Low income households to get £180 cost of living vouchers within days – check if you qualify
LOW income households are in line to receive cost of living vouchers worth up to £180 within days.
The help comes via the Household Support Fund, a giant £742million pot of money that's been shared between councils in England.
Local authorities are distributing their share of the fund, which runs until March 2026, to households in need.
In most cases, this is residents who are on benefits, low incomes or classed as vulnerable.
Ealing Council, in London, has been given £4.7million out of the £742million pot and is issuing supermarket vouchers to families with children on benefits-related free school meals.
Households with children under the age of five receiving housing benefit or council tax support are also eligible for vouchers.
Vouchers are being issued in July, October and December this year, as well as February and March 2026.
The vouchers being given to families with children on benefits-related free school meals in July are worth £90 per child, meaning households with two eligible children will receive £180.
If you live in Ealing, you don't need to apply for the vouchers as they will be sent to you via email or letter.
The council's partner, Blackhawk, is issuing a 16-digit, personalised code and instructions on how to redeem the vouchers on the Blackhawk website - ealingcouncil.select-your-reward.co.uk.
If your child goes to a school outside the borough of Ealing, you will need to apply for the vouchers.
Details on how to do that can be found via ealing.gov.uk/info/201103/benefits_and_financial_support/3043/household_support_fund.
Three key benefits that YOU could be missing out on, and one even gives you a free TV Licence
Can I get help if I live outside Ealing?
Whether you can get help via the Household Support Fund depends on where you live.
This is because each council sets it own eligibility criteria.
However, the Household Support Fund, which was first established in 2021, is designed to help those on low incomes, benefits or classed as vulnerable.
So, if you fit into any of these three categories, the chances are you will be eligible for support.
The best thing to do is visit your local council's website where most have a page dedicated to the Household Support Fund.
Or, you can contact your local council's customer service helpline to inquire.
The latest round of Household Support Fund runs until March 31, 2026, and some councils have already opened up for applications.
Households in Birmingham are being urged to apply for £200 payments.
Meanwhile, low income households in North Northamptonshire can apply for supermarket vouchers worth up to £320.
Other help if you're on a low income
It's worth checking if you're eligible for benefits if you haven't already - it could boost your bank balance by thousands of pounds a year.
Are you missing out on benefits?
YOU can use a benefits calculator to help check that you are not missing out on money you are entitled to
Charity Turn2Us' benefits calculator works out what you could get.
Entitledto's free calculator determines whether you qualify for various benefits, tax credit and Universal Credit.
MoneySavingExpert.com and charity StepChange both have benefits tools powered by Entitledto's data.
You can use Policy in Practice's calculator to determine which benefits you could receive and how much cash you'll have left over each month after paying for housing costs.
Your exact entitlement will only be clear when you make a claim, but calculators can indicate what you might be eligible for.
If you're struggling with the cost of food, check where your nearest food bank is, to help you get cupboard staples for less.
The Trussell Trust has hundreds of food banks across the UK, and you can find your nearest one here - trussell.org.uk/emergency-food/find-a-foodbank.
Meanwhile, if you have fallen behind on your energy bills, you might be able to get a grant to wipe any debt.
British Gas and Octopus Energy, the UK's two biggest energy firms, both run schemes offering customers grants worth up to £2,000.
You might be able to apply for a free grant through a local charity as well.
Charity Turn2Us has a free-to-use grants search tool on its website which you can find here - grants-search.turn2us.org.uk.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
27 minutes ago
- The Sun
I'm growing tired of three-year-affair with my lover… our sex is awesome but he's still with his wife
DEAR DEIDRE: MY lover visits me every Thursday or Friday, late afternoon. We have sex and then he carries on his merry way back to his wife. He tells me he loves me and sounds genuine but after three years, I am starting to tire of this arrangement. I am 39 and he is 45. He has been married for 18 years but says that, despite the fact he and his wife are no more than friends, he would feel too guilty to leave her. He is an HGV driver and regularly stops in the lorry park where I have a mobile burger van. We used to swap banter while he stopped to eat and one time he suggested we go for a drink. There was a pub just up the road, so we went there. The next time we met up he came back to my flat. We discovered that we are compatible when it comes to sex and instantly gelled. No matter what his working week is like, he always makes sure he calls at my flat before he returns to his wife for the weekend. The sex is awesome; he