Experts call for revamped Troubled Families scheme to focus on poverty

The government's Troubled Families programme has been refreshed under the new name Supporting Families a decade after it was first launched by former Prime Minister David Cameron.

More than £1.5bn has been ploughed into the programme since its creation following the summer 2011 youth riots, with government analysis showing it has supported more than 500,000 families over a decade with issues like generational joblessness, antisocial behaviour and school truanting.

However, the scheme has been dogged by criticism – that the name was stigmatising, the payment-by-results funding model encouraged “gaming” of the system and whether outcomes were sustained once local authority support workers stepped back.

Here, experts question if the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has learned from its mistakes when designing the revamped programme.

Supporting Families

When the Troubled Families programme was introduced, sector leaders questioned whether the name shifted blame onto families struggling with patterns of youth crime, long-term unemployment, teenage pregnancy and substance abuse.

In a speech in 2019, then Communities Secretary James Brokenshire said the name “obscures as much as it enlightens”.

“At its worst, it points an accusing finger at people who are already isolated, and says to them: ‘You are the ‘others’ and not like the rest of us’,” he said.

However, announcing the name change to Supporting Families, the government says this is to “reflect what it does in principle and in practice” rather than to move away from perceived stigmatisation of vulnerable families.

MHCLG has also announced plans to improve multi-agency working to support vulnerable families, update eligibility and outcomes frameworks, and introduce a new £7.9m fund to improve local authorities' use of data to support families (see below).

Charlotte Ramsden, president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), says the move towards a focus on supporting families is “welcome” and is “the beginning of a long-term commitment by government” to working preventatively with families.

But experts say that without addressing the relationship between levels of deprivation and child welfare interventions, revamping the scheme will not go far enough to support families.

Stephen Crossley, associate professor of sociology at Durham University, says while the focus on family “wasn't particularly wrong”, there were concerns around “stigmatising these groups who were already struggling and living in and on the edge of poverty”.

He raises questions over the changing scope of the scheme from “turning around” the lives of families, through seeing them make “significant and sustained progress” to “building resilient families” and “driving reforms across public services”.

Crossley says: “What we have is a government that does not create policy around families – families were not mentioned once in this year's Queen's Speech or in the Spending Review. Without that drive from government to want to fix these underlying issues, you can't keep moving the goalposts to get results if the underlying structure isn't there.”

John Redhill, a researcher at the Nuffield Foundation, says the reformed programme overlooks the role of deprivation and poverty in tipping families into vulnerability.

“There is strong, growing evidence on the relationship between poverty, inequality, abuse and child welfare interventions during early childhood,” he adds.

Outcomes

The Troubled Families programme operated as two distinct tranches running from 2012 to 2015 and 2015 to 2021.

The first phase of the scheme aimed to “turn around” 120,000 families in England. Government figures state 116,654 of the 117,000 identified families had achieved this outcome by May 2015.

However, in 2016, the Commons public accounts committee said the term “turned around” was “misleading” as the outcomes measured were short term, leading the MHCLG to adopt a new evaluation process.

According to the final annual report for the Troubled Families programme, between 2015 and 2021, it saw 401,719 “successful family outcomes”.

In its 2018/19 annual report, the government states that the scheme helped cut:

the proportion of children on the programme going into care by one third

the proportion of adults on the programme going to prison by one quarter

juvenile convictions by 15 per cent

the number of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance by 10 per cent.

However, experts have raised concerns over the way in which success is measured.

Crossley says the large reductions “actually relate to small numbers of families on the programme”.

“Only 1.7 per cent of families on the programme had a child in care between 19 and 24 months after being on the programme, compared to 2.5 per cent of families in a control group,” he says. “The headline figure of a ‘one-third’ drop is technically correct, but this relates to very small numbers of children on the programme.”

He adds that, similarly, small cohorts had been used to measure conviction rates and unemployment, while the report states the programme made “no statistically significant change” to levels of health and domestic abuse.

