AS CHILDREN ran about his feet, MP Malcolm Wicks turned to Sue Moses, manager of Gingerbread Corner Children's Centre in West Croydon, and remarked sympathetically: "I bet managing all these little ones is a challenge."

"Not as challenging as making sure we have funding," she replied.

Mr Wicks, Labour MP for Croydon North, toured the centre last Friday, in the wake of the Advertiser's report on cost-cutting measures that will see significant changes to how children's centres in Croydon are run.

While the timing of the visit was coincidental, it gave Mrs Moses and her staff the chance to express their concerns about plans that may result in Gingerbread merging with other Sure Start centres.

The facility, in Grenaby Avenue, has already been forced to cope with the loss of £143,000 of council funding in the last year, but a pay freeze and cutting back on buying toys has not been enough to fully absorb the impact.

Finance director Paula Carter said: "We used to provide up to 12 free places for our most disadvantaged children. Now we have had to reduce that down to four.

"Telling those parents who missed out was incredibly tough. It was one of the most difficult things we have had to do."

Children's centre services are used by some of the borough's most deprived families, with 78 per cent of those on Gingerbread's books coming from single parent backgrounds.

Funding cuts have forced the centre to increase charges by six per cent while the children's healthy afternoon meal has been replaced with a far less extensive snack.

"We've been through funding cuts before," explained Mrs Carter, "But these are by far the most serious and challenging we've ever faced."

It is likely to get even tougher. In an effort to reduce the cost of early years provision, the council aims to cut management costs by merging the borough's 26 children's centres.

While the authority has no plans to close any centres, they will instead be asked to form eight or nine "federations" sharing resources and staff.

Private companies, charities and voluntary groups will also be able to bid to run a new early intervention service based at each building, though the council insists they will not be asked to run the centres themselves.

However, the collaborative approach has met with concern among workers at Gingerbread.

Mrs Moses said: "There has been no clarity about what collaboration means in terms of governance or what our budgets will be.

"Our fear is that funding will all go to the lead centres in each cluster, who will then dole out services to the others as they see fit.

"We're very nervous this whole process will inevitably lead to closures in the next few years."

The council says collaboration will result in services being made available to a wider range of families and will enable parents who have become "reliant" on local authority support to be more independent.

Having toured the centre, which has been open since 1976, Mr Wicks said: "A lot of the work already done at Gingerbread, and many centres like it, enables parents to be less dependent on the state.

"It helps them back into work and to stand on their own two feet.

"Without this support, these families would be drawing more benefits.

"Any cloud over children's centres is a very dark cloud indeed.

"Not only are they immensely important to parents, but if children get the wrong start it's very difficult to make that up in primary or secondary school."