Plans for Peterborough wards to have new ‘Family Hubs’ to help parental mental health and infant support

Peterborough City Council will receive a multi-million pound funding boost for new ‘Family Hubs’, which will be paid for using £3 million of Government funding.

In April, Peterborough City Council was named as one of 75 top tier local authorities eligible for the Family Hubs scheme.

The Department for Education and Department for Health and Social Care have now ringfenced between £3.3 and £3.4 million of funding for the city hubs over three years.

The services will help parental mental health and parent-infant relationships support, infant feeding, parenting support and home learning and child education.

‘High quality support’

Speaking to members of the Children and Education Scrutiny Committee on 4 October, Lisa Riddle, head of Service Early Help at Cambridgeshire County Council, said: “Family Hubs deliver high-quality support from conception, through a child’s early years, right up until a young person reaches the age of 19, or 25 for young people with special educational needs.”

The scheme will be instigated from April 2023 and will aim to open within existing family or community centres across the city.

She added: “What the funding specifically doesn’t allow us to do is any building – so we won’t be using the money for new buildings.”

“The Government were very clear on this – all of the money must be used to directly help families with children who have needs, not to further the infrastructure by providing new centres.”

Ms Riddle said she’s a “Fenland-girl” and knows about rural challenges.

She added: "It is something that we need to explore – how do we take the Family Hub services out to the rural areas so we can give the same level of support to those inner-city families?

“We need to reach out to existing community services especially in the rural areas and see how we can work with them to provide additional support through the Family Hub scheme. They may already, for example, have access to a building, which we can then support as a Family Hub.

“We also need to improve the digital services and technology that is available, because as things stand at the moment our digital presence is not ‘job done’: there isn’t a single place at the moment where as a parent you can go and find out information about breastfeeding, or child mental health service near where you live and what you need to actually do to access these.

Councillor Lynne Ayres, Peterborough City Council Cabinet Member for Children’s Services added: "Helping families as early as possible is more effective in the long-run so investing in high quality support is a core part of the offer we will be delivering through Family Hubs.

“We know that a child’s experiences from conception to age five play a critical role in their development.

"Of particular importance is the broader engagement with parents around the support for children from pre-birth through to birth and early years.”

Family Hubs were introduced by MP Andrea Leadsom in March 2021 to focus on babies from conception to age 2, to set the foundations for lifelong emotional and physical wellbeing.

The next meeting of the Children and Education Scrutiny Committee is on 2 November 2022.