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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what plans his Department has for future continuous assessment of the Troubled Families initiative.

The Troubled Families initiative aims to turn families around. This means children are back in school for three consecutive terms and there has been significant reductions in youth crime and anti-social behaviour; or an adult in the family is back in work for at least three months. The first Troubled Families Programme is on track to achieve its goal to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families across England by May 2015. As of February 2015, over 105,000 families had been turned around. Final results will be published shortly.

The first programme has been subject to an independent national evaluation carried out by a consortium of research organisations, led by Ecorys UK Ltd and comprising Ipsos MORI, The National Institute for Economic and Social Research, Bryson Purdon Research and Clarissa White Research. The evaluation is assessing the impact, process and cost benefit of the programme. In July 2014, an initial report on the characteristics and problems experienced by families in the programme was published titled Understanding Troubled Families. The full final evaluation report is due later this summer.

The new expanded Troubled Families Programme aims to help up to 400,000 additional families achieve significant and sustainable change. It was rolled out nationally in April 2015 and an evaluation of this programme has already begun, delivered by the Office of National Statistics, Ipsos MORI and The Stationary Office. This will build on the first programme's assessments of impact and cost benefit, alongside a programme of qualitative research with local authorities and families to understand if and how services have adapted to work more effectively with families and those families' experiences of services.