Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

17. What progress the Troubled Families Team based in his Department has made in its work.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

19. What steps he plans to take to tackle the problems of the most troubled families.

[The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)]

In December, the Prime Minister announced a £448 million programme to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families. So far, more than 95% of upper-tier local authorities have engaged with the programme. Local authorities have begun to recruit a local troubled families co-ordinator, and to pull together their own list of local troubled families. We have also been able to offer each area £20,000 to help it to prepare for the programme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

Some 55,000 of the 120,000 most-troubled families have children with behavioural problems. How will the work being done to deal with problems such as serial truancy dovetail with other initiatives dealing with parenting and early intervention?

[Mr Pickles]

Probably about 65% of those 55,000 cases involve truancy issues, while others involve criminal convictions and special educational needs. The purpose of this initiative is to pull all the various interventions and programmes together so that we can, at last, tackle these issues. I have found from talking to council leaders of all political parties that we all recognise that we must solve these problems, and this is our big chance to work together to do so.