Members of the influential Public Accounts Committee are to hold inquiry into suggestions that the government's flagship Troubled Families Programme has had no demonstrable impact on the problems it was created to solve.
The programme aimed to reduce the estimated £9bn annual cost to the taxpayer of 120,000 families facing multiple challenges, such as antisocial behaviour, unemployment and poor housing.
The Department for Communities and Local Government launched the three-year mission in 2012 in partnership with 152 local authorities. It had a budget of £448m.
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But ministers have been accused of suppressing an independent evaluation that found the programme “had ‘no discernible’ effect on unemployment, truancy or criminality”.
A recent BBC report on the programme said that while lots of authority areas had claimed 100% success rates, the criteria for such claims was “very vague” and families could be deemed "turned around" even while the children were still persistently truant or committing crime. It said ministers had been in possession of the report since autumn last year.
DCLG denied the document had been suppressed, adding: “There were several strands to the evaluation work commissioned by the last government and there is not yet a final report”.
Launching the inquiry, MPs said the DCLG target of identifying and then "turning around" 120,000 families in the period from April 2012 to May 2015 had been “ambitious”, as it had required each of the councils to transform the lives of an agreed number of families identified in their own area as meeting the definition of “troubled”.
PAC is accepting written submissions of evidence on the Troubled Families Programme until October 11. It is due to hold an evidence session on the programme on October 19.