0300 0300 363
Our Helpline is available from 9am - 10pm Monday - Friday and from 10am - 3pm at weekends.
On Monday - Friday, between the hours of 6 pm and 10 pm, we provide more specialised support. At these times, the helpline is staffed by FNF volunteers who have experience of some of the problems that you might be facing. They may able to give you information that will enable you to progress your situation or simply to listen if you want a sympathetic ear. Outside of these hours, our calls are taken by the charity Family Lives, whose Helpliners are trained by Family Lives and receive additional material and training from FNF on how to respond to our service users. FNF internal Helpline volunteers are recruited from within the FNF membership, and receive training from FNF as well as the Telephone Helplines Association.
We receive a large number of calls and it can sometimes be difficult to get through. Our average call length is 45 minutes so please try to leave a gap between your attempts. Please keep trying.
Callers can leave a message on our weekday evening service and they should receive a callback from our volunteers, usually within 24 hours.
Please note: The Helpline is often extremely busy and very occasionally for technical reasons your message may occasionally be lost - so if we don't call you back, we're sorry and please try again and/or leave another message.
If you would prefer to talk to someone face-to-face - which we recommend, you might wish to consider going to one of our branch meetings in your area.
If you would like to find out more about the FNF services available to you as a member, see Join Us.
Important: Our helpliners cannot and must not advise on where to obtain legal advice by recommending solicitors, McKenzie Friends or themselves for any work outside the helpline and branches. FNF does NOT recommend any practitioners as our services are intended to offer direct support only. Any attempts by a helpliner to recommend firms or individuals should be reported immediately to fnf@fnf.org.uk.
Becoming a Helpline Volunteer
FNF is always seeking to welcome new helpline volunteers.
Whether you have received support from FNF in the past and would like to help others in the same way, or whether you're just keen to support people in need, FNF can you offer you training and support to become a helpline volunteer.
To discuss volunteering on the helpline please contact fnf@fnf.org.uk. We will be happy to support you in becoming part of the team.
To find out how else you could offer your help to FNF please visit the Volunteer section on this website.
Our record over the two years to Feb 2015
These stats include the calls answered by our partner Family Lives outside the hours of 6pm to 10pm on weekdays. They cover a total of very roughly 200,000 minutes' worth of calls.
Numbers calling are not unique – ie several calls may have been received from any given number.
This should be seen as a very rough guide only – partly because we also return many calls (not included above) and also because about 23,000 of the total calls are longer than 30 seconds (our criterion for being an answered call). Of the latter about 19,000 were answered by Family Lives on our behalf and about 4,000 calls which on average is 167 calls/month out of 958 calls/month over the period.
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