‘Families to suffer’ as budget for children’s charity slashed

Sheffield Information Link (SIL) has been in existence for a quarter of a century and was initially set up to provide help and advice on childcare for parents as part of a Department of Health pilot scheme.

Since then it has grown to provide a wide range of family support services and had a budget of around £700,000 in 2010/11, a figure which has been radically reduced by Sheffield’s new Labour administration.

Most of SILs budget comes from Sheffield Council, with a small proportion coming from the Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and it delivers statutory services on behalf of the authority.

Council chiefs have told SIL workers that some of their work is to be transferred into the authority’s main call centre while other services may be stopped completely after September this year.

The cut has meant that the organisation has been forced to close a shop it had run in Sheffield city centre on Sheffield’s Leopld Street since 1987 and has left staff facing uncertainty over how much longer SIL will survive.

The organisation’s chief executive, Sharron Baroudi, said her team and customers were devastated after the news of the 29 per cent funding cut was broken by senior officers at Sheffield Council.

She added: “We have been delivering the drop-in service in Sheffield for 24 years and in that time we have helped over 90,000 families and responded to over 250,000 enquiries.

“Our service is highly valued by the city’s families. Our well-known location allowed people to access our specialist services when it suited them while they were in the city centre.

“We are being told that frontline services won’t be cut but how much more frontline could you get?

“We were here to help with a wide range of expertise that cannot be found elsewhere, desperate people would come and see us because they knew we would have the answers – where will they go now?”

Mrs Baroudi said Sheffield Information Link handled 15,000 enquiries each year helping almost 4,500 families with information ranging from where to find a childminder to how to deal with domestic abuse.

Last month Sheffield Council’s new leader, Julie Dore, said she was changing spending priorities set by her Liberal Democrat predecessors to help safeguard services for children and families.

A review of services for children under five was also announced at the end of June, which the council’s children’s services spokesman, Coun Jackie Drayton, said would give children “the best possible start”.

Mrs Baroudi said Coun Drayton had agreed to meet with SIL later this month to discuss the service’s future, but in the meantime she and her staff were in a “difficult situation”.

In a recent survey of around 900 people, including health and social care professionals, 96 per cent said they were concerned or very concerned about the impact of spending cuts on services offered by SIL.

Charnit Kaur-Javed, a parent who has recently used SIL, said: “I recently found out that my child has autistic spectrum disorder. Although I had already suspected that was the case, it was still a shock.

“I felt at a total loss of what to do in terms of benefits, services that provide some help and access to information on my son’s condition.

“I honestly don’t know how I would have managed without their assistance.”

Despite several requests, nobody from Sheffield Council was available to comment on the budget cut.