All children deserve access to healthy, nutritious food from their earliest years, and ensuring parents are properly supported to feed their babies well is central to achieving this. Bremner & Co have been working with Impact on Urban Health to understand the policy landscape that shapes infant feeding and early years nutrition, identifying opportunities for change within the system.
This work has spanned three phases:
- A policy and practice landscape review of breastfeeding in England, capturing the experiences of those working in and around breastfeeding policy and exploring barriers and opportunities for change
- The resulting report was refined and finalised to be used as the basis of wider sector engagement. Practitioners, advocates and policymakers were brought together at our symposium to explore the report’s findings and collaboratively identify practical next steps for strengthening breastfeeding support across the UK.
- The final phase was focussed on strengthening the collective voice of the sector
Building on the initial phases of work, Bremner & Co were commissioned to convene organisations to co-produce a shared vision for breastfeeding and infant feeding. The aim was to leave a strong legacy for the sector that supports ongoing advocacy work and engagement with policymakers.
Our Approach
Our approach began with desk research to map the existing policy asks of key advocacy groups, identify shared aims, and assess the degree to which these aligned with the government’s current missions. This was a live and evolving policy space, with major announcements including Best Start in Life, the 10 Year Plan for England and the National Food Strategy. As a result, our analysis was adapted to evaluate how each development addressed, or left gaps in, sector priorities.
Alongside this, we held one-to-one conversations with 10 representatives from 8 leading breastfeeding advocacy organisations and expert bodies. These conversations allowed us to explore each stakeholder’s appetite for engagement in broader sector collaboration and helped us understand what collaboration might look like in practice.
We engaged local authority representatives to understand the perspectives of those involved in the delivery of policy, to understand the conditions needed for national support to be effective and get their view on tangible policy opportunities that could support the vision.
Finally, we facilitated a collaborative process with leading advocacy groups and academia to explore where their priorities converged. Through careful facilitation, consultation and evidence gathering, it became clear that there was genuine momentum for progress and real potential to align efforts across the sector.
Key Outcomes
The central output of this phase was a shared vision for breastfeeding and infant feeding support in the UK, developed in collaboration with and endorsed by key stakeholders from 17 breastfeeding organisations. The vision reflects the themes that emerged most consistently throughout our engagement with the sector and is grounded in the evidence and practitioner insight gathered across all three phases of the project. It calls for:
- Equity focussed support: Ensuring that all families, regardless of background or circumstance, are protected from discrimination, misinformation and commercial pressures.
- High quality support: Providing independent, evidence-based guidance and access to compassionate, expert care from skilled practitioners, trained peers and healthcare professionals.
- Enabling environments: Creating settings that normalise and create a safe space for breastfeeding.
- Resilient, community-based systems: Strengthening local services that sustain parents and families.
- National commitment: Calling for Government leadership on delivering world-class breastfeeding and infant support, in collaboration with organisations that have recognised expertise.
Breastfeeding and infant feeding is a sensitive and value-laden area of policy. Bringing a diverse group of organisations into alignment required careful facilitation and sustained engagement. That the sector arrived at a unified statement of ambition after such a short period reflects a genuine collective commitment to change. This also led us to reflect on 8 key principles to effective convening to ground our work going forward.
The vision gives the sector a positive, forward-looking foundation from which to engage confidently with policymakers, and a common reference point around which ongoing advocacy efforts can be coordinated. Ultimately, it strengthens the sector’s hand in calling on national government to create the conditions in which every family can access the support they need to meet their breastfeeding and infant feeding goals.
Infant feeding is a deeply personal and emotive issue, and bringing the sector together around a shared vision really needs care, empathy, and understanding. Bremner & Co approached this with a thoughtful and flexible mindset, shaping each stage of the project in response to stakeholder feedback and the changing environment. It is clear how much care, dedication, and genuine commitment they brought to the work, always focused on making sure the project achieved its goals. A special thank you to Cressida Pidgeon, whose warm, positive, and compassionate approach to engaging stakeholders made a real difference throughout.
Carole Coulon, Portfolio Manager, Impact on Urban Health
Our Services
This project demonstrates Bremner & Co’s ability to navigate complex and contentious policy areas, bringing a diverse range of stakeholders to the table to work towards collective change.
Acting as a trusted, independent facilitator, we created the conditions for different voices to be heard and helped to establish common ground. This required careful attention to language, framing and neutral facilitation to ensure a balanced and collaborative process.
In an evolving policy landscape, we stayed on the pulse of emerging developments and the shifting priorities of the organisations we worked with, continuously adapting our approach to ensure the work remained relevant and actionable. The result was a shared platform for ongoing government engagement: a vision to guide future work and sustain impact beyond the life of the project.
We help organisations find common ground, align their efforts, and advocate with a stronger collective voice. Talk to us about how we can support your work.
