Andrew Gwynne – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Communities and Local Government

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andrew Gwynne on 2016-10-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many families in (a) England, (b) Greater Manchester, (c) Tameside and (d) Stockport have been identified as challenging and are subject to persistent visits under the Troubled Families programme.

Mr Marcus Jones

In Stockport, the local authority achieved outcomes with 565 families in the first Troubled Families Programme; in Tameside with 620 families; in Greater Manchester with 8,090 families. Across England local authorities achieved outcomes overall with 116,654 families. We expected that local authorities would work with more families than they claimed results for in order to achieve their targets.

In the new programme, Greater Manchester, including Stockport and Tameside, is delivering the programme as a whole. Greater Manchester has engaged 13,228 families in the new programme so far; across England, 164,481 families have been engaged.

The programme promoted but did not mandate a whole family intervention approach. It was not appropriate to do so: all local authorities are different, and the problems faced by each local authority and each family are different. The intensity of the intervention, and the number of visits made by key workers to each family, was dependent on the particular needs of each family and the approach agreed by the family and the key worker.