Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government what is the breakdown of spending by local authorities of Reducing Parental Conflict grants, in terms of matters such as internal human and other resources, training, and direct delivery to parents; and what are local evaluations showing is the impact of the way the grant is allocated locally.

This phase of the Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme (2022-25) focuses on supporting and funding Local Authorities (LAs) to integrate RPC into their family help offer. As such, the programme does not directly put parents through RPC interventions, these decisions are instead taken at a local level.

LAs receive RPC funding through the RPC Local Grant, which makes up to £19m available from 2022-25. In the first year of grant funding, LAs have directly supported around 18,000 parents, and over 30,000 training places for staff. Further details on LA breakdowns of grant funding have been appended to the end of this PQ.

In the first year of the RPC Local Grant, LAs had spent £159,000 of their Local Grant funding to undertake evaluation activities. As we are at the start of the second year of a three-year grant process, this work is ongoing. There are however positive findings emerging from local evaluation work. For instance, through our partnered working with ‘Foundations’, these have been published on their website.

LAs are not required to provide data on whether those parents are together or separating/separated. The forthcoming Reducing Parental Conflict evaluation reports, announced on 19th July, will provide further detail on the effects of support on the relationships between intact parents and separating/separated parents.

To Note:

The information in this PQ is derived from internal management information and is not quality assured to Official Statistics standards.

As this is ongoing Management Information, derived from 134 LAs, small amounts of additional resource which LAs have committed beyond their Grant Funding has not been disaggregated from the figures, as such totals may slightly exceed overall allocation in some places and the final reported figures will differ.