring back the Sure Start health services into every family centre,” Cooper told the conference, according to the Guardian’s live report. The promise describes a planned expansion. It does not mean the services are already available in every centre.

What Healthy Babies would add to family hubs

The programme is intended to bring together support for infant feeding, parents’ mental health and relationships between parents and babies, alongside health visits, midwifery care and other family services, the Guardian reported. That combination matters for families seeking help during pregnancy and a child’s early years: the announcement concerns the range of support offered through hubs as well as the number of places that may provide it.

Cooper said the missing services included mental health support for mothers and fathers and help with feeding and bonding. The Guardian reported that more than half of local authorities already had family hubs without Healthy Babies services. The proposed expansion would address that gap, although the available announcement does not identify which local areas or centres would receive the additional services first.

How the expansion fits existing funding

In that parliamentary answer, the government said it was investing £200 million in Healthy Babies services across 75 local authority areas with high levels of deprivation. Of that sum, £109 million was designated for enhanced support with parent-infant relationships and perinatal mental health. The department said the £200 million was part of a £900 million package for Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies.

A separate family-hub policy commits £500 million to opening 1,000 centres from April 2027, according to the Guardian’s report on the expansion.

Those figures describe related plans with different purposes. The earlier parliamentary answer identifies funding and areas already included in the Healthy Babies programme; Cooper’s conference announcement sets out the ambition to extend its services much more widely. Neither figure supplies a timetable for each individual hub. The Guardian reported the target as up to 1,000 hubs over two years, rather than a count of hubs already delivering the expanded support.

What the Sure Start comparison can tell families

Cooper framed the announcement as a return of Sure Start health services. Sure Start offered integrated help to families with children under five, and its centres became a prominent part of Labour’s approach to early-years support. The Nuffield Foundation dates the introduction of Sure Start local programmes to 1999 and says the scheme later expanded into children’s centres across England. Its account says about 3,500 centres were operating in 2010, before funding was cut and services declined.

The foundation’s summary of research into the earlier programme reports lasting gains in children’s health and educational attainment, including fewer hospital admissions and better results at school. Researchers compared children with different levels of access to Sure Start during its staggered rollout. The summary also describes mixed findings for social and behavioural outcomes. It cautions that universal early-years services alone cannot replace later, more specialised help.

Those findings give context for the policy choice, but they measure access to the historical Sure Start programme. They cannot establish what outcomes the newly announced Healthy Babies expansion will produce. Its effect will depend on what is delivered in particular hubs and how families use those services; neither can be assessed from the announcement alone.

What remains to be confirmed

Cooper has set a national direction and a two-year reach target, but the available reporting does not provide a local authority-by-local authority schedule. It also does not establish when each hub will begin offering the added feeding, mental health and parent-baby support. For families, the practical question is when those services will become available at their local centre.