Welfare Foods - a consultation on meeting the needs of children and families in Scotland

The ideal position would be to use benefits/income data to identify those eligible and enable automatic entitlement/payment however we appreciate there are challenges in doing so. With that in mind, we need to work in partnership at a local and national level to promote these entitlements. At a local level this should include ensuring that those working with pregnant women and families with young children make their clients aware of the entitlement and take steps to maximise uptake.

In South Lanarkshire we have been developing a very effective partnership between our Council run Money Matters Service and NHS Lanarkshire Midwifery services, now scaling up to include Health visiting teams and other services supporting parenting such as the Family Nurse Partnership.

The aim is that health staff will discuss financial wellbeing with all families from the point of pregnancy to school age as part of the child health pathway and will pass on the contact details of those wishing help and support (including finding out about welfare and other entitlements) to our Money Matters service. Families referred are called by a specialist advice line within 5 working days.

Early Learning and Childcare settings, as well as other community based services are also ideally placed to help support the promotion of the programme.

As we scale this work up, there will be resource implications for our Money Matters Service and other local advice services which will be a challenge for the Council alone to find the additional resources required to fill the anticipated gap. Within the Scottish Governments Child Poverty Delivery Plan there are various references to additional resources being made available for financial wellbeing advice and support and we would request that local Community Planning Partnerships can inform how these resources are deployed locally to ensure best fit with current and planned activity.

We feel the proposal to develop a single application for both the Best Start Grant and Best Start Foods are appropriate and will help to maximise uptake. The good work undertaken by the government to involve parents or parents to be who have or may benefit from the programmes should help to ensure processes are effective and accessible for all.

Awareness raising activity and materials developed at a national level will also be critical and minimising stigma must be a key consideration.

We fully support what is outlined in the consultation paper - a smart card pre loaded every 4 weeks. This will reduce the stigma associated with the paper voucher system which is key. The fact that retailers will be automatically reimbursed will encourage their involvement and help to maximise the outlets where the cards can be used and ideally provide choice without the need to travel far and face additional travel costs. We would suggest that awareness raising across the retail sector will be required to encourage understanding and involvement whilst also building understanding of the rationale behind the system and how retailers can help to reduce stigma and support the effective delivery of Best Start Foods. Clear guidelines provided alongside the card, including steps to take if the card is lost or stolen will be required. It may be helpful that recipients are provided with some Best Start Foods promotional cards to present to retailers in their community who are unaware to encourage and support involvement or that this is detailed in the card itself .

Our own Early Learning and Childcare establishments can help support evaluations of the programme for families who attend the settings as could our Money Matters staff engaging with families with young children. We would also suggest that health colleagues including community midwives and health visitors who are the primary contact with families during what would be the duration of the programme would be well placed to carry out evaluations with families.
Details of how those benefitting from the programme can suggest improvements or highlight problems should be provided on the smartcard itself ideally with online and telephone options.

We would suggest creative advertising including ideas for healthy, low cost recipes within retail outlets, perhaps similar to how Tesco provide a variety of recipe cards to give families ideas. At a local/community level there is certainly an opportunity to bring a range of stakeholders together including retailers, to develop opportunities for families to learn more about diet and nutrition and how to cook healthily on a budget if this is something they struggle with. Key to any community level action is involvement of families from the outset.

Partnership working between Early Learning and Childcare settings and Health professionals could provide opportunities for families to establish healthy eating patterns. Increasingly with the implementation of the 1140 hours childcare, children will be receiving free healthy meals as part of their nursery day, as well as other health promoting activities staff currently carry out with both children and families. This could provide opportunities for agencies to come together to support this agenda.

The provision of a toolkit to retailers (more likely the smaller independents who possibly lack awareness themselves) may help them to develop displays promoting and raising awareness and understanding of healthy eating. This could also influence what food choices are offered, increasing the fresh affordable food options available. Within communities there may well be stakeholders who would offer support to retailers to maximise the impact. This may be a challenge in terms of staff resources across every community however in South Lanarkshire we would seek to support a programme like this in those communities where we are working with residents and partners to develop neighbourhood plans to improve local outcomes (locality plans).

It is not entirely clear what is being asked here and whether this question relates entirely to the impacts from programmes to support healthy eating as opposed to the Best Start food payment.

There will be a range of health and wellbeing and income /financial wellbeing indicators that the programme, both the payment to families and any associated healthy eating activity could have a clear and direct impact on e.g. child weight/obesity. As the paper suggests there could also be an impact on wider outcomes including attainment but it would be hard to measure/evidence the specific contribution in these cases.

Case studies can be a very effective way of evidencing the impact on individual families and we could work with our partners to identify families willing to provide an insight into how the programmes have impacted on eating habits, financial wellbeing etc.

The paper gives no indication of the opportunities to track what food items families are using their entitlement for .If this is not possible, would retailers provide an insight into changes in the levels of the healthy foods the scheme is intended to cover that they are selling?

If the rationale for stopping at 3 is that children by that stage would be benefitting from the milk and healthy meal (and potentially healthy snack) at nursery then this would seem reasonable. Clearly the longer we can support low income families the better but we recognise that the will be budgetary limitations.

The proposal would hopefully make a clear and seamless approach to delivering to children their free entitlement to both milk and healthy meal. However consideration should also be given to water being accessible to children throughout their day.

We would welcome the inclusion of a healthy snack within the proposalsFrom 2020 although children will have an entitlement to 1140 hours, this could be taken in a number of different ways e.g. 9am – 3pm over 38 weeks, 8am – 1pm over 45 weeks etc. Establishments need to take this into consideration when planning for children’s free meal and snack entitlements.

South Lanarkshire Council already delivers and support the implementation of the ELC free meal entitlement. This could be extended to include milk, water and snack provision providing a one stop shop approach to implementation. This could also be offered to our partner provider establishments to support their delivery as well.

As above, the offer should be the same for children whether in Council or partner provision.