Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-21
Topic: Social Welfare
Michael Farmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am sure I speak for many in your Lordships’ House when I say how pleased I was that funding for the troubled families programme was extended into this Parliament and that the Bill will create a statutory duty to report on our progress in supporting these families with multiple, highly complex problems In more than one in 10 of the original troubled families on the programme, an adult moved off benefits and into continuous employment, which was a huge achievement since, on average, troubled families in the first programme had nine serious problems to overcome. Surely I am not being too optimistic in assuming that this reporting obligation signals an intent on the part of this Government to keep helping such families in the most effective ways possible and to renew the necessary funding Although ongoing accountability and financial commitment are obviously essential, I have to confess to a nervousness about the wording of Amendment 70, which talks about, "the adequacy of resources given to local authorities" My understanding of when and why troubled families programmes have worked best is that one crucial common factor has been the wider system reform that the funds have helped to effect. In early speeches about the intent of the programme, a recurring theme was that if social services were to help families turn themselves around, this would require the service landscape in a local authority area to be no less transformed itself The Government never intended to foot the bill for business as usual but to make a contribution on a payment-by-results basis to the bigger prize of system reform. Local authorities would not get the results they needed on the per-family spend alone—indeed, the first financial framework document published in 2012 was explicit that they would get only up to 40% of the unit cost of the intensive interventions that work with this group of families. Government were priming a pump, not signing a blank cheque. This should remain the guiding principle: a level of funding that incentivises services such as the police, health and social services to work more closely together to reduce costs, not a level of funding that is adequate in isolation to fund the support provided for troubled families This brings me to Amendment 71 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor. She argues that the report should specify which types of interventions were used and which were a success or failure. But this seems to ignore the evidence that a whole system has to become relentlessly focused on supporting families across the spectrum of need if a local authority can truly be deemed to be successful. Taking an intervention-level approach runs the risk of ignoring the importance of synergy and the whole-system emphasis also seen, for example, in the way in which Ofsted is now examining the entirety of a council’s services to support children, using the single inspection framework Local authorities, such as the Isle of Wight, which have gone through profound reform, have integrated their troubled families work and funding with early years obligations, delivered through children’s centres, by forming family hubs. These help families with children right up the age range and across the spectrum of need, so are able to offer early help as well as the more intensive help typically associated with troubled families. This is highly relevant, given the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that local authorities which fail to safeguard children adequately will be taken into special measures, because that is what happened to the Isle of Wight. It was taken over by Hampshire, forced to rethink all its children’s services and make prevention of harm the watchword. It is now modelling a better offer for all families Increasingly, family hubs are the visible manifestation of a system that integrates troubled families work with full-spectrum support in a sustainable financial envelope. Surely the future lies in evidence-based interventions being locally tailored into better functioning systems. I am not convinced that reporting at the level of interventions would capture the most important learning, which is surely the priority.