Families: Disadvantaged

(asked on 20th July 2015) - View Source

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how many families are in the Troubled Families programme; and what estimate he has made of the average cost to the public purse for each family which has participated in that programme to date.


Answered by
Greg Clark Portrait
Greg Clark
This question was answered on 7th September 2015

As was announced on the 22 June 2015, the original Troubled Families Programme (2012-2015) worked with and turned around the lives of 116,654 families. The new and expanded Troubled Families Programme was rolled out nationally in April 2015 and will reach up to a further 400,000 families with multiple problems. Details of how many troubled families are engaged in the new programme, in its first year of implementation, will be published in due course.

Research estimates that the cost to the public purse of the most troubled 120,000 families before engagement with the Troubled Families Programme was £9 billion in total; an average of £75,000 per family (DCLG: ‘The Fiscal Case for Working with Troubled Families’ (2013)). £8 billion of this spend was purely reacting to their problems. Information about the fiscal benefits resulting from that programme will be published in due course.

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