Up to 1,000 Surestart Centres have been closed down, but estimates vary between that upper number and as low as 500. That illustrates just how hard it is to work out the implications of the huge assault on Council finances of the past few years. Journalists and "campaigners" sometimes portray this as a deliberate effort to obscure the truth, but in fact it is a natural result of trying to cope with the problems.
The estimate above refers to "hollowing out" which given the budget losses was pretty inevitable. The NAO estimated that Councils had been forced to cut the overall budget by about half. The main alternatives are (as with libraries) all out closure or restriction of access, for example by means testing.
The picture is also made harder to follow by co-location. It is interesting to see in the Guardian piece that some of the early years demand appears to have shifted in the direction of libraries, which certainly seems likely to be true.
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