Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-21
Topic: Social Welfare
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, Amendment 70, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, seeks to require the Government to report on the adequacy of the funds provided to local authorities to support troubled families. We believe that the best way to judge the adequacy of the funding will be in the outcomes that the programme achieves. Our report will ensure that the Government remain transparent in publishing the progress made by families supported by the programme. This amendment, therefore, is not necessary The Government have committed to funding the new, expanded troubled families programme. In the spending review 2015, funding of £720 million was allocated for the remaining four years. Of course, the new programme also aims to incentivise local authorities to reprioritise existing resources to achieve better outcomes for families with multiple problems. These families are known to local services and money is already spent on them As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, there is pressure on funding for children’s services, but we have actually seen local authorities maintaining relatively stable funding in these areas. However, we completely understand that there is pressure, and that is why we are also providing additional resources to change the way services respond to these families to achieve better outcomes As a number of noble Lords have said, funding for the new troubled families programme is available to local authorities in three ways. They are provided with a service transformation grant to transform their services and collect evidence for the national evaluation; they receive attachment fees of £1,000, as mentioned, for each family that they agree to work with; and they are able to claim an £800 results payment once one of these families achieves significant and sustained progress Of course, noble Lords will be well aware that the real financial prize, as a number of noble Lords have said, is the long-term change that we make to these families’ lives. It is not the money provided by central government, but the cost savings that can be delivered through redesigning their services to deliver better results for complex families with multiple problems and to see those families take control of their lives and move forward. We would certainly expect, as the noble Baroness suggested, local authorities to work together when a family moves from one area to another. It is both in the local authorities’ interest and in the family’s interest, so we would expect the sharing of information The programme has been designed to incentivise local services to reprioritise their money and front-line resources away from reactive services towards more integrated, targeted interventions to offer better outcomes for families with high-cost, multiple problems. By responding more effectively to the issues that these families face, the burden placed on local services can be reduced for the long term It is also important to remember that we are talking about a programme that has a track record of success. As the noble Baroness said, the original programme achieved success with about 116,000 families struggling with a multitude of problems. This could not have been achieved if the right services had not been in place. As with the original programme, the Government have asked local authorities to provide information that will enable us to assess its impact. This includes understanding what is being spent on families and the savings that are being achieved through local cost-benefit analysis. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked whether this would increase the burden on local authorities. We do not believe that it will, because local authorities have already agreed to supply this information as part of the national evaluation of the expanded programme. Furthermore, they themselves receive valuable analyses of the programmes to help them drive improvement to their services Amendment 71, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, seeks to require the report of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to include information on the types of interventions families receive and whether they are successful. DCLG has always recommended that families should be supported through a whole-family approach to achieve positive outcomes, but it does not mandate a specific type of intervention. This is because we believe that, to work effectively, local authorities need the flexibility to adapt their approach to their local area and to each family they work with. There are no set or standard interventions that are universally applied by or across local authorities: each intervention is specific to each family. Given this necessary flexibility, the effectiveness of the programme will be measured through the outcomes it achieves with families rather than the individual intervention that it uses The duty to report, as it stands, already ensures that the Government are held to account on the effectiveness of the programme through publishing annual information on the progress made by families. To make progress, families will have received effective support from local authorities and their partners. The report will include information on this It may also be worth noble Lords noting that the report Parliament will receive annually on the troubled families programme will be based on the national evaluation of the expanded programme and the payment by results achieved by local authorities. The national evaluation will provide information about the progress of families against the six headline problems that the programme seeks to address The noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, asked about data matching, which was used by local authorities in the original programme in relation to outcomes. They used data sets to track and monitor the progress of families. However, the fact that they used data in this way should not imply a lack of support for families. Every family that it was claimed had been turned around made real progress following support from local services. This is checked through the councils’ internal audit process before they can claim a results payment On the Guardian report that the noble Baroness mentioned, that was based on something of a misunderstanding of the programme. The programme certainly encourages services to join up and offer better support for families with multiple problems through redesigning their approach to providing support, and we advocated a family-style intervention approach, but that is not the only approach. The Guardian looked only at a certain subsection of families who achieved support through the programme in this particular way, rather than the large number of families helped through a whole variety of different approaches On the basis of the information I have provided, I ask noble Lords to withdraw Amendment 70 and not move Amendment 71.