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Market Context

Early Help & Prevention is about proactively supporting an adults’ wellbeing, identifying, and responding to, emerging problems so that they do not escalate, therefore preventing, reducing or delaying the need for care and support. It is person-centred, enabling adults to help themselves and overcome difficulties and build resilience.

Early Help & Prevention supports and enables the delivery of our legal duties under the Care Act to meet the needs for care and support of eligible adults and to provide support for carers.

Essex County Council invests in Early Help & Prevention to support people’s wider wellbeing and to manage demand on the ASC front door, through the commissioning of a number of services. This is in addition to support funded and provided by external partners and organisations both at a countywide and more local footprint.

Strengthening our Early Help and Prevention offer is a strategic priority for ASC, and as part of this, we work closely with Public Health colleagues and align investment where appropriate.

The offer currently includes:

  • Access to advice and information
  • Activities that promote healthy and active lifestyles
  • Schemes to reduce loneliness and social isolation
  • Support for mental, physical and emotional wellbeing

As our Early Help services comprise of services commissioned across all cohorts and areas, specific information on those services is covered by the individual Market Position Statements. However, the below gives an overview of the market data and spend.

No. of Early Help Services for 25/26  28
Total spend for 24/25 Approx. £9.5m

The information shown in the table(s) above is correct as of 31st March 2025.

Our ambition is:

  • Everyone can live their life to their fullest potential, to live as independently as possible and be supported to thrive within their own families and local communities.
  • The system works with people to identify their own solutions, building on their own strengths and assets and those of their communities.
  • We are clear what the impact of Early Help is and have the right commissioned support in place to support peoples’ needs.
  • The approach shifts focus away from managing short-term crises and towards effective support for people and their families at an earlier stage, with them at the centre of enabling environments rather than them being dependent on organised public services.

There is a plethora of Early Help services/support across Essex, provided both by ECC and externally with our partners. We want our Essex residents and professionals in the system to have easy access to good quality information and advice about the support available, both at a countywide and more local/community level.

COVID has only strengthened the need to have a robust Early Help offer building on the strengths of the voluntary and community sector and communities.  Analysis is currently being undertaken to understand the demand on the ASC front door in order to develop more targeted appropriate responses that will see people get the early help they need to support themselves and be resilient and thereby prevent escalation to crisis.

Current market risks:

  • Accessing information, advice and Early Help support available – there is no single place to access information and advice on what support is available to people. Instead there are a range of directories and catalogues commissioned across Essex but they are not cohesive or aligned. This can leave both people and professionals confused and frustrated about what is on offer.
  • Demand for support – the demand for ASC support continues to rise, as does the level of complexity of cases. Early Help services are experiencing the same waiting times and waiting lists as other ASC support and this can have a detrimental impact on the individual, as timely access to support is fundamental in Early Help services.
  • Evidencing the impact of Early Help support – there are many challenges to measuring the impact of Early Help and Prevention and as such has been difficult to build a robust evidence base to both the individual Early Help services commissioned and the totality of their collective and wider impact

Our current areas of focus are:

  • Building our data and insight on ASC demand and the reasons why people come to us – what support could have been offered at an earlier stage? Do our EH commissioned services meet the demand?
  • Develop an Early Help Performance Framework to demonstrate impact of initiatives/ services and requirement for continued/increased investment
  • Insight and engagement to understand how we can improve our wider information and advice landscape – including short term improvements to essex.gov to more clearly showcase our Early Help offer
Last updated: 01/04/2025
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