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Troubled Families latest

shawn mach
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New Public Accounts Committee report today -

The Committee concludes the Government overstated the programme’s success through its use of terminology and the method used to estimate financial savings to the taxpayer.

Families were considered ‘turned around’ on the basis of short-term outcomes rather than “long-term, sustainable change in families’ lives”, says the Committee, while £1.2 billion of claimed savings was an overstatement.

An official evaluation of the programme was “unable to find consistent evidence” the Troubled Families programme had any significant impact.

More @ http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news-parliament-2015/troubled-families-report-published-16-17/

Plus Guardian report: Government misled public with 99% success rate claim on troubled families, say MPs

 

Paul_Treloar_AgeUK
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Previous thread on this Social Impact Bonds for troubled families scheme

Excoriating blog from Jonathon Portes on the sorry shambles Troubled Families - anatomy of a policy disaster

neilbateman
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Dodgy statistics used by civil servants and politicians to justify flawed and unworkable policies (AKA policy based evidence).  Why are we surprised? 

John Birks
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It is well worth reading the comments -

“The qualitative evaluation has plenty of examples of good work, good practice etc. My criticism is of the targets/funding model.”

“....as someone who works for a local authority in London and has some closeness to TFP your assessment is entirely consistent with my experience. Its a highly convoluted means of funding Council’s children’s services departments”

Poor behaviour always comes down to ‘targets’ and ‘rewards.’

Paul_Treloar_AgeUK
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Others have said elsewhere why the programme was manna from heaven for cash-strapped local authorities, and also pointed to some good work done as a result. However, any programme claiming 100% success would be dubious but when you tie £‘s to results in the way that it did, that was always going to be a likely outcome.

As an aside (a rather long aside admittedly), this essay in the London Review of Books is worth a read to understand the scale and the magnitude of cuts to liocal authority budgets and the knock-on effects on services The Strange Death of Municipal England - the proper scary bit, this is going to continue for the foreseeable future.

John Birks
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I don’t think anyone is going to be stopping those changes too soon due to the changes in society and the prolonged lack of widespread economic growth with the current model (1970’s.)

On the subject of targets.

I had a colleague who claimed a 100% success with appeals for years.

Everyone’s a winner.

Mike Hughes
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John Birks - 21 December 2016 09:52 AM

I don’t think anyone is going to be stopping those changes too soon due to the changes in society and the prolonged lack of widespread economic growth with the current model (1970’s.)

On the subject of targets.

I had a colleague who claimed a 100% success with appeals for years.

Everyone’s a winner.

Do we not all have a colleague or know of an advice service which claims 100% success? It comes with the territory surely :) There’s always one, often more.

I take great pleasure in trolling such claims on Twitter as any agency dumb enough to express such a thing out loud is absolutely dumb enough to do so on social media and you have a ready made audience who will lap it up and then be absolutely outraged when someone like me comes along and points out what’s really going on. It’s a good way of explaining what good advice should look like.

Over 30 years I would reckon my success rate is about 70/30 and I am probably over-estimating that. The whole point of being a rights-based WRO is surely to ensure that the law, caselaw and guidance is interpreted correctly rather than just support people whose claims or appeals fall within the range of current (and possibly wholly wrong) interpretations.

neilbateman
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I have always been a critic of the TFP.  It was a fig leaf to cover the scale of cuts in local authority, social security and other welfare state spending while also feeding the rightwing stereotype of the dangerous underclass.

TFP was based on a completely false statistical correlation by taking several indicators of long term poverty and concluding that where families scored on those indicators, they were troubled, responsible for much crime and anti-social behaviour.  Moreover, the scale of poverty has of course worsened in recent years, so even if the approach as sound, it was being undermined by welfare reform.  Bodies such as CPAG have been making such criticism since TFP was first mooted.

Apart from being methodologically flawed, this is actually really offensive.  Countless families living in poverty and without work bring their children up to be good, well-behaved citizens who avoid breaking the law.

As someone who has spent their entire working life (now getting on for 40 years) with people on very low incomes, I have experienced this first hand and actually the clients who could be described as fitting the stereotype of long term jobless, poor and also involved in crime and anti-social behaviour have been a small minority.  However, those who are so involved, tend to stand out which can amplify the issue.

I have also encountered many people who are not poor who have behaved in an obnoxious anti-social manner - like the drunk forty something professional who recently threatened to hit me after I challenged his loud, public homophobic comments.

[ Edited: 21 Dec 2016 at 10:55 am by neilbateman ]
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This has been going on for as long as I can remember.

Back in 2000 I was one of two welfare rights advisers employed as part of the very first Sure Start programme, on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark. The ‘success’ of that pilot was then the basis for the programme to be rolled out across the UK.

In the years that followed I lost count of the number of times I heard Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt, Hazel Blears etc appear on Newsnight or the Today programme and claim that Sure Start had helped X number of hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty. This was nonsense.

Whilst Sure Start undoubtedly did some very good work, and I don’t doubt the positive impact we had on the finances of the families we worked with, no statistics were collected that could even begin to justify those claims. What we were required to provide in our monthly reports were;

- the number of lone parent families we had worked with
- the number of families we had worked with where no-one was employed
- the number of ethnic minority families we had worked with
- the numbers of children in each family we’d worked with
- the number of children under 5 in families we’d worked with

and so on. These figures were then passed on the national Sure Start unit - and they produced the government statistics. Every Sure Start programme was required to report the same stuff.

Nowhere were we required to provide information on the number of benefit claims made, the number awarded or what those claims migt be worth financially.

Paul_Treloar_AgeUK
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That’s all right, they’re also cutting hundreds of SureStart centres as we speak, as noted in the LRB essay I linked to above.

Councils are also closing Sure Start children’s centres, one of New Labour’s most successful innovations. Designed to mitigate the effects of inequality as early in life as possible, the centres provide sessions with midwives and health visitors, ‘stay and play’ sessions, and other educational activities for families. A government-commissioned report, sneaked out last Christmas, found that ‘children’s centres can have positive effects on [social] outcomes, especially on family functioning that affects the quality of parenting, and that children’s centres are highly valued by parents’. Unsurprisingly, it also recorded that the most effective operations had growing budgets. Although more than a million families (and rising) use their services, there will soon be 736 fewer Sure Start centres than in 2010; those that remain have been subject to year-on-year budget cuts: 2300 centres had their funding reduced in 2015.