Blog post from Councillor David Fothergill on the vital need to improve the Healthy Start scheme.
Healthy Start has been reported by both healthcare professional and families to play a vital role in ensuring access to nutritious food, improving diets, and lessening the strain on household budgets.
Evidence shows that pregnant women and mothers registered for the scheme reported that Healthy Start made them think more about their health and diet and led to improved dietary choices. The scheme provides hundreds of thousands of families across England with vital funds to purchase fruit, vegetables and milk, so why is the scheme in such need of improvement?
Nutrition during pregnancy and early years directly impacts long-term health. The Healthy Start scheme was launched in 2006 with the aim of providing a nutritional safety net and improving access to a healthy diet for low-income families.
The scheme allows those on a low income who are more than 10 weeks pregnant or have a child under four, to help to buy milk, fruit and vegetables, pulses and baby formula. Families can also access free Healthy Start vitamins. These can be bought using a prepaid card, which is regularly topped up by the government so that pregnant mothers and mothers with children between the ages of one and four-years-old receive £4.25 per week, while mothers with children under the age of one receive £8.50 per week. The offer is universal for mothers under the age of 18.
Healthy Start began transitioning from a paper-based voucher system to a digitised prepaid scheme between October 2021 and March 2022 this year. The move was meant to make it easier for families to apply for the scheme and reduce stigma, yet families have reported delays in receiving their cards, being unable to reach the helpline and cards not working.
When the scheme fully switched to digital at the end of March 2022, issues emerged at the checkout. Families reported having to separate their baskets into Healthy Start and non-Healthy Start items and some prepaid cards were not recognised by major retailers. Eligible families reported being rejected for the scheme and having difficulties accessing the helpline. These issues generated additional stigma and stress for families who were pregnant or had young children.
As of early September this year, around 44,500 families who previously received the paper vouchers had not been enrolled onto the new digital system. This is 44,500 families who are now potentially missing out on accessing healthy fresh food. We need to understand why this is the case; what does this mean for families facing digital exclusion? We need a review commissioned into the barriers affecting uptake of Healthy Start, such as the role of digitisation, accessibility, rurality and proximity to stores accepting the cards.
Thankfully, many of these issues have now been resolved with the creation of a new phoneline and glitches resolved with the online form. There is still much to be done to improve Healthy Start and fix other aspects of the scheme since it was fully digitised at the end of March 2022.
As the cost-of-living crisis deepens, families are finding it more difficult to access healthy food. Many have been forced to opt for cheaper, more energy-dense options which are typically the least nutritious. This means the Healthy Start scheme is now more important than ever to ensure pregnant women and their young children can get the vital nutrition they need for their development.
The Government increased the value of Healthy Start from £3.15 to £4.25 in April 2021. Since then, the value of the prepaid cards hasn’t increased to match the rising cost of food, with the price of staple items such as milk and tomatoes rising from between 21 and 47 per cent since prices were set in April 2021. This means that the purchasing power of the vouchers has rapidly decreased as inflation has risen. Families with babies under the age of one receive £8.50 per week, yet the price of most brands of infant formula (from birth) has soared well above this. The value of the cards should be reviewed at regular intervals in line with inflation to ensure the scheme can continue to act as a nutritional safety net for families on low incomes.
Currently only families with a combined income from employment of £408 per month are eligible for the Healthy Start scheme. Expanding the scheme to all families on Universal Credit will ensure that more families currently facing food insecurity can access a nutritious diet and was recommended in Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy.
In March 2022 alone, almost 150,000 eligible families on low incomes missed out free fruit, vegetables and milk due to low Healthy Start uptake.
Uptake of Healthy Start varies wildly at a national level; the latest available data shows that a population the size of Preston (almost 150,000) missed out on the scheme in March this year alone. In some council areas, almost 90 per cent of families are using their vouchers; in others it’s as low as 50 per cent. Introducing autoenrollment for the scheme, therefore making it ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ would make it easier for families to access the prepaid cards and minimise the risk of digital exclusion.
Data produced on the uptake and eligibility for the scheme, previously published monthly, has not been released since March 2022. Councils and their partners are calling on the Government to urgently publish this vital data so they can gain a better understanding of local food insecurity and the impact of the scheme’s transition to digital.
Councillor David Fothergill, Chair, LGA Community Wellbeing Board.
