Comment on Troubled Families report leak

Commenting on the leak of the independent Troubles Families evaluation, described as ‘damning’ of the project by a senior civil servant, our Deputy Director, Will McMahon, said:

‘It is no surprise that the government has done its level best to sit on the findings of the independent evaluation. With £400 million spent and another £900 million in the budget, the Troubled Families programme is a huge waste of public money.’

‘As concerning, is that in May 2015, the government published figures purporting to show that local authorities had ‘turned around’ 99 per cent of ‘troubled families’, a figure questioned by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in a report published in November last year. The 99 per cent figure now sits uneasily alongside the claims of a senior civil servant that the evaluation shows the strategy had ‘no discernible effect’.

‘There is an urgent need for the Public Accounts Committee and the Communities and Local Government Local Select Committee to investigate why £1.3 billion of public money has been spent on a strategy that has had no impact on any of its key objectives, and why the government felt able to claim a 99 per cent success rate’