PM's flagship scheme not reaching three quarters of troubled families

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/15/david-cameron-flagship-scheme-troubled-families

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Three quarters of troubled families "turned around" under a scheme initiated by the prime minister are still committing crime, without jobs and have children who remain excluded from school, according to local government data obtained by Hilary Benn, the shadow secretary of state for communities and local government.

Despite David Cameron's pledge to fix by 2015 the lives of 120,000 families beset by chaotic lifestyles, unemployment and poor health – estimated to cost the country £9bn a year – freedom of information requests made by Benn revealed that the government's flagship scheme has failed to help many of the households.

Data from 133 councils out of the 152 participating in the scheme found that almost one in seven families that had been "turned around" were either still on drugs, had children missing from school or involved in criminal acts.

Another 60% of households deemed to have been successfully helped by the scheme in March still had adults on unemployment benefits after leaving the programme.

In Bradford, more than 100 of the 893 families whose lives have been "rescued" were still committing crime. Nearby Leeds saw one in seven chaotic households still had children excluded from school after going through the scheme.

In England's biggest local authority, Birmingham, the council reported that 1,154 families had been "turned around" yet 93% of those were still living on unemployment benefits .

There also appears to be a large discrepancy between the numbers of troubled families that councils found living within their areas and what Whitehall set as the maximum amount of households it would help under the scheme. On average, each council claimed to have found 812 troubled families, 20% more than the amount central government had estimated.

For some councils this has meant that the money made available to tackle troubled families falls far short of the identified need. Local authorities get £3,000 for finding a troubled family and getting them enlisted for help and another £1,000 for "turning their lives around".

In Labour-controlled Manchester, the local authority said there were 2,200 more households that should be helped because they fell into the bottom 2% of society, but the government would not fund the £9m to deal with them. In Tory-run Kent, the council estimated that it needed funding to deal with 960 more cases than the government had allotted.

The troubled families programme was launched by Cameron as a "big society" response to the riots in England in 2011. With £1.3bn of public money devoted to the scheme, it was the largest coalition anti-poverty programme that would, in Cameron's own words, "heal the scars of the broken society".

With just a year of the programme to run, the data shows that local authorities have on average "turned around" just 267 families each, which is 33% of the number councils have found. The programme is more than two years into its three year lifetime.

Benn said that he strongly supported the programme, but there were concerns that there appeared to be more families that need help than Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) initially calculated. "It would have been better to assess need and then allocate resources," he said.

The biggest problem, said Benn, was that the government's Work Programme had failed to deliver jobs to the poorest people in society: "It is worrying that so many families remain mired in worklessness. Being in a job helps increase family income, gives a sense of pride to the individual and inspires their children as to what is possible if they work hard and put in the effort. That's one of the reasons why we want to devolve the failed government Work Programme, so it can be joined up at local level with precisely this kind of work."

Claire McNeil, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research said: "The big failure is that the government has not systematically asked local authorities to collect how large the savings are from running the programme."

When it worked, she said, that the institute's work had shown the scheme can make big savings. "Across Greater Manchester, authorities supporting troubled families could generate cost savings across public services of £224m".

The DCLG said: "The programme is making good progress with some of the hardest to help families in the country. To be classed as turned around does not mean that these families, who usually have very complex needs, have had their problems solved overnight.

"It means that they have children who were regularly truant or excluded back in school for three consecutive terms, any youth crime committed is down by a third and antisocial behaviour across the household is down by 60%. Or alternatively that they have an adult who was on benefits back in work for three consecutive months. These are significant improvements that will have a lasting impact for families with multiple problems that were not effectively dealt with before.

"Councils of all colours right across England deserve praise for having already helped 40,000 of these families in such a substantial way. And with over 111,000 families identified for help and 97,000 being worked with, these results will continue to improve over the next 12 months."