Babies and young children growing up in poverty are less likely to live long, fulfilling and happy lives than their peers. We are working to explore new ways to increase the financial security of low-income families. For support and help to reach the families in greatest need of it, we also advocate for a more integrated and better funded early-years system.

Many local authorities, including Camden Council, offer a range of vital support services for families during pregnancy and early childhood. Local authorities also administer cost-of-living grants, which are one-off, discretionary grants that families can apply for. However, these services are often underutilised by the families who would benefit most from them. 

In this pilot, Camden Council will provide proactive support to parents at a time when this help stands to have the greatest impact on their child’s development. They will do this by offering pregnant people a £500 one-off cash grant, alongside proactive warm introduction and encouragement to take up local services – such as antenatal classes, benefits advice and more specialist support. 

This pilot project will run from May 2025 for one year, with evaluation activities continuing through to early 2028. The warm introduction will be provided to half of the grant recipients, who will be randomly selected. This allows us to introduce and pilot a new initiative within existing staffing capacity, while generating robust evidence on its impact. As a result, the project creates an opportunity to both support families directly and learn what approaches most effectively connect them with ongoing local support.

We are testing a new approach to increasing engagement with evidence-based family support services among low-income families with young children – with a specific focus on the prenatal period. By combining immediate financial support with an introduction to ongoing services, we hope to enhance early childhood health and developmental outcomes and reduce inequalities that emerge in early life. If we find that this approach is a cost-effective means of supporting early childhood development, we will seek to scale it up in other areas.

There is compelling evidence that getting the right support in pregnancy and early infancy can have long-lasting positive impacts on children's development. However, across the UK, lower-income parents systematically struggle to access early-years services. Camden Council has identified this same challenge locally.

We spoke with parents of young children in focus groups and interviews we conducted together while designing this pilot. Many told us that they do not know about what Family Hubs offer, or that they did not find out about Family Hubs until their children were older. 

Research also suggests that "stacked interventions” – in this case, combining financial support with other forms of family support – may deliver greater benefits than providing these elements separately. In this case, we hypothesise that the cash grant may:

• build parents’ trust in local services
• reduce financial pressures, giving parents mental bandwidth to engage with a warm introduction
• enable parents who engage with local services to make better use of their grant (eg, by finding out about what baby items they can get for free or second-hand, so they can spend the grant on something else). 

This project provides an opportunity to test this approach while addressing immediate financial needs, and promoting engagement with services that can improve health and developmental outcomes for babies from all backgrounds.

Camden Council will deliver the pilot, providing the £500 grant to all eligible low-income pregnant people in the borough during the pilot period. Eligibility for the grant will be automatically assessed based on linked administrative data, eliminating the need for parents to find out about and apply for it themselves.

For half of these people (randomly selected), they will also offer a personalised ’warm introduction’ to local services through a one-to-one meeting with a family navigator. The other half will receive a letter and email signposting them to available support, but will not receive the proactive outreach from a family navigator. 

Nesta is helping to refine the pilot design to maximise its potential impact, and leading on the evaluation of the pilot. Our work includes:

• applying behavioural science and design methods to optimise how the grant offer and warm introduction are communicated and delivered
• designing and supporting a rigorous randomised controlled trial (RCT) to measure the impact of adding the warm introduction to the cash grant on parents’ engagement with Family Hubs
• conducting qualitative research and surveys with parents and service providers to understand experiences and mechanisms of impact
• implementing a comprehensive theory-based evaluation to assess the overall programme effects, including the cash grant component
• supporting Camden Council in developing recommendations for sustainable service improvements, as well as analysing broader policy recommendations arising from the pilot.

This collaborative approach allows us to combine Camden Council’s local expertise and service delivery capacity with Nesta's evaluation capabilities and evidence-based design methods.