Two key elements define the context for the establishment of Sure Start: the desire of the New Labour government to develop policy in new ways, including an ambition to reform the civil service, and the genuine commitment of the new government to improve and expand services for children, particularly early years and school provision. Underlying both of these, and critical to the New Labour project, was the unusual relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. This chapter will describe the wider policy context for Sure Start, and how politics as well as policy and personalities set the stage for radical developments in children's services.

If Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had had the traditional relationship between Chancellor and Prime Minister, there probably would not have been a Sure Start. Children and disadvantage would have been a priority for the new government, and much would have happened, but the particular way in which Sure Start was developed owed much to the increased power in the Treasury on domestic policy issues. The famous Granita deal, where Blair promised Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, unprecedented authority on domestic policy issues, gave Treasury officials a chance to design innovative approaches to policymaking almost independently of the government departments that would have to implement the policies they were designing. In part, this was made possible by one of Gordon Brown's first actions as Chancellor of the Exchequer, handing over control of interest rates to the Bank of England. This left a cadre of high-level officials at the Treasury with time on their hands. They used the time to radically redesign the way in which the Treasury allocated taxpayers’ money to fund public services (Melhuish and Hall, 2007, p 3).

New ways of making policy: the Comprehensive Spending Review process

A new government was determined to develop policy in new ways, and the Treasury was leading on a new way to set and monitor government spending. Gordon Brown's dominance of the political scene led to a significant increase in power to the Treasury. The Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) process was a radical departure from the traditional annual budgetary process.