Funding boost for Families First Partnership programme

Yesterday MHCLG confirmed the Local Government Funding Settlement, including additional funding for the Families First Partnership programme which support social workers and helps keep vulnerable families together.

Summary

• Today we have confirmed additional funding for the Families First Partnership programme, taking the total budget to over £2.4 billion
• This includes £547 million of new funding over the next three years, as confirmed in the Local Government Funding Settlement.
• Ministers are now calling on safeguarding partners and councils to double down in their commitment to the programme, having provided this additional funding.
• The reforms will help children and families access the support they need at the earliest opportunity.
• This supports professionals working with families facing a range of issues, including experience of domestic abuse and violence, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health challenges, sexual abuse perpetrated against children and severe financial difficulties.
• These issues can seriously impact children's development as well as their emotional, mental and physical health and wellbeing.
• Services funded by local authorities give families in difficulty places of refuge and points of contact with trained specialists to offer them advice and support.
• The Families First Partnership programme aims to ensure that more people get dedicated support from individuals they are able to form a lasting relationship with so they don't feel they are being passed between different agencies and practitioners. 

Background – how the Families First Partnership works

• This comes amid wider reforms being introduced through the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the most ambitious piece of child protection legislation in a generation.
• This funding will support the delivery of national reforms to Family Help, Multi-Agency Child Protection, and Family Group Decision Making.
• Collectively these reforms mark a radical shift in how children's services are delivered on the front line – child-centred and designed with families and communities, not imposed upon them.
• Family Help brings together existing targeted early help and child-in-need support into one seamless offer, led by teams of professional specialists rooted in their communities and working with the whole family. 
• New multi-agency child protection teams will bring a clear, fresh focus when there are child protection concerns, bringing experts together across agencies to identify significant harm and take decisive action to protect children.
• The teams include social workers, police, health and education practitioners and others with substantial child protection expertise and experience who will lead and oversee child protection activity.
• Furthermore, families get more of a say in how care is handled through family group decision making, which will enable more children to live safely at home or support a transition into kinship care.
• The approach means early intervention to support families in difficulty and keep them together where it is safe and feasible to do so, rather than social workers stepping in once things have already reached crisis point and putting children in the care system.