UK Gov't Wasting Millions on Dodgy 'Troubled Families Program' - Report

Following violence in cities across the UK sparked by the fatal shooting of a young black man by police in London, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said: "I don't doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighborhoods where it's standard for children to have a mum and not a dad?

"For years we've had a system that encourages the worst in people — that incites laziness, that excuses bad behavior… discourages hard work, above all that drains responsibility from people."

"Now that the riots have happened I will make sure that we clear away the red tape and the bureaucratic wrangling, and put rocket boosters under this program," Cameron said. 

So, the Troubled Families Program (TFP) was set up to help 120,000 families in England by 2015. According to the government, the scheme was on target and 99 percent of families identified as 'troubled' had turned their lives around. The government has since decided to extend it to 2020 allocating US$303 million (£200m) of funding to help 400,000 more families.

How it works, the TFP pays councils to work directly with families in their borough, who are behaving anti-socially, committing crime, skipping school and where the parent lives on work benefits.

Each local authority is allowed to choose which family to engage with and allocates a key worker who offers support, counseling and advice — in return the parents must agree to take charge of unruly children and stop them truanting. But according to a report scrutinizing the TFP, councils could just "make up the numbers." 

And that's not all, 'The Troubled Families Program: The Perfect Social Policy?' report accuses the government of wasting millions of pounds, working with the wrong families and using dodgy research data that mixes families experiencing problems with those seen to be causing trouble.

Claims by the government that 120,000 of the most disadvantaged and excluded families have turned their lives around in three years, is a "remarkably short period of time," according to the report published by the Center for Crime and Justice:

"All of this has occurred against a backdrop of cuts to local services and welfare reforms, which have hit not just families but also the very organizations and councils that deliver services to them."

Freedom of information requests submitted by London newspaper The Guardian to all councils taking part in the scheme reveal that only 79,000 families were turned around through "family intervention" and more than 8,000 families were claimed to have been turned around despite not receiving any family intervention.

Meanwhile, the government claims the program has had a 99 percent success rate and saves the British taxpayer US$16,900 (£11,200) per family. Claims — the report suggests — are too good to be true.

The report's author, Stephen Crossley from Durham University said:

"The report traces the history of the program and questions claims of success made by government and their problematic use of data. Quite simply, the reported successes of the Troubled Families Program are too good to be true and require closer public and political scrutiny that they have received to date."

The report questions whether taxpayers money should be used to further support a program accused of hyping its own success.

Will McMahon, Deputy Director at the Center for Crime and Justice Studies believes "the Troubled Families program is itself deeply troubling.

"Its claims to success of lives turned around and savings made — are not credible. There is a crying need for this program to be subjected to proper scrutiny. 

"Parliament should investigate the Troubled Families Program and the government's misleading claims about its success as a matter of urgency."

But according to a TFP spokesman: "All the evidence is rigorously audited and each claims made by a local authority represents measured improvements."