Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats announced policies this weekend to dramatically increase free childcare hours. Understandably, these plans dominated the headlines – parents, and especially women, currently face extortionate bills just to take care of their children. Recent figures show that under the Conservatives, childcare costs have risen twice as fast as wages.

But another policy announced this weekend may tell us more about where this country has been and where it might be heading: Labour’s pledge to open a Sure Start centre in every community. First brought in by the Blair-Brown government in 1999, Sure Start centres were the pinnacle of good policymaking: a neighbourhood-based hub that provided health, welfare and education services for any preschool child and their parents. You only have to listen to Angela Rayner, Labour’s shadow education secretary, who became a mum at 16, recount her own experience to know why these centres matter: “You gave me a gift to be a better mum than my mum had the ability to be – and you changed the life of my children.”

But deep cuts to local councils over the last decade have hollowed out the service across the country. Since 2010, it’s estimated as many as 1,000 Sure Start centres may have been shut down in England, with more under threat as cash-strapped local authorities struggle to cover key services. Those centres that remain are often open only sporadically, or have to limit help to the increasing number of families already in crisis. As youth clubs also shut their doors nationwide, other Sure Starts have become “one-size-fits-all”; rather than targeted help for babies and toddlers, they now need to support young people up to the age of 19.

It is heartbreaking – but not an accident – that this has happened at a time of soaring child poverty, when need couldn’t be greater. Governments that don’t blink at pulling health checks from toddlers will soon enough leave hungry school pupils to eat apple cores from bins.

Few things exemplify austerity’s shortsighted cost-cutting more than the demolition of children’s centres. Evidence shows that early-years intervention is one of the most valuable mechanisms we have to improve life chances – and ease pressure on services in the long term. The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently confirmed Sure Start centres have significant benefits to children’s health: on a national level, for every extra centre per thousand children, there were 18% fewer hospital admissions for 11-year-olds each year – around 5,500 hospitalisations fewer across the country. They are just as precious for emotional and cognitive development. Research from the Sutton Trust shows that the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their counterparts is already evident by the time they start school, with a gap between them equivalent to 4.3 months (which rises to 19.3 months at the end of secondary school) – inequality that can be tackled by early support such as Sure Start.

To carelessly wipe out these essential services shows a particular level of disdain not only for the children and parents who rely on them, but the idea that their lives are ones worth investing in. The ease with which working-class children can be thrown on the scrapheap by governments should not come as a surprise, nor that it is typically done by ministers who were lucky enough to be born into every advantage themselves. And yet the Sure Start conversation is a reminder of how politics – and with it, elections – are never fully new. We must cover old ground again, slip into well-worn battle lines, strive once more for hard-won gains.

A decade on from the first deep cuts to the state made by the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, we are now having to rebuild some basic truths that we never should have forgotten to begin with: that all schools should be open daily, hospitals fully staffed, food banks obsolete, and homes secure and safe.

To that list we can add “every child matters” – the sort of radical thinking that used to be the most humdrum status quo. The story of Sure Start is a lesson in the worst of politics and the best: it was politicians who wrecked the legacy of Sure Start, but political will is what formed it in the first place, and what can rebuild it now.

What is at stake in this election is not simply the bricks and mortar of children’s centres but the values that built them. Sadly, it seems that it’s only once we realise what’s been lost that we can learn the lessons of the past.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist