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About the Lone Parent Helpline
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The Lone Parent Helpline run by Gingerbread:National Council for One Parent Families' receives over 20,000 calls from lone parents in England and Wales each year.
Our partner organisation, One Parent Families Scotland, operates the Lone Parent Helpline in Scotland.
The Helpline is currently made possible by funding from The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Department for Education and Skills, and Manchester City Council.
Our trained and highly skilled Helpline team offer free, independent and confidential information and advice on range of issues.
The Helpline opening hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm extended to 8pm on a Wednesday. There are specialist advice sessions provided throughout the week dealing with such areas as benefits and tax credits, Family Law, housing on relationship breakdown, maintenance and the CSA. Ring for details of the advice hours.
The aims of the Lone Parent Helpline are: - To provide a one-stop information and advice service to lone parents, their families and friends, and professionals working with them. This includes providing free publications and fact-sheets to lone parents on a range of legal and practical issues, providing advice on benefits and tax credits, child support, legal issues relating to children and other financial matters. The Helpline is accredited by the Community Legal Service at General Help Level and is a member of the Telephone Helplines Association. The Helpline Team consist of three Helpline workers, and three full-time equivalent advice workers.
- To put Helpline callers in touch with organisations providing advice, information and practical support using information from the Signposter database. The database contains details on 10,000 agencies, including local advice agencies, parenting skills classes and support groups.
- To provide a sensitive listening ear to lone parents callers contacting the Helpline and to help callers access our advice service and specialist projects. The Family Safe project provides telephone guidance and support to lone parents whose children are displaying violent behaviour or threatening to do so and our Disabled Child Project provides specialist telephone advice and web based services to lone parents with a child who has additional needs.
- To offer lone parent callers the to opportunity to become members of One Parent Families and for their views to feed into the policy work done by One Parent Families.
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