We are pleased to share this blog article by Richard Brooks, Director of Strategy Equality and Partnerships at Birmingham City Council. Since the time of writing, an extension to HSF has been announced.

In the autumn of 2022, Birmingham City Council set up a cost of living programme in response to surging national inflation. At that point around 300,000 people in Birmingham, including almost half the city’s children, were living in poverty. Rising food and fuel prices risked pushing more and more into destitution. This was a true crisis, long in the making but suddenly in sharp relief.

The council declared an emergency and invested £5m of its own resources, with the main funding coming from the national ‘Household Support Fund’. Originally a one-off grant in the Covid winter of 2020, HSF had by that time become an annual £1bn lifeline for millions of people in the most precarious circumstances.

The Birmingham programme had four main areas of focus: warmth, food, energy costs, and income. Our largest area of spending was small emergency payments to individuals in crisis. But we went far beyond this and tried to make the money drive innovation, develop social infrastructure and deliver greater value than cash handouts.

We initially wanted to establish ‘warm banks’ where residents could shelter from the cold. But when we spoke to local voluntary organisations, they wanted to be part of a broader offer of social connection and more meaningful help. We partnered with the amazing Thrive Together Birmingham, and the Warm Welcome network was born.

Today the Warm Welcome network has almost 300 member organisations across every ward in the city, with capacity for around 60,000 weekly sessions for residents. They are amazingly varied and provide an astonishing range of services. As well as being places of friendship and safety, they support people to claim benefits, to access other help, and to become more capable and independent. We are distributing energy efficient devices (like heated blankets and slow cookers), running damp and mould clinics, supporting cooking and exercise classes through the network. There’s a lot more development in the pipeline, much of it driven by interactions between members.

On the emergency food front, we quickly realised that food projects across the city were seeing demand outstrip donations. So we created a fund to fill the gap, supporting food banks, community pantries etc to buy the supplies they needed. Then we ran an infrastructure fund to support them to buy fridges, freezers, cookers and the like. Then we supported a food reuse and distribution project… then a voucher distribution to primary schools. Today the food network comprises around 200 food projects across the city, supporting tens of thousands of the lowest income households.

For advice and information, we started with the council’s own services, extending the opening hours of our physical contact centres. Then we set up a dedicated cost of living team on the main council phone line, which took 100,000 calls from residents over 12 months. We’re now developing digital and automated tools to allow residents to self-triage on our website and access more help independently, and we are planning to support them to do this through the Warm Welcome network.

The credit belongs overwhelmingly with the voluntary and community organisations in these networks, and (as ever) with a relatively small number of exceptionally dedi cated and public-spirited people they depend upon. We haven’t set up any new organisations, and we don’t pay any core costs. But by creating a network, investing small amounts of cash in a strategic way, creating a brand, communicating effectively, connecting people and managing the information in the system, the overall impact is much greater. We’re now seeing our most committed private sector partners invest for social value through these networks. (Special mention to Cadent Gas who have made ten Warm Welcome centres into energy support hubs.)

This has all been relatively low cost. For example, supporting 150 food projects over a winter – a whole city network – costs around £1m. A similar amount provides a year of micro-grants for the entire network of Warm Welcome spaces. There are 1.2 million residents of the city. The costs of a single adult requiring social care, or a child being taken into care due to neglect, or a family becoming homeless, are huge in comparison. So the programme is a response to urgent need, but it is also a form of preventative spending. One that is massively amplified by the voluntary and community sector.

I am only describing a fraction of the activity here. We are constantly trying to address terrible gaps in our welfare state and social fabric. We are putting beds into homes where children are sleeping on the floor, sending hot food to people who have no cooking facilities, and supporting the re-use of furniture and household goods. We know were only scratching the surface of need.

Some argue that the Household Support Fund does not make sense. It is certainly small relative to the overall amount spent on welfare benefits in the UK, which is around £150bn this year[1]. It is obviously correct that the two much bigger challenges are i) getting more people into decently paid work, and ii) rebuilding the core welfare system so it returns to a state approaching civilisation.

However, without this small slice of protected funding, none of the innovation I describe above would be possible. Most councils are now so financially pressed that they cannot fund any such programme from their mainstream resources. In the case of Birmingham, we are legally prevented from doing so by our wider financial situation. And DWP – which certainly spends over £1bn annually in Birmingham – has no remit or culture of enabling the kind of support I am describing.

It is also true that the one-year funding horizon of HSF – annually renewed and all to be spent in that year – is crazily inefficient. This March we were told by Jeremy Hunt three weeks before money ran out that there would be a six-month extension to September. Now we are staring down the barrel of the gun again. This time the new Chancellor can take a different path.

I don’t think enough people really understand what this kind of broken-by-design short term policy means. You can only employ people on interim and short-term contracts. Every year you have to be prepared to shut down. As you approach the end, you prioritise spending the money anyhow rather than maximising value (because otherwise you have to give it back). Every month you must keep people’s spirits up when they know the clock is ticking. And your partners all know you may not be here next year.
All this is purely a policy choice. The Chancellor should extend HSF and announce a multi-year programme. This costs no more than yearly allocations and is far better value.

In addition, there should be flexibility to carry resources forward. This would avoid cliff edges and allow better investment decisions.

Same spending, better decisions, greater impact.

***There is already lot of lobbying around this issue. But it won’t hurt to add our voices here, so please do pass this on if you agree with my argument.***

Finally, I must express thanks to the many, many people involved in the Birmingham programme, although I can’t possibly name them all. The political leadership of the council has been unwavering in their support and has accepted the risks that come with innovation. The core programme team has been amazing, and brilliantly led by Greg Ward. There are hundreds of partners across the city, but Brian Carr (Bham Voluntary Service Council) and Fred Rattley of Thrive have been particularly crucial. Many services across the council – from the Public Health Food Team (Rosie Jenkins), to the Early Intervention and Prevention Programme (Kalvinder Kohli, Pye Nyunt), to the Children’s Trust to Adult Social Care and Housing (Helen Shervington) – have all leaned in brilliantly. Thank you. I hope we get the chance to keep on building what we have started.