Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether new voluntary sector organisations are eligible to access the £39 million of funding provided by her Department for relationship support services in local communities.

The Reducing Parental Conflict Programme is funded by up to £39m, and will encourage councils across England to integrate evidence-based services and approaches to addressing parental conflict that work for their local families.

Just over a quarter of the programme budget will be used to build the evidence base for which interventions work to reduce parental conflict, and provide access to face-to-face support to reduce parental conflict in 30 local authorities across England. The procurement process for the delivery of the face-to-face interventions will be open to any interested party as an open competition.

To help potential suppliers to prepare for these opportunities, we recently published a Prior Information Notice which outlined the timescales for the procurement. This notice advised suppliers that we will be launching an opportunity in July for expert organisations to bid to deliver the face-to-face interventions which DWP will be funding, with these contracts in place by January 2019. Full details of this process will be available when the Invitation to Tender is published. Organisations interested in bidding for the face-to-face contracts will be able to access the procurement opportunities on Contracts Finder, and can register their interest on Bravo.

In addition to the procurement of face-to-face services, we have also announced £6m of joint funding with the Department of Health and Social Care, aimed at improving the outcomes of children of alcohol-dependent parents, and we expect that there will be opportunities for voluntary sector organisations to participate in this work.