Troubled Families – working in partnership

In August 2011, the civil disturbances that erupted in London and other major cities propelled the issue of tackling Britain's social problems back to the top of the political agenda. The Prime Minister subsequently reiterated his ambition to turn around the lives of the 120,000 most ‘troubled families'.  The Troubled Families Team was then established in the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), with Eric Pickles MP given responsibility.  

The Troubled Families Programme will enable councils and their local partners to build on the work already underway, such as community budgets. Helping ‘families with complex needs' was already the first area of work where a community budget approach was being applied, with 16 areas developing new ways for public services to work together across a local area, pooling resources.  A number of case studies setting out their approach can be found here. Many others were also coordinating local services through family intervention projects.  

Community budgets are an important tool, driving forward the agenda to find a more effective and financially sustainable way to support a greater number of these troubled families. Community budgets provide an opportunity to redefine the way services work together and help break down barriers at a local level by moving away from a system where funding is fragmented across separate agencies.  

We all recognise that we need to 'do something differently' when working with our Troubled Families. The big questions are:

• What exactly do we need to do differently – it's very easy to say ‘we need to do something very different, but much harder to articulate exactly what ‘different' is
• How we go about deciding what this ‘holy grail' of the different way of working that will significantly improve outcomes is. We all agree that something has to change substantially – but that's hard. Most of the people driving change are people who have been involved in the current system. Our perception of ‘substantially different' might look to an outsider as just another variant on a theme. So, how do we get beyond this to designing something that really is different? Do we want to add extra bits on/tweak around the edges e.g. introduce a key worker but otherwise continue pretty much as we were? Or do we want to take a more 'whole systems change' approach to changing the way we work across partner agencies? 

The first option of tweaking around the edges may have its attractions. But the second option of ‘whole systems change' has much more potential for genuinely improving things for our troubled families, whilst considerably widening the scope for making savings across the public sector.

Birmingham and Greater Manchester have been developing a framework – a toolkit  that you can use ‘off the shelf' – to help your partnership through whole system change, including partnership investment agreements and partnership delivery agreements that are legally sound and enable the savings generated to feed back to investing partners.

The framework widens the question to make us think about: 

• How do we understand why families are troubled? On the whole, they're not troubled because of the way public sector services organise themselves, so looking solely to our structures and initiatives for the solution is potentially to miss a crucial step
• Do we really understand what troubled families and other in the communities perceive as the problem? What do they think the solution is?
• Are we delivering the right kinds of things at all? Are the right people delivering them? Could we just stop a lot of what we're doing?
• How do we both help those who are already troubled and reduce the likelihood that more families will become troubled in future? 
• How do we take a flexible approach so that we maximise the opportunities from the plethora of projects and initiatives that surround this agenda – Troubled Families Payment by Results; DWP European Social Fund Complex Families Payment by Results; Youth Contract etc. etc.?

By putting significant time into considering questions such as these, we have real potential to both improve
outcomes and drive savings out of the system in a number of ways: 

• Re-focusing the things we provide, the way we provide them and who provides them so we reduce duplication/streamline – making efficiencies in the way we collectively deliver
• Improving outcomes, which often result in knock-on financial benefits. For instance, every A&E attendance avoided saves around £52; one domestic violence incident costs £18,730; every child who doesn't enter care saves £43,500; ever anti-social behaviour incident costs up to £630 etc. Individually, these may not seem significant, but they add up quickly when done at scale. 
• In addition, it will help maximise the level of Payment by Results into our areas through not only the Troubled Families Unit PbR but also all the other schemes mentioned above. 

The driver provided by the announcement of the Troubled Families Unit PbR provides a real impetus to have these conversations and make this whole systems change. 

If you are interested in taking the framework approach developed by Birmingham and Greater Manchester,  the information on the following website provides some suggestions for how you might do that.

Contacts

If you are interested in being involved in the project, or testing any of the approaches suggested on the following pages, then please contact:

Jason Lowther
Email: jason.lowther@birmingham.gov.uk

2. Who is this framework aimed at?

Share:

30 August 2012