Best Beginnings Episode 10: What Will Quince told us about power, prevention and the first 1001 days

The case for investing in a baby's earliest years is not new. It has been made, in one form or another, for the best part of thirty years. What is rarer is to hear it made by someone who has actually sat in the rooms where the money gets decided, who has won some of those arguments and lost others, and who is willing to say honestly what happened either way.

Will Quince spent nine years as the MP for Colchester. He served as Minister for Early Education and held further ministerial roles across health and welfare before leaving Parliament. He is now the first ever Chief Executive of the 1001 Critical Days Foundation, the organisation founded by Dame Andrea Leadsom to build a long term, cross-party, international case for investing in the period between pregnancy and the age of two. He joined George Looker for this episode of Best Beginnings, three months into the job and clear that the work he is now building on belongs to others first.

The Foundation, as Will describes it, runs on three strands that are designed to reinforce one another: the research, the grant funding that supports and proves that research, and the advocacy that ties it all together and puts it in front of the people who can act. It is the combination, he argues, rather than any single piece, that has made the difference in a busy first year.

That research has already produced findings that are hard to put down. Work commissioned through Swansea University looked at fathers and found that, extrapolated across the United Kingdom, as many as three babies a week are losing their dads to suicide. Set that alongside how little perinatal mental health support exists for men, and the gap becomes impossible to ignore. It is part of why the Foundation backed the national rollout of Dad Matters to the tune of a million pounds. But it sits within a much wider programme of work, from screen time and infant sleep to parent-infant relationships and the impact of domestic abuse, rather than standing on its own.

The screen time review is a good example of how the strands connect. Rather than tell parents off, the Foundation set out to give them something they keep asking for, which is clear information they can trust. Will is candid that the research showed screens being used as much to soothe the parent as the baby, and that there is no judgement in that. Parenting is hard when it is going well. The point of the review, published to sit alongside the government's own position that screens should be avoided for the under-twos, was to add evidence and weight, and to make sure that guidance is amplified through health visitors and every other part of the system that actually meets parents where they are.

Underneath all of it is a single fact that Will returns to again and again. Around 80 per cent of the human brain is developed by the age of two, with millions of neural connections forming every second. The stress responses, the attachment patterns, the capacity for relationships that will shape a whole life are laid down in that window. "If politicians and policymakers just knew," he says, and then he pauses, "just knew how important that period was." The pause is the tell. This is a man who has spent years trying to make something obvious land, and who is still slightly amazed that it does not land more easily.

He is honest about why it does not. Politicians, by his own account, are pulled towards the burning platform in front of them, the acute crisis that demands attention today, at the expense of the quieter work of prevention. The NHS, he points out, is getting better at this but is still a long way from it. And the early years carry an odd disadvantage: because almost nobody argues against investing in babies, the subject is not contested, and what is not contested rarely gets fought for. Most politicians, he suspects, would nod along and then struggle to explain why the period matters so much, or how directly it connects to the things that do dominate their in-trays, from educational attainment and employability to mental health and the prison population.

This is where the conversation turns more personal, and more useful. Will does not pretend his own record was perfect. Asked what he would do differently, he says he wishes he had been more muscular with the Treasury and with Number 10. He talks about ideas and concepts that were blocked or left unfunded when he could see the difference they would have made, some of which are only now bearing fruit under a different government. There is real frustration in the memory of being elected, appointed as a minister, and then told by a special adviser that the money was not coming. He understands why that process exists. He still wishes he had pushed harder.

He is also clear-eyed about how badly it can go when the youngest are not protected. Drawing on his time as a children and families minister, he describes the weekly reports that were always horrific to read, and a statistic that stays with him: a child is most at risk of homicide in the first year of life, with the second highest risk in the year after that. Around 40 per cent of domestic abuse begins during a pregnancy or with a new baby in the home. We forget, he says, just how completely a baby depends on a loving adult, and how much can be changed with the right support around parents and carers. It is why the Foundation is proud to back organisations such as For Baby's Sake, and why he keeps coming back to the idea that someone has to speak for the babies who cannot speak for themselves.

So what does he think actually helps? Repeatedly, he comes back to the family hub. He is a strong advocate of the Best Start family hubs model and wants to see it completed and then extended, with the Healthy Babies programme rolled out across every hub so that every parent has somewhere to go. When the Foundation's founder asked parents what they wanted, he says, the answer was a one-stop shop where they were not made to explain their situation fifty times over, where they were not stigmatised, and where they could find information they could trust. Above all they wanted other parents. The reassurance of hearing that your baby's crying is normal, that the feeding struggle is common, that you are not failing, is the kind of thing no screen can offer and that a room full of other mums and dads can.

He frames this through an old idea with new urgency. It takes a village to raise a child, but the village many families once relied on has thinned out. Grandparents live further away or are still working. The informal support network is not what it was. Will is careful to say this is not an argument for a nanny state. It is an argument that the state can help to be that village, and that the earlier the support arrives, the better the outcomes for the child, the parents and, eventually, the public finances. He points to a sobering projection from the ONS that 2026 is likely to be the first year in which the UK's death rate outstrips its birth rate, and argues that part of the answer lies in how poorly supported new parents can feel.

His advice, in the end, comes in two halves. For parents, it is the thing he wishes someone had told him: you are not alone, none of this is new, and somebody will always have been through what you are going through and will be able to help. For policymakers, it is shorter still. Listen, and act. Invest in the period from pregnancy to age two, prioritise it, and the rewards will follow societally, financially and politically.

And what should those first 1001 days actually feel like, for every baby? Will does not hesitate. "It's a unique period of vulnerability, and every baby is reliant on a human, loving caregiver. So it's got to be a loving home with loving parents and caregivers. That's at the heart of everything." A safe, secure, loving home. It is a simple answer to a question that, as this conversation makes clear, the rest of us are still a long way from getting right.

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