Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what approach his Department plans to take to select local authorities for the family hubs transformation fund.

The department has launched a £12 million Family Hubs Transformation Fund (Transformation Fund 1) to support at least 12 local authorities in England to move to a family hub model of service delivery and open family hubs by March 2024. The application window closed in December 2021 and we received 84 bids from upper-tier local authorities. We expect a public announcement on the first wave of successful local authorities in the coming weeks, following a cross government assessment process to review the bids.

In October 2021, as part of the Autumn Budget, the government announced £301.75 million to transform Start for Life and Family Hub services in 75 upper-tier local authorities across England (Transformation Fund 2). The 75 eligible local authorities were announced on the 2 April 2022. Local authorities have been pre-selected in rank order using ‘Income Deprivation Affecting Children Indices – Average Rank’, ensuring a minimum of 25% of local authorities, from each rural urban classification, have been pre-selected. More information on this methodology can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/family-hubs-and-start-for-life-package-methodology-for-pre-selecting-local-authorities.