Introduction

This chapter, along with others in the book, considers care and its links both to the domestic spaces of the home and to the concerns and policies of the welfare state. This takes us into complex political terrain that includes questions of public and private lives, gender and intersectional inequalities, and the different ways in which care is taken into governance and policy regimes. Running through this terrain is a question about how forms of ‘care’, as embodied, gendered and everyday labour that often takes place within domestic space, should be of concern to the state and in what ways.

Policy prescriptions to address concerns over care in recent years in the UK have ranged from funding for paid childcare, thus ‘supporting’ mothers into the sphere of paid employment (MacLeavy 2007), to promoting care services as ‘personalised’ or ‘co- produced’ with recipients (Needham 2008), to seeking to shape the forms of care undertaken within ‘parenting’ through interventions around, for example, healthy eating and exercise (Colls and Evans 2008). As other chapters in this book show, such interventions potentially reshape the boundaries between the home space and the welfare state in a range of ways, often with rather ambivalent outcomes. The state may be experienced both as overly involved and controlling in matters of care (as in the examples about parenting), but also potentially as absent, neglectful and not involved enough (as in approaches to childcare).

This chapter focuses on Sure Start Children's Centres, as spaces that provide examples of some of the progressive ways in which public services might be involved in matters of care and domestic lives, ways that are perhaps often overlooked within critical commentaries. However, I argue that austerity cuts are shifting the politics of care surrounding the centres. As the threat of cuts and closures are brought to bear on the centres, a complex web of caring relations is made visible around the centres between parents, children and staff, relations which are fundamentally under threat as centres close. The first part of the chapter outlines some key debates around home, care, public services and austerity. I then go on to consider Sure Start Children's Centres as spaces of care and the ways in which these forms of care are being threatened by austerity cuts, and why this matters for the everyday lives of women.