Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

It would be very easy to dismiss health in pregnancy grants, as some Opposition Members seem to think that we are doing. I am not doing that. My constituency has significant pockets of poverty, and if Conservative seats were ranked in order of deprivation, mine would be somewhere near the top. I spent a fascinating Friday a couple of weeks ago with our family nurse partnership, a pilot project that is working with young mothers-to-be in the most deprived quartile of the population in the most deprived areas of the constituency. They receive intensive support from the moment they become pregnant to beyond the birth. It is a fantastic project and it costs £3,000 per mother. The project also works with the father. It addresses issues such as self-esteem, improving literacy and numeracy, helping the father to get back into work and ensuring that the father feels part of the birth. To my mind, the project achieves far more than a £190 health in pregnancy grant. One might argue that it is a significantly greater amount of money, but I would argue that it represents a different approach to policy making. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) is looking at early intervention on behalf of the Government and he is a strong supporter of the family nurse partnership. I think that it makes a much greater difference to outcomes if we have evidence-based policy. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) was correct to pursue the Opposition about the lack of medical evidence for improvements in the health of pregnant women—