The pilot for children and young people’s personal health budgets in Tower Hamlets comes to an end in September 2025. We are no longer able to take any further referrals.
What was the Personal Health Budget pilot project?
The Personal Health Budget (PHB) project provided money to support someone’s health and wellbeing needs giving people more choice, control and flexibility over the support they receive.
The Advocacy Project provided PHBs to children and young people in Tower Hamlets from 2021 when the pilot started until it concluded in 2025. PHBs were used to buy an item, service, or membership that wasn’t available through existing statutory or community support.
The Advocacy Project provided PHBs to children and young people in Tower Hamlets.
We do not run the PHB services for adults within City and Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham; Core Arts PHB Brokerage service manages Personal Health Budget queries and services. Find out more about this here: https://www.corearts.co.uk/phb-brokerage-service/
Statement from North East London Integrated Care Board
“Thank you for supporting us to test the Personal Health Budgets pilot delivered by The Advocacy Project (TAP), for Tower Hamlets CAMHS.
The pilot started in March 2021, administered by TAP on behalf of North East London Integrated Care Board (ICB). It set out to provide a small fund for local young people (CYP), through their CAMHS clinician, to purchase items, services or membership that support their health and wellbeing. The pilot supported over 100 CYP, with 90% of CYP demonstrating improvement on wellbeing scores.
As the pilot came to an end, we undertook a review to determine how to use the work of the pilot and whether or not to commission a similar service in future. The review identified that:
- funds of this type should be linked more closely to the treatment and support plans made by CAMHS (to allow the funds to be more closely aligned to improving health and wellbeing outcomes)
- providing a range of budgets differing in size would allow for the funds to be used more effectively (the pilot offered a single, set payment but this didn’t always reflect individual need)
- building in needs analysis and means testing would allow us to improve equity (as individual circumstances were not a determining factor during the pilot but would ensure greater equity if developed as a longer term project).
We have taken the decision that we will not extend this time limited borough specific pilot although the learning will be shared to inform future work in this area across north east London.
Referrals to the service are now closed. This is to allow TAP to process outstanding referrals before the project contract ends on 30 September 2025.
(Note: this pilot is not linked to the national personal health budgets available to those eligible.)
We would like to thank the local CAMHS, TAP and the families for piloting the Personal Health Budgets in Tower Hamlets with us. It has given us an opportunity to reflect on innovative approaches and consider sustainability when working with local providers as part of our neighbourhood working. The ICB continues to focus on reducing health inequalities, improve outcomes for local residents and build equity with and for the people of north east London. If you have any queries, please contact us via: ”