is a thoughtful lover. I convince myself things will work out with him in the end. However, I have been waiting for him to sort his life out for almost three years now. He promises me we will be together soon and that we can have a fantastic life, but it is just words because nothing changes. He hates it when I tell him my plans for the weekend. He doesn't like me going out with my friends even though he admits that he has got no right to expect me to live like a hermit. Is it time to end things even though I know how much it will hurt me to do so? DEIDRE SAYS: Your lover's marriage might be one of friendship, but he shows no signs of leaving his wife for you, despite his promises. Tell him to focus on his marriage and work out what he wants. Perhaps give him a deadline and don't spend your entire life waiting around for him now. You can find someone to love you who is free to be with you – it's really what you deserve. But first you must end this affair. It will be tough, but you have no future together. Improve your social life, get out there and meet men who are free. My support pack Your Lover Not Free explains more. MY ROTTEN TEETH ARE A TURNOFF DEAR DEIDRE: MY horrible teet h are scaring women away. I rarely get a second date even though I have no trouble meeting women through dating apps. I am a 36-year-old man. I go to the gym to keep myself toned. I'm not that bad looking until I open my mouth. It is so awful. I have a couple of chipped and broken teeth and some of them are discoloured and misaligned too. I will chat to women and get on well with them while we message but when we meet up, I can tell immediately that the spark isn't there for them. I am terrified of the dentist but can't carry on like this because I am totally miserable. I am ashamed and embarrassed to let anyone look in my mouth. It has gone on so long and my teeth are getting worse. I'm so ashamed and embarrassed. It really is soul-destroying. There is no need for you to suffer a minute longer. Dentists are trained to be sympathetic, not to judge you. It is important you seek professional help because this issue will only get worse. Take a look at Dental Phobia ( who have a guide Overcoming Dental Fear you can download. Think ahead and imagine how relieved you will feel when you have got the treatment you desperately need and can start to date with confidence. DEAR DEIDRE: I AM desperate to have a baby after waiting years for my husband to say he is ready for us to start a family. I am 34 and my husband is 35. We've been married for five years. A year into our marriage he agreed to try, but then when I discussed coming off The Pill with him he said to leave it a month or two. He admitted he wasn't 'quite ready'. I agreed to not mention it again for a while, but I don't understand what he is waiting for. Now a couple of years have gone by, and I am still waiting. We own a house together, our jobs are secure, and our relationship is good. I thought it would be the perfect time. My husband loves children and is brilliant with his nieces and nephews. I don't want to have a baby unless my husband wants it, too. I am trying to be understanding but my resentment is starting to drive a wedge between us. Why doesn't he want to start a family with me? DEIDRE SAYS: You are going to have to bring it up again in a calm moment because your husband is unlikely to. His attitude towards starting a family could be tied up with difficult experiences. Perhaps he had problems with his own dad and is scared that history will repeat itself? If you both want a family, it is time to start talking honestly but if he is adamant about never having children then I'm afraid you may have a difficult decision to make. HIS MUM WON'T GIVE US SPACE DEAR DEIDRE: IT appears my boyfriend's mum will always be the main woman in his life. She is like the third wheel in my relationship. I am 27 and my boyfriend is 29. We have been together for almost two years. My boyfriend was brought up by his mum after his dad died when he was only ten. As a result, he and his mum are very close, which I completely understand. However, if we go out anywhere, to the cinema, bowling alley, dinner or just for a drink, my boyfriend always calls his mum to say where we are going. It is infuriating. It has got to the stage that if we go out for the day, a trip to the seaside or an adventure park, his mum comes along too. We have just bought our first flat, which needs a lot of work so there is plenty for us to do. His mum calls every weekend to say she has some DIY she needs help with, or something has gone wrong with her car, knowing that my boyfriend will drop everything to help her. Sometimes he can be gone for the rest of the day. Recently I picked her up late from the hairdressers. She told my boyfriend that I drove too fast and almost caused an accident, which was untrue. My boyfriend went ballistic saying I had stressed her out. I am starting to feel that we are at a breaking point in our relationship. He formed a deep emotional connection with his mum, which has resulted in his loyalty towards her. You really must talk to him. Tell him that he must start putting your relationship first and then, put some boundaries in place with his mum, so he can be his own man. I would also encourage him to talk to a Cruse bereavement counsellor, which will help him deal with his dad's death too ( 0808 808 1677).
