Why should we believe Margaret Hodge? Why should the childcare community, both parents and professionals, trust that when the children's minister says the spirit of Sure Start will live on in the proposed 3,500 children's centres, she really means it and she can deliver it?
The truth is that we can't. But that isn't the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The great debate that has kicked off the New Year, between Ms Hodge and Norman Glass, the former Treasury official who was the chief architect of Sure Start, is a challenge to Hodge to put her money where her mouth is, to specify just what it is about Sure Start that will live and die in its new incarnation.
This is exactly the debate that we've been waiting for. In fact, it is more than a debate about childcare - it is a larger window on the ambiguities, successes and failures of the entire Government project.
Whether Norman Glass's scepticism is spot-on, or whether he's being cynical, his case for the spirit of Sure Start is exemplary - that it worked because it was generously funded, that it was wrought by alliances between agencies, professionals and parents in the context of local autonomy, and that it tailored services to parents' and children's needs rather than the Government's imperatives.
It was the culture of professionals who were grounded in childcare and social work, who understood the community development approach and made it work with hard-to-reach parents. That model also harvested initiatives ranging from debt counselling, stress relief and personal empowerment, to projects for parents struggling with multiple births, as necessary parts of a childcare strategy.
Glass cautions that Sure Start was captured by those in Westminster who were on a mission to sort out feckless proles. Certainly, it was always compromised by the Government's alienation from the poor, its estrangement from mothers, and its tough talk on crime. And it was harassed by the Government's primitive management.
But Sure Start's success came from the people who ran it, who made it more than the Government ever wanted it to be.
Hodge will feel thrilled that she's got a reluctant Government to make childcare a priority. The debate is about the culture as well as the quantity of childcare. Sure Start's vulnerability is also her weakness - women in this government underestimate their own power. If the spirit of Sure Start is to survive, then it must embolden Hodge, make her a believer, so that she can convince her unconverted Cabinet.
