Where no local Home-Start shows
This is a map, not a service, and nobody here can arrange support or a referral. Your health visitor, GP or local family hub can help now, and many local Home-Starts take families who ask for themselves — find one under Find a Home-Start. If a child is in danger, call 999.
In 78 of the 174 counties and unitary authorities of England and Wales, neither record shows a local Home-Start. 1,052,141 children under five live in them. Before either sentence is quoted anywhere, read the next one.
It does not mean families there get no support. Councils run and commission family hubs, children’s centres, health visiting and other family support, and many charities outside this network work with families of young children. What it means is narrow: no local Home-Start on Home-Start UK’s public list gives an address there, and no Home-Start charity records the area as one it works in. Both records can miss a Home-Start that is really there.
How presence was counted
- An address — a local Home-Start on Home-Start UK’s list gives one in the area: 71 areas.
- The register — a Home-Start charity tells the Charity Commission it operates there: 92 areas.
Either one counts. A charity that records a whole region or country is not counted as present in any one area of it, because a charity that says it works everywhere says nothing about a particular place.
Recorded as working everywhere
One of the network’s charities tell the register only that they work throughout a region or nation, so the register places them nowhere and they count only where they give an address. Where one of them really covers an area, this page cannot see it:
- Home-Start Greenwich — recorded as “Throughout London”
Every area where neither record shows a local Home-Start
Largest number of children under five first. Spending is what the council reported for 2024-25 under the headings named on the front page; a council reporting little here may pay for the same work from another line, so this shows the line, not the service.
| Area | Children under five | Council spending on under-fives, Sure Start and family support, 2024-25 | Real-terms change since 2015-16 | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lincolnshire | 35,818 | £19.2m | -23.7% | |
| Buckinghamshire | 30,890 | £13.2m | -35.2% | |
| Sheffield | 30,178 | £38.0m | +67.7% | |
| Liverpool | 26,372 | £19.8m | +18.7% | |
| East Sussex | 24,993 | £12.4m | -43.6% | |
| County Durham | 24,752 | £14.4m | -19.7% | |
| Newham | 23,855 | £16.5m | -19.1% | |
| Cumbria | 22,404 | £22.4m | -13.6% | |
| Sandwell | 22,176 | £7.4m | -48.9% | |
| Redbridge | 21,194 | £15.2m | +117.8% | |
| Coventry | 20,444 | £13.8m | -1.0% | |
| Cheshire East | 19,930 | £9.4m | -28.2% | |
| Lewisham | 19,127 | £9.9m | -45.5% | |
| Tower Hamlets | 19,090 | £24.3m | +3.5% | |
| Waltham Forest | 18,985 | £10.7m | -3.2% | |
| Hounslow | 18,221 | £9.9m | -12.1% | |
| Walsall | 18,194 | £7.2m | -20.4% | |
| Dudley | 18,176 | £7.6m | -24.0% | |
| Nottingham | 17,820 | £4.7m | -60.8% | Named by “Home-Start Nottingham” |
| Cheshire West and Chester | 17,616 | £11.0m | -13.4% | |
| Barking and Dagenham | 17,251 | £13.3m | -13.5% | |
| Doncaster | 16,942 | £11.6m | +6.1% | |
| Havering | 16,491 | £6.3m | -16.5% | |
| Wolverhampton | 16,325 | £23.3m | +54.3% | |
| Wirral | 16,316 | £17.5m | +7.0% | |
| Hackney | 16,135 | £26.8m | -16.2% | |
| Newcastle upon Tyne | 15,651 | £21.5m | +73.3% | |
| Stoke-on-Trent | 15,625 | £5.5m | -40.1% | |
| Derby | 15,219 | £9.7m | -12.4% | |
| Bexley | 15,029 | £4.2m | -53.5% | |
| Haringey | 14,932 | £7.2m | -54.9% | |
| Rotherham | 14,645 | £10.9m | -2.5% | |
| Shropshire | 14,422 | £5.1m | -38.2% | |
| Northumberland | 14,235 | £7.1m | -45.2% | |
| Peterborough | 14,163 | £6.5m | +127.2% | |
| Sunderland | 13,848 | £5.2m | -37.6% | |
| Southampton | 13,794 | £6.3m | -47.8% | |
| Swindon | 13,627 | £4.3m | -30.8% | |
| Barnsley | 13,463 | £14.5m | +10.3% | |
| Thurrock | 12,261 | £7.5m | -3.1% | |
| Slough | 11,774 | £3.3m | -3.4% | |
| Brighton and Hove | 11,752 | £11.8m | -26.7% | |
| Solihull | 11,694 | £11.1m | +67.9% | |
| Swansea | 11,428 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Portsmouth | 11,280 | £9.4m | -2.7% | |
| Bedford | 11,163 | £4.9m | -36.9% | |
| Richmond upon Thames | 11,103 | £7.0m | -25.9% | |
| North Tyneside | 10,992 | £8.7m | +8.5% | |
| North Somerset | 10,660 | £11.5m | +59.0% | |
| Southend-on-Sea | 10,242 | £6.5m | +7.6% | |
| Reading | 10,238 | £7.5m | +15.2% | |
| Blackburn with Darwen | 10,056 | £11.2m | +27.2% | |
| Gateshead | 10,052 | £8.6m | +21.2% | |
| Wokingham | 9,854 | £4.8m | +47.1% | |
| Knowsley | 9,735 | £12.4m | +152.7% | |
| Newport | 9,733 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Kingston upon Thames | 9,559 | £7.1m | -1.0% | |
| Bath and North East Somerset | 9,020 | £6.5m | +10.2% | |
| North East Lincolnshire | 8,455 | £9.5m | -35.2% | |
| North Lincolnshire | 8,444 | £8.4m | -11.4% | |
| West Berkshire | 8,310 | £4.0m | -37.7% | |
| Windsor and Maidenhead | 8,020 | £3.6m | -27.6% | |
| South Tyneside | 7,823 | £7.1m | +71.8% | |
| Bridgend | 7,343 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Halton | 6,954 | £5.2m | -22.8% | |
| Torbay | 6,059 | £5.9m | -13.0% | |
| Powys | 5,731 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Pembrokeshire | 5,586 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Isle of Wight | 5,552 | £5.3m | +11.8% | |
| Darlington | 5,494 | £4.0m | -1.7% | |
| Gwynedd | 5,348 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Conwy | 5,030 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Torfaen | 5,002 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Hartlepool | 4,983 | £5.3m | -24.4% | |
| Blaenau Gwent | 3,543 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| Isle of Anglesey | 3,209 | – | – | Wales — see below |
| City of London | 214 | £1.6m | -2.8% | |
| Isles of Scilly | 97 | £19,728 | -89.1% |
Wales
A local Home-Start shows in 12 of Wales’s 22 areas, where 60.1% of Wales’s children under five live. Welsh councils report their spending to the Welsh Government, so Wales is in every count here except the spending and the deprivation comparison.
What else to know
- The count of children under five is from census day, 21 March 2021. The spending is from 2024-25. Both are the latest there are.
- Some councils cannot be compared across the years. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset were redrawn in 2019, and North and West Northamptonshire were one county until 2021. Their spending is in the totals for England, but no change is shown for them alone.
- Home-Start UK’s list is the one it publishes. Its own words are “our network of over 160 local Home-Start charities”; its public listing pages show 143, and an area with a Home-Start the list leaves out will read here as having none.
- Area figures add up to slightly more or less than the national figure (3,232,038 against 3,232,036), because the statistics office adjusts small numbers to protect people’s privacy.