The Sun
27 minutes ago
- The Sun
Famous UK tourist attraction almost had its massive penis COVERED up after complaint that it ‘offended Christian values'
THE Home Office once suggested covering up the Cerne Abbas Giant's manhood with shrubbery. It came after a prudish member of the public complained that the 35ft chalk penis was an 'obscenity that offended Christian values'. The whiner claimed that two bishops and other religious leaders supported his view — and it forced the Home Office to raise the 'serious charge of indecency against a prehistoric monument' with the National Trust. But Cecil Yates, an official at the Home Office, added in a letter in 1932: 'What does the complainant want us to do? 'Plant a small grove of fig trees in a strategic position?' And in an official response to the moaning prude — a man called Walter Long, he said: 'The Secretary of State regrets that he cannot see his way to take any action in the matter.' The 180ft Giant — a bald, naked man with an erection and carrying a club — is etched in chalk on a hillside in Cerne Abbas, Dorset. It was created by the Anglo-Saxons in the 8th century as a tribute to god of health Helith. Mr Long's pre-war complaint was uncovered by writer and local historian Karen Heaney as she carried out research for a new book on the landmark. Karen, 64, of Netherbury, said: 'It made me smile to think the Giant was controversial even back then. "The Home Office official wasn't sure what they were expected to do about it.' In 2023, The Oxford Cheese Company caused upset by branding a vintage cheddar range with the Giant — but covering his appendage.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Brian Bond obituary: pioneering academic at war studies school
English and geography once struggled to gain acceptance as degree subjects but war studies struggled longer. In 1966 Brian Bond joined the newly formed department at King's College London (KCL) as a lecturer, giving up his more 'respectable' post in the history department at Liverpool. A department of military science had existed at KCL since the college's early years in the 19th century but it was not until 1962 that a separate, permanent department was established for the study of war and its impact on the world. Sir Michael Howard (obituary, December 2, 2019) was its founder and, thanks in the main to his support, Bond would go on to become reader and then professor of military history, writing numerous books and papers specialising in the late 19th century and the two world wars. He was first encouraged in the subject by no less a figure than Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the former Great War soldier, interwar strategist and apostle of 'the indirect approach', although perhaps studied more in Nazi Germany than in Britain. While reading history at Worcester College, Oxford, in the late 1950s, Bond met Liddell Hart at home in Buckinghamshire, where the latter had recently settled and Bond's father had become his gardener. At Oxford, Bond had elected to take the special subject paper on Napoleonic military history taught by Norman Gibbs, Chichele professor of the history of war. Liddell Hart, impressed by his gardener's son's scholarship, gave him access to his library and private papers and introduced him to visiting prominenti including Howard, who encouraged him to take an MA in war studies. This he completed in 1962 while lecturing at Exeter and then Liverpool. Brian James Bond was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1936 to Edward Bond and Olive (née Sartin). He was an early beneficiary of the 1944 (Butler) Education Act, gaining a free place at Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in 1947. Leaving school in 1954 he elected to do his two years' National Service first, rather than deferring it to take up his place at Oxford, and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. Although hardly the same as Howard's decorated active service in Italy with the Coldstream Guards, it did at least give him an insider's understanding of military culture and some credibility with serving officers looking to KCL for professional development. In 1962 he married Madeleine Joyce Carr. She died in 2023. They had no children. Bond's first book, as the editor of Victorian Military Campaigns, with each campaign written by a different historian, including Sir John Keegan, was published in 1967. Next came a serious study of the Victorian army and the staff college before two books on the Second World War and a highly regarded study of British military policy between the wars. He was disappointed not to be Liddell Hart's official biographer, the job going instead to one of his former doctoral students. Evidently Liddell Hart's widow, Kathleen, had wrongly believed that Bond had said that her husband had been a fascist. To an extent, honour was satisfied when, with the diplomatic intervention of Howard, he was allowed to write an interim study of Liddell Hart's ideas, but not touching on his life as a whole: Liddell Hart: a Study of His Military Thought (1977). Unfortunately, two reviews focused not on the book but on Liddell Hart himself — and disobligingly — which further upset his widow. Bond then turned, as eventually all British military historians must, to the First World War and in particular to the Western Front, which meant Field Marshal Haig. Undoubtedly the pendulum had swung beyond all balance with the publication in 1961 of Alan Clark's The Donkeys, a book that Howard dismissed as being almost entirely worthless. Some rebalancing was needed but Bond's revisionism was considered by many to be almost as unbalanced as Clark's diatribe. It was ironic, too, that Bond's revisionism disputed Liddell Hart's own assessment of the British high command in the First World War. One review of Haig: A Reappraisal said that Bond wrote with blinkers on: '[His] Haigiography testifies to the power of British patriotism and loyalty into which, as a British general, Haig tapped. Bond's defence of Haig's asininity horsed cavalry convictions is only exceeded by defence of Haig when he was faced by the evidence that his major push into the Somme had failed.' A later book, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History (2002), which tried to unpick the myth, as he saw it, from the 'reality', brought a sharp retort from the other side of the Atlantic that Bond was trying to 'set up traditional military history in the mansion while relegating art to the little shed out back'. Disappointed not to have become head of the war studies department, Bond knew that his strength lay principally in teaching, which he did at KCL for 35 years. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Western Ontario, visiting lecturer at the US Naval War College, visiting fellow at Brasenose and briefly at All Souls colleges, Oxford, and for 20 years was president of the British Commission for Military History. In 2001 he retired to Buckinghamshire to watch cricket, a lifelong passion, to tend his garden and to visit country houses. He was, too, a strong supporter of wildlife conservation, especially of foxes, not a species usually thought to require protection, unlike Field Marshal Haig. Brian Bond, pioneering war studies academic, was born on April 17, 1936. He died on June 2, 2025, aged 89
