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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, with reference to the Answer of 19 October 2016 to Question 49444 on families: disadvantage, how many families have been turned around in 2017 to date; and how many families his Department plans to turn around in (a) 2018, (b) 2019 and (c) 2020.

As set out in my answer to the Hon Member for Denton and Reddish to Question UIN 49444 on 27 October 2016, ‘turning around’ a family was a phrase used in the first Troubled Families Programme (2012 – 2015). In the current programme (2015-2020), local authorities can claim results payments for families when they can demonstrate that significant and sustained progress has been made against every problem a family is facing, or that continuous employment has been achieved.

The programme aims to achieve significant and sustained improvement for up to 400,000 complex families with multiple high-cost problems families over its lifetime (2015-2020). The programme’s first annual report to Parliament (published in April 2017 - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-evaluation-of-the-troubled-families-programme-2015-to-2020) reported that almost 53,000 families had already made significant and sustained progress, with 3 years of the programme left to run. The next update of these figures will be published at the end of this financial year.