The Mayor of London has committed £4.7m to extend the Family Financial Resilience Partnership from 12 boroughs to 19 over the next two years. City Hall announced the funding on 4 November 2026, alongside a further £750,000 for benefits take-up work that will run with the enlarged programme.
The partnership currently works in Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, Greenwich, Croydon, Brent, Enfield, Southwark, Haringey, Lewisham, Ealing, and Barking and Dagenham. The seven boroughs joining under the expansion have not been named, and City Hall has not published the basis on which the additional areas were chosen.
In its first six months the partnership helped more than 6,000 families secure more than £5.4m in support, according to City Hall. That is an average of roughly £900 for each family assisted. The expansion is projected to help about 29,000 further families to access roughly £18m that they are entitled to and are not receiving.
Advice under the partnership is delivered locally, with advisers working with families to establish what a household can claim, assemble the supporting evidence and pursue the application. The sums secured are recorded by City Hall as the measure of the programme. The announcement therefore rests on claim totals rather than on the number of advice sessions held.
The separate £750,000 will fund take-up work with boroughs and the firm Policy in Practice, concentrated on four benefit lines: Pension Credit, Attendance Allowance, disability benefits and Universal Credit. City Hall estimates that this strand could reach 32,500 households and unlock £15m, a narrower exercise than the broader advice offer delivered through the partnership.
The unclaimed billions
City Hall estimates that more than £4bn in benefits goes unclaimed in London each year, a figure it attributes to Policy in Practice’s Missing Out 2025 report. Separately, it says its campaigns and advice services have helped more than 170,000 households claim more than £108m since April 2022.
Spread across two years, the £4.7m works out at about £2.35m a year for 19 boroughs. Measured against the annual shortfall, the £18m the expansion could unlock is a fraction of one year of unclaimed support in the capital. The programme adds advice capacity at borough level; it does not alter who is entitled to which benefit or how much any household can receive.
In Barking and Dagenham, one of the twelve existing boroughs, the leader of the council, Cllr Dominic Twomey, said the partnership had supported 612 families in six months. The Deputy Mayor for Communities and Social Justice, Dr Debbie Weekes-Bernard, visited the family hub at Barking Learning Centre ahead of the announcement.
What happens next
The seven new boroughs are to be confirmed, with the £4.7m covering delivery across the two years that follow the announcement. The £750,000 strand runs on the same timetable, and its four named benefit lines are the only priorities published for it so far.
For households in the existing twelve boroughs, advice continues on the same terms, and the six-month claim figures suggest demand there is already established. For residents of the seven areas still to be confirmed, access depends on a list that has not yet appeared, which leaves the practical reach of the expansion unsettled.
The figures to watch are whether the 29,000 families and £18m are realised, and whether the 32,500 households and £15m attached to the take-up strand follow. Both are projections published at the point of funding rather than promises to individual claimants, and neither carries a borough level breakdown.
