Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

The first 1,000 days of a child's life are critical to their lifelong physical health, mental well-being, and life chances. At the heart of this vital early window are our health visitors - specialist public health nurses who safeguard babies, identify developmental delays early, support infant feeding, and ease pressure on overloaded A&Es and GPs.

Yet across England, this universal safety net is being stretched to breaking point. 

Since 2015, the number of health visitors has fallen dramatically, leaving remaining practitioners with unmanageable caseloads and creating a post-code lottery where vulnerable families fall through the cracks. While billions are poured into childcare subsidies, public health funding for healthy baby services has suffered real-terms cuts, leaving more than a quarter of health visitors in England responsible for over 750 children each.

Liberal Democrats believe that every child deserves the best possible start in life, regardless of their family's income or postcode. Today, our members passed a comprehensive policy to rebuild the health visiting workforce, shift the NHS towards community prevention, and extinguish the postcode lottery in early years care.

Our new policy calls on the Government to:

• Rebuild the Health Visiting Workforce: Launch a national strategy to expand training places, fund new substantive posts, roll out return-to-practice schemes, and improve staff retention.
   
• Enforce Safe Caseload Limits: Introduce nationally recognised safe caseload guidance to protect practitioners from burnout and ensure families receive high-quality, continuous care.
   
• Ring-Fence Public Health Funding: Increase and protect local authority public health funding to restore universal health visiting services and expand the national Healthy Babies programme to every local area.
   
• Protect the Universal Offer: Ensure new Department of Health and Social Care Key Performance Indicators mandate that statutory health reviews are conducted by qualified health visitors, rather than relying on non-specialist substitution.
   
• Integrate Key Community Services: Create seamless links between health visiting, maternity, perinatal mental health, Best Start Family Hubs, speech and language specialists, and children's social care.
   
• Provide Targeted Specialist Support: Focus investment on deprived areas to tackle health inequalities, expanding specialist support for domestic abuse, parental mental health, neurodiversity, and families in temporary accommodation.
   
• Publish Transparent National Data: Require national collection and publication of health visitor numbers, caseload sizes, service access, and developmental outcomes.

Investing in early intervention is not just compassionate - it is common sense. It stops problems before they escalate, saving millions for acute NHS services, schools, and social care down the line.

We cannot allow another generation of children to miss out on vital early support. It’s time to back our health visitors, end the postcode lottery, and guarantee every child the healthy, safe start they deserve.