Delivering Families First programmes through integrated welfare and safeguarding
09 September 2026
As local authorities and partner agencies prepare for the March 2027 Families First deadline, the need for joined-up, data-driven early intervention has never been more urgent. Fragmented communication across Children’s Services, health, housing, and emergency services often leaves practitioners working with incomplete information, making it difficult to spot struggling families before they hit a crisis point or to coordinate effective whole-family support.
In this webinar, we explored how to break down these agency silos using our Better off platform. We demonstrated how combining welfare intelligence with multi-agency safeguarding data enables teams to identify early risk factors, streamline Best Start Hub referrals, and track continuous engagement across services. By creating a single view of family needs, local authorities and their partners can reduce administrative duplication, meet statutory responsibilities, and ensure no family falls through the cracks.
Listen back to hear
- Families First and Best Start Family Hubs: what can joined up data tell us about families?
- A brief view of the Low Income Family Tracker (LIFT) and the Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST)
- Bringing safeguarding and welfare together
- Q&A
Guest speakers
“Safeguarding concerns rarely exist in isolation. Financial hardship, debt, housing insecurity and missed benefits can all contribute to wider family vulnerability, while safeguarding concerns can also be a signal that a family may benefit from additional practical and financial support.”
“Small changes in income that bring families above the poverty line can reduce the need for further, more complex stages of the system. This gives us a sense of how income maximisation can help prevent escalation.”
“The objective isn’t to create more data for practitioners to look at. It’s to create better intelligence so practitioners can make better decisions and take earlier actions. That’s what can make the difference between reactive intervention and earlier prevention.”
