Sure Start children's centres are widely seen as one of the great achievements from Labour's time in government.

Birkbeck University researchers described Sure Start as ‘an innovative intervention unlike almost any other undertaken to enhance the life prospects of young children'.

The cross-party Education Select Committee called it ‘one of the most innovative and ambitious Government initiatives of the past two decades' and observed that they had heard ‘almost no negative comments' about the programme.

It was policy and delivery innovation with councils at its core. Explicit in the 2006 Childcare Act is the definition of a Sure Start children's centre as ‘a place or a group of places which is managed by or on behalf of...the local authority'.

Such was the popularity of Sure Start that the day before the general election in 2010, David Cameron famously denied that a Conservative government would withdraw support for the Sure Start programme.

This seemed to put it on a par with other radical Labour policies – like the national minimum wage, increasing international aid and civil partnerships – behind which a progressive political consensus had been built.

Indeed, he re-affirmed that promise in 2011 at Prime Minister's Questions, saying: ‘the money for Sure Start is there, so centres do not have to close'.

However, there's a gulf between what the Government says and what it does. To camouflage cuts to a range of programmes for children and young people, ministers rolled funding for Sure Start and other programmes into an ‘Early Intervention Grant', which is being cut by over 40% over the life of this parliament.

So far this has led to the closure of over 500 centres and cutbacks in service at many more. As with all the cuts that this government has imposed on councils, the poorest areas have been hit hardest.

Ministers seem to have taken the lesson from the Gospel of Mark, that ‘whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them'. Rotherham and Barnsley councils in my own local area face cuts of over 50% in their Early Intervention Grant compared to its predecessor funding streams in 2010.

In Rotherham, 13 of our 22 Sure Start centres now face a complete end to council funding and closure next year.

Any incoming government in the next parliament will inherit a shrivelling Sure Start service and continuing pressure on local authority budgets. The challenge will be to rekindle the ambition and restate the case that motivated the policy in the first place.

There are hard economic gains from making childcare available to parents, because it can allow them to return to work.

A recent IPPR study suggests that extending childcare could result in a 5% increase in the employment rate of mothers with children under-five, leading to a £750m per annum benefit to the Exchequer.

The greater prize and value, however, remains the scope to change the life-chances of young children, and tackle inequalities in attainment before they become entrenched.

Any reception class teacher will say they can tell immediately the children who've had preschool experience, while a major longitudinal study of early care and education found that ‘…it enhances all-round development in children' and in particular that ‘Disadvantaged children benefit significantly from good quality pre-school experiences'.

Childcare plus early education produces the best results. So the lesson for policymakers is that, while local flexibility will remain vital, it's not enough just to promise a certain number of hours; quality and type of provision too.

Vouchers and market forces in early years provision will never answer this challenge of equal access and consistent quality; and the Education Select Committee recently concluded that: ‘The Government was wrong to remove the requirement for a link with a qualified teacher' given that ‘research shows that contact with qualified teachers enhances outcomes for children'.

The 2006 Act role of the local authority remains the best guarantor of standards.