Casey defends Troubled Families programme

Questioned by the public accounts committee, Dame Louise Casey, who led the programme for three years from late 2011, said findings from an evaluation report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research had been "misrepresented" by academics.

The NIESR report, published earlier this week, found that across a wide range of outcomes such as employment, benefit receipt, school attendance, safeguarding and child welfare, it was "unable to find consistent evidence that the programme had any significant or systematic impact".

But Casey told MPs that she had been "frustrated" by the "extraordinary negative publicity" of the programme following the release of the report.

She said important caveats in the research about how progress had been measured under the programme had not been fully explained.

"Lots of comments made by those closely involved in the evaluation have been unedifying," she said.

"If I'm blunt, in the last couple of days they have misrepresented their own research by not putting the caveats in the public domain.

"I accept the findings of the research - that the changes in these families you can't directly attribute to the programme.

"My frustration is that we haven't had a chance to put the record straight."

Ministers have claimed the vast majority of the 120,000 families initially worked with under the programme have been successfully "turned around", creating savings of £1.2bn.

But the committee, which is holding an inquiry into the programme, questioned these claims in light of the latest research.

"Did we oversell and under deliver? The answer to that honestly is no," said Casey.

"Did we change the lives of 116,000 families? Yes, we did.

"The impact on these families was monumental. What the research says we can't prove is that we can attribute them to the Troubled Families programme."

Under the Troubled Families programme, introduced in 2012 with £448m of government funding, councils are paid up to £4,000 to work with each family, with the amount of cash they receive being based on results.

Since then, a further £900m has been committed to the initiative so it can work with an additional 400,000 troubled families by 2020.