Healthier Wealthier Families in East London

The project runs from September 2024 to August 2027 and is funded by the National Institute of Health Research.

• Background
• Methodology
• Team
• Related links
• Outputs 

Background

Many parents face money problems, especially when they have a new baby. Over £23 billion goes unclaimed in welfare benefits each year in the UK. Making welfare benefits advice easy to access will help improve family finances and improve the health and wellbeing of parents and their children.

Previous studies in Australia, Sweden and Scotland have shown that combining health and financial support can help families with young children. UCL ran a feasibility and acceptability study in East London with the East London Foundation Trust and Tower Hamlets Council to find out the potential for joining up health and money advice in a very multi-cultural and socio-economically deprived area. We found that where services were delivered in a trusted and universal environment, like the NHS, it reduced the stigma associated with money advice.

We also found that streamlined referral processes, a flexible and empathic approach and attention to language and digital inclusion helped families to take up the advice services and professionals to refer families to advice services. For some families, such as those with a disabled child, the financial impact could be substantial. Of 174 referrals, 60 families were eligible for some financial support and the average amount raised for each family was almost £7000 per year. We now want to find out about the health impacts of co-locating welfare benefits advice provision for parents of newborns in the same area of London.

Offering welfare benefits advice that is joined up with child health is a good idea. The early years are a time of big changes for new parents, and addressing financial concerns alongside scheduled health checks could greatly improve health outcomes for both parents and children.

Aims

We aim to find out: 

1. Whether providing co-located welfare benefits advice to new parents, alongside scheduled health appointments in a community setting, impacts parents' mental health, wellbeing, household income, and their feelings about their finances.
2. How parents perceive the welfare benefits advice service when located in a health and community setting, such as a Family Hub or Children’s and Families Centre.
3. The medium and long-term health, economic, social, and wellbeing implications of welfare benefits advice for recipient families’ children if this idea was to be replicated across the country.
4. How to deliver a joined-up welfare benefits advice service for very marginalised families.

We also aim to collaborate with international ‘Healthier Wealthier Families’ teams all over the world and to exchange knowledge about these and similar schemes in the UK.  

Methodology

The HWFinEL project consists of integrated multi-method work packages which will generate evidence on the impact of easy-to-access money advice (Welfare Benefits Advice (WBA)) services, made available adjacent to routine universal health appointments for new parents.

Elements of the HWFinEL project include:

• A randomised controlled trial
• A process evaluation
• Modelling of the medium and longer term impacts of the evaluation findings
• Development of a co-designed targeted service informed by and for mothers from marginalised groups.

Trial study setting

Eight Children’s and Families Centres/Family Hubs, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, will take part in this research project.

Trial Participants

Eligible participants will be mothers or fathers aged 16 years or over, with a new baby aged less than three months old, who are registered with the health visitor service in LBTH, and who respond ‘Yes’ to a screening question asking if they wish to receive advice about money. We aim to recruit 1153 participants over a 16-month period.

For the process evaluation we will ask some of the participants to agree to take part in an interview about their experience of the service offered. 

Outcomes

We will be asking questions about parental mental health, quality of life and perceived financial situation. 

For the modelling, colleagues at the University of York will use a novel longitudinal individual-level microsimulation modelling approach to understand how improvements in short-term family income and parental mental health will impact children’s longer-term health, economic, social, and wellbeing outcomes. We will also find out how cost-effective referral to the co-located WBA is over a lifetime, compared with no referral.

Co-Design

Many families who are very marginalised through housing or immigration status find it hard to access welfare benefits advice. We will be working with members of The Magpie Project (Newham) to find out how best to design a co-located welfare benefits advice service.

Team

HWFinEL is a collaboration between UCL’s Social Research Institute, Institute of Child Health and the Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit, the University of York, Tower Hamlets Council and Health Visiting Service, the Mary Ward Legal Centre and The Magpie Project.

Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)

We are advised by several members of the East London community, led by Pratima Singh. PPI members help improve the project with their views on the acceptability of participant facing documentation, images, questions asked, interpretation of findings and help with project dissemination.

Project leads

• Professor Claire Cameron, UCL Social Research Institute 
• Professor Michelle Heys, UCL Institute of Child Health
• Dr Rafael Gafoor, UCL Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit
• Professor Richard Cookson, University of York
• Dr Shainur Premji, University of York
• Dr Aase Villadsen, UCL Social Research Institute

Project researchers

• Dr Catherine Harris, UCL Social Research Institute
• Dr Elizabeth Cecil, UCL Institute of Child Health

Trial managers

• Jo Hornby, UCL Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit
• Rahi Jahan, UCL Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit

Clinical project manager

• Mrs Nazma Ali-Begum, UCL Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit

PPI lead

• Pratima Singh, UCL Social Research Institute

Collaborators

• Paula Twigg, Mary Ward Legal Centre
• Jane Williams, The Magpie Project
• Hamida Serdiwala, Tower Hamlets GP Care Group
• Sheli Kadir, Early Help & Children and Families Service, London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Related links

• UCL Social Research Institute
• Thomas Coram Research Unit
• Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health
• East London Foundation Trust
• ActEarly
• National Institute of Health Research

Outputs

• Healthier, wealthier families: Money advice services in trusted community settings policy brief, Claire Cameron, Michelle Heys, Siew Fung Lee, Laura Austin-Croft (2024)