What is your viewpoint?

Firstly, tell us about Islington Families

We provide support for around 250 vulnerable families each year. Our support involves helping families to access services and resources to improve their quality of life and to help prevent family crisis.

We work with families with a variety of needs, focusing on helping them to set and achieve their own individual goals. We are a voluntary service and often families that we work with are wary of statutory services but are in need of help.

Our services are tailor made to each family, it could involve helping them with housing needs, to parenting classes to employment and training advice.

What do you think about Labour’s commitment to family intervention projects (FIPs)?
Labour FIPs is a good initiative aimed at enhancing community cohesion. Our experience of the pilot FIPs is that they tend to work with a small number of families who are often at the most chaotic end of the spectrum.

This is different to our approach, which is focused on early intervention and prevention rather than a more intensive ‘repair’ type approach. There is obviously a place for both types of service.

As part of a larger housing group we are well placed to provide this type of programme as we are often working in the heart of local communities and familiar with providing support and working with a range of partners to join up services.

What do you think the main challenges for this will be?

This is a new and progressive approach so there could be challenges in providing the number of qualified staff needed to run these types of services in some Local Authorities.

I would also be concerned that preventative services such as ours could be reduced due to budget constraints. These projects will have an enormous impact on communities where there are number of vulnerable families, but it needs to be part of a long-term programme of intervention rather than a short-term fix.

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