'A service provision for the future' says Frank Field MP, when asked about Home-Start

With a ratio of 25 volunteers to one paid member of staff, Home-Start Wirral is a future model for service provision, says Frank Field

You have just visited Home-Start Wirral, a voluntary organisation offering home-based friendship and support to local families as part of a wider network of Home-Start schemes nationally and internationally. What most impressed you about the way volunteers support families in poverty and other circumstances?

What most impressed me was the ratio of paid staff to volunteers, 1:25. This is the model for the future, both for voluntary and for statutory services.

The breastfeeding project, which aims to increase breastfeeding prevalence and improve the health of families living in this area, is clearly important, as it is almost true that every mouthful makes a difference to a baby's health and life chances. We need to get this message over, rather than: 'you are a failure if you don't last for x amount of months feeding your baby'.

A lot of charities like Home-Start have seen a recent increase in demand for food parcel services. Do you think there are changes in public perceptions of child poverty as public sector spending cuts begin to bite and children are going to bed hungry?

It is great that organisations like Home-Start meet those most basic needs like food parcels. But most poor families, though incredibly stretched, are not reduced to that level. Many of those families who find themselves in this situation have their poverty compounded by massive debts and are just trying to keep a roof over their heads. So while it is important there are projects like that, it is not typical of child poverty.

The Foundation Years report which I delivered to the prime minister was about moving from this static view of measuring poverty in money, to a more dynamic view which measures poverty in life chances. So the key question becomes: are we increasing children's life chances with our intervention programme?

Home-Start works across the four nations – and is seeing different policy approaches to influencing child poverty in each of them. What do you think Home-Start can learn from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

I have been up to Scotland and met with the civil service team that is advising incoming ministers. But I hope one of the things that we will get, now that the government has accepted Foundation Years as the approach, is that we learn from what each of the four constituent parts of the UK is doing. So we can use the best ideas and not replicate failed ones.

Can you assure us that the third sector, which delivers these projects and has so much frontline experience, will be listened to at a strategic level as well as being commissioned to deliver services at the 'coal face'?

Sadly I am in no position to guarantee that the third sector is listened to, but as foundation services begin to be reconfigured locally it is really crucial that Home-Start is near, if not in, the driving seat. That way, in future, when local authorities decide the early-intervention budget, Home-Start is along there with other people who want to see this money focused on the best outcomes for children, rather than maintaining the existing structure which we have, which doesn't deliver enough to the very poorest and most disadvantaged children.

What developments have you seen at Home-Start in recent visits?

They just become bigger and more successful. It started as Home-Start Birkenhead and is now Home-Start Wirral, but over that period of time they have increased the numbers of contacts they have with mums, dads and babies who need help, more than you would have thought by just multiplying the Birkenhead figures. So they are clearly on a roll, which is good.

Home-Start has just come through the first year of what are likely to be three or four very tight public spending settlements. How can organisations like Home-Start ensure that early-intervention spending is not cut further?

The hard truth for Home-Start is that, because of the way it is organised with the ratio of paid to volunteer staff, the chances are that in the future it will find it easier to defend its budget compared with a service which is largely salary-operated. That is what I meant when I said at the beginning that my visit to Home-Start was about meeting the future, because the services that we are going to have in the future are going to look much more like Home-Start Wirral than they are going to look like Sure-Start.

What impact does Home-Start have on the wider community, not just on the families, but on the volunteers?

What is so important is that many of the volunteers themselves are helped, so nobody feels superior to another. It starts out from the very point that we need to start out if we are going to get alongside parents and encourage them to do better. We will never do that if we say, 'You are a failure'. All of us can do better, literally all of us. Parents are all in the same boat – that is what we need to get over.

Home-Start Wirral has solid support from its local authority, and supported 1,200 families last year. What would you say to other local authorities in the UK who have a local Home-Start, but don't support them with any funds?

What they need to do is look at what we are doing in the Wirral and to support this; maybe Home-Start Wirral could create a video that they could post on their website. The presentation that I got on Friday from the manager of Home-Start Wirral, Bev and her colleagues, I think would be a very impressive way to demonstrate why we should put this in other local authorities.

Pictured from left to right- Jonathan Gibbs, chair of trustees, Home-Start Wirral, Bev Morgan, manager of Home-Start Wirral, Frank Field MP

(source of interview- epolitix)

Read the interview, along with more Home-Start news on our epolitix site, here

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