Decision details

The Regulatory Portfolio Holder presented a report setting out the tracked progress of families worked with in the previous year under the Troubled Families Initiative, to ascertain whether or not improvements achieved had been sustained in the 9 months following intensive support work with the Family Support Team.

The purpose of the troubled families’ initiative was to change the repeating generational patterns of poor parenting, abuse, violence, drug use, anti-social behaviour and crime in the most troubled families in the UK.

Since its inception in 2013, the joint Runnymede/Surrey Heath project had worked with 230 families, providing intensive support and been awarded £654,815, in total funding for set up and payment by results. This represented an average cost of £2,847 per family worked with.

The scheme worked in two parts with families receiving intensive support

for a period of around 12 weeks through the Team around the Family (TAF) and then support through a lead organisation for the following 9 months (post TAF).

27 Surrey Heath families had been assisted in 2015/16, out of 54 families supported by the Team. 8 of the 54 families had been found to have circumstances that warranted more serious interventions. Of the remaining 46, all had shown improvement in at least one of the criteria covered by the initiative.

One criterion, Domestic Violence/Abuse had proved more difficult to address, with 8 out of 11 families showing no improvement after intensive support. However, Members noted that, in this most challenging measure, an improvement with 3 out of 11 families was actually, in itself, a considerable achievement.

The report highlighted one weakness of the scheme, that being the lack of an agreed approach to monitoring progress of families in the post TAF period or resourcing for this. Partly in response to this concern, a restructuring of the Family Support team within Runnymede/Surrey Heath had introduced 2 senior posts with responsibility for post TAF tracking.

Surrey County Council was now introducing a 2nd phase of the initiative, in which a more refined approach would be adopted to assessing and tracking of families across the 12 months, to make claiming of Payment by Results easier, as well as monitoring of the improvements achieved to see whether these have been sustained.

Whilst the Team had sought to assess outcomes for the 54 families worked with over 2015/16, it had proved difficult to track families once they had left intensive support and to monitor progress against DCLG criteria. This would be the subject of further work with partners.

Resolved, that the report be noted