PM: £448m to help problem families

Dec 15 2011

The Government will spend £448 million on "turning around the lives" of 120,000 problem families, David Cameron has announced.

In a speech to charities, the Prime Minister said ministers were setting up a national network of "trouble-shooters" to tackle the country's hard core of chaotic households that cost taxpayers £9bn a year.

He pledged to reform the system that means a "string of well-meaning, disconnected officials" treat the "symptoms and not the causes" in difficult families. Instead, there will be a "clear hard-headed recognition" of where families are going wrong.

Local authorities must identify who the troubled families are in their area and what services they use by February.

Councils will have to put up 60% of the cash needed to help them and the Government will stump up the remaining 40%, Mr Cameron said.

He added: "We need to provide leadership at the top, action in local authorities and results on the ground. We're not prescribing a single response. But we are demanding results from councils in return for support.

"For many of the most troubled families, there will be a family worker - a single point of contact for the first time for particular families, working out what the family needs, where the waste is and lining up the right services at the right time."

Mr Cameron said last December that he wanted to "turn round every troubled family in the country" by the end of the current Parliament and in October appointed Louise Casey as the head of a new Troubled Families Team.

But the summer riots "were a wake-up call", he said, "not a freak incident but a boiling over of problems that had been simmering for years".

Mr Cameron said a targeted approach can "work wonders" with families. He added: "People in troubled families aren't worthless or pre-programmed to fail. I won't allow them to be written off. So we must get out there, help them turn their lives around and heal the scars of the broken society."