“The programme actually appears very unsuccessful in meeting its goals, but the figures look impressive based on a small group affected by a particular issue compared to a control group,” he says.

However, David Halpen, chief executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, suggests that the programme enables children to stay out of care through greater use of tools like child protection plans.

In 2018/19, 9.8 per cent of children on the Troubled Families programme were placed on child protection plans within six months compared with 6.1 per cent of children in a control group.

In an analysis, published in 2019, Halpen states: “In essence, the troubled families' key workers seemed to help the families do a better job, and hence keep the kids in the family rather than ending up in care. It wasn't easy. A tell-tale sign is the surge in child protection plans that are put in place in the troubled family group in the first year of the programme, but how these ultimately seem to bear fruit.”

Crossley is sceptical. He says that while carrying out research on the programme, he spoke to support workers “who are doing great work but don't believe in the programme, as they're not seeing the outcomes”.

He says that due to the short-term focus of the programme, it was difficult to obtain data to establish if it had any impact once work with troubled families staff stopped.

TROUBLED FAMILIES

• £1.53bn amount spent on the scheme over a decade
• 518,719 number of families supported 2011-2021
• £1,800 current funding per family
• £165m budget for Supporting Families programme in 2021/22

Funding

Over the past decade, £1.53bn has been invested into the programme.

Funding has been made available to councils through a payment-by-results (PbR) model. However, an evaluation of the scheme by Ipsos Mori Social Research Institute, carried out in 2020, found that funding had dropped from £4,000 per family in 2011 to £1,800 in the second phase of the scheme between 2015 and 2020 – funding was extended to March 2021 due to the political upheaval caused by Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.

This PbR model initially sparked concerns that families most likely to achieve “success” through the scheme would be chosen to be supported by it.

Crossley says this remains “a big concern” due to deep cuts to early intervention services in local authorities totalling £1.5bn over the past decade. Such cuts have also led to concerns over the programme funding the delivery of existing early help services.

The ADCS's most recent Safeguarding Pressures Phase 7 report finds that “funding for the Troubled Families programme continues to prop up the delivery of early help in children's services”.

It states that one-third of councils that took part in the research “experienced no change in funding, partly due to the continuation of the Troubled Families Grant”.

Despite concerns over funding for the programme being used to facilitate existing projects, the government states that “the funding was never intended to cover the full cost of providing local services to families, but to act as a strategic investment, enabling local systems to operate in a different way and, in doing so, maximise the value of local family services”.

In its policy paper on the reformed Supporting Families programme, it adds that the PbR model will not change before 2022 while MHCLG works with councils to “co-design” the new scheme.

The ADCS's Ramsden has described the funding as “much needed extra investment” that “has been a vital part of the early help offer for a majority of local authorities” and that its continuation “will undoubtedly help improve the lives of many children and families”.

However, Crossley says that without a focus on poverty, mental ill-health and domestic violence, these families are going to be helped only short term while they are on the programme.

“We need systematic change instead of a name change,” he adds. “The Troubled Families programme has never had the structure to address underlying issues, so it was always doomed to fail.”

While little is known about the focus of the new programme, it appears authorities may be given the option to have their say on a vital funding scheme that delivers early support to the most vulnerable families.

SUPPORTING FAMILIES PROGRAMME

The government has so far announced very little about the reformed scheme other than the change of name in a bid to “reflect what it does in principle and in practice” with a budget of £165m in 2021/22.

In its “vision for change” for Supporting Families, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government says it “will build vulnerable families' resilience by providing effective, whole-family support to help prevent escalation into statutory services” and “level up every local area to the standard of the best”.

It has also announced a new £7.9m Data Accelerator Fund “to improve how councils use data to support families, including by providing key workers with the information they need”.

However, the government has also said it will not change the structure or funding model of the programme during 2022 to allow the opportunity for councils to co-design and test “future improvements to the programme”.