The Troubled Families team was a rare winner in the spending review. Richard Welbirg learns how they’ll spend it
Amid the slicing and dicing of June's spending round, one of the prime minister’s pet projects was not just spared the knife, but handed a substantial bundle of extra cash.
The Troubled Families team, launched by David Cameron personally in December 2011 and headed by social issues troubleshooter Louise Casey, will see an extra £200m added to its existing £448m, three-year funding pot in 2015-16. There are, of course, strings attached: the team will have to expand its coverage from the current 120,000 families to 400,000 within the next four years – always assuming that the post-2015 government opts to continue the programme.
Speaking to CSW at Civil Service Live in London last month, the team’s deputy director Ian Brady (pictured above) said: “We’re now going to spend the next few months looking at what we have learned from this cohort of families and [asking]: where are we going to go next?”
Such a large increase in target families will mean a significant change to the team’s working practices. While its work currently focuses on turning around the most serious problem families – with local authorities paid by results to achieve targets on employment, crime and school attendance – the programme will now aim to catch families before they reach ‘troubled’ status.
There is already a two-pronged approach, explains Brady, with a number of the Troubled Families team members working “upstream” with councils to change their approach, as well as directly with the families. It’s the former that will be key to scaling up.
Brady has been impressed by the councils which have already changed practices to become more family-oriented. In Durham, frontline workers have been retrained to consider services from a family perspective. Manchester’s ‘M People’ programme has a similar aim. In Sheffield, says Brady, “everybody who’s employed in the council has to have a minimum set of attributes that means they can work with these families.” Sheffield’s council has scrapped a number of posts and replaced them with a single family intervention officer.
It is hard getting the current local hotchpotch of single-issue agencies and officers to think about the totality of services needed by problem families, but this approach represents the best practice and should be followed by other councils, argues Brady: “Maybe if some of those workers [PCSOs, education officers etc] took a more family-centred approach, then you’d be able to get to a bigger group of families.”
He is also looking forward to increasing the integration of the Troubled Families programme with the social security system, and is heartened by the secondment of 150 Jobcentre Plus staff to work within the programme across the country. By August, he says, 94 councils will have between one and six additional workers lending their support.
Given the coalition’s fresh backing for the scheme, Brady was very positive about its future. But when asked what happens to families who are successfully “turned around”, he sounded a note of warning. Councils must maintain some contact with all these families, he warned: they mustn’t be ignored again.
“At the very high end, people work with these families for 12-18 months,” he said. “For some of the ones that need less intervention, you’re doing the work in 3-6 months. Ideally the family gets turned around and that’s it – but it doesn’t happen in every case.”