Confederation of Heads of Youth Services Annual Conference

Good afternoon. I’m really pleased to be here with you at your

national conference, so thank you very much for giving me this slot

on your programme to talk about troubled families.

My job and the task that I’m here to talk to you about, is to lead the

drive to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families by 2015.

When I talk to people around the country and when I stand before

you now, I am up front about the fact that I have never been a

children’s social worker or a youth worker and I haven’t worked

directly in core children and young people’s services. [Reference

Centrepoint night shelter].

I do though have a long memory for regeneration programmes. I

remember City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budgets, I

remember Neighbourhood Renewal and New Deal for

Communities. And all those programmes have transformed

previously run down areas and brought opportunities.

But for all of this investment, there are a group of people that

haven’t been touched by physical renewal, new buildings. People

who didn’t work in the boom times, and certainly won’t work now;

whose parents didn’t attend school and who have never been

helped or cajoled to get there.

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And where anti-social behaviour, domestic violence and crime are

part of what they have grown up with and are therefore re-living

with their own children. Generation after generation.

I don’t think any of us can say hand-on-heart that we have dealt

effectively with this problem, which is not about physical

regeneration or new buildings, but something much harder - about

changing people and changing families.

So the aim of the Troubled Families programme is to change the

lives of families who have many problems and indeed cause many

problems by getting to the root causes of what’s going wrong for

them as a family rather than continuing to spend vast sums of

money, frankly, just containing them in a mess.

These are families who, despite the best efforts of many of us over

the years, in government, in local authorities, in the police and

others, have not been changed.

If you asked a long-standing youth worker, I’m guessing they

would say that when they first came into the job, they quickly learnt

the names of the local families where anti-social behaviour,

domestic violence, drugs and alcohol were a problem and the

children and young people were out of control and in need of help.

And that twenty years later, no matter what their current role, they

could tell you the names of exactly the same families with pretty

much the same problems, only now with four or five more children

needing help in the generation that followed.

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We all know how resource intensive these families are. As Chief

Constable Peter Fahy put it, there are cases where it would be

cheaper for him to station a police officer full time on a family’s

sofa than to deal with the constant call outs, arrests and every

other demand they place on the police service. The resources that

are spent on young people, trying to help them, when in many

cases the damage has already been done.

Some of the money agencies are spending on troubled families

may be necessary, but it is also largely money that is being spent

maintaining the status quo or mitigating disaster.

You in this room and others in local government and beyond have

run services in times of growth and now in times of austerity and it

is fair to say that troubled families have dominated both.

Budget cuts have been painful, for all services across the public

sector. And of course, we can expect more to come. This will

force radical change even on services that some would deem

minimal and essential.

We can all see that something needs to give and we need to do

things differently. We have to reduce the vast amounts we are

spending right across public services reacting to the problems

these families have and cause.

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We have to sort out the families who cause the greatest grief for

themselves, the greatest grief for the people who have to live

around them and the greatest grief to public sector budgets.

For example, one area in the north west has spent a huge amount

of time and effort dealing with two related families in one street

over 8 years. They estimated the costs of agency services to date

at over £1million – that’s £125k per year, nearly £300 every single

day of the year. And no success. Something needs to change

Compare that to the example now, that Lancashire have told me

about - a family where police calls outs to them have dropped by

90%. Where agencies involved with them fell from 26 agencies to

something more like 7 – because the family has been worked with

intensively by a trained skilled worker.

When I talk about changing families, what I’m talking about is

family intervention. In 2006 we had a hunch and instinct based on

work in Dundee and some Action for Children projects that here

was something different and powerful.

We went with that hunch, persuaded ministers to fund it and set up

53 family intervention projects in England over 2006 and 7.

Lots of people in government were sceptical, asking ‘Where is the

evidence for this?’ And there wasn’t much to be honest, other than

a few small scale studies.

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But now in 2012 many local authorities have some experience of

running family intervention projects or services. In March 2011,

nearly 9,000 families had been or were being supported in one or

by that kind of approach.

And it’s really striking that there is consistently strong evidence of

the effectiveness of family intervention year after year.

The history of social policy is littered with examples of stunningly

effective pilots which when rolled out, saw their impacts diluted –

but this hasn’t happened with family intervention.

We were on to something then and we need to build on that

approach. The evidence is strong enough for us to go further: To

adapt this model to work at less intensive levels with other families

who are still troubled but whose needs might not require someone

there day in, day out but who still need the consistent, assertive,

practical input twice a week or even once a week to keep them

moving in the right direction.

It is these elements that draw the line in the sand between this

programme and what has gone before.

Whatever level of intervention a family needs, the approach should

be based on proven methods that are about -

one single case worker who grips the whole family (and doesn't

just work with the teenager who’s on a youth offending

programme or the mother who’s in drug treatment),

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who works assertively and honestly and won't take no for an

answer, telling them the truth about what needs to change with

an authoritative voice

who rolls up their sleeves, dons the marigolds and gives

practical help to change their ways and not just fill in forms and

makes assessments to tell them what they are doing wrong

And importantly, who uses sanctions when needed.

In many areas, people have talked to me about the value of an

upfront, honest and assertive approach, which has come from

them asking themselves ‘Who are the families who’ve been on

everyone’s lists for years?’ and ‘What now do we need to do

differently to get them to change’?

The families who seek help or who are immediately open to it, may

not be the ones who need it most. Sometimes it is only when a

family is at serious risk of eviction, childcare proceedings or an

ASBO, or indeed the heat that the police can bring, that they will

accept intervention in their lives.

Yes, it's about supporting families and giving them the help they

need to change, but this time round, we can not and must not

leave behind the children in those families whose parents “do not

want to engage”, who refuse help or evade this programme. Their

children deserve better.

We simply can not allow this programme to be more of what has

gone before, of making services available and hoping the people

who need them turn up.

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This programme has to be different. For the first time, we will

actively identify the families who will be targeted. We have to be

clear about who the families are that most need help to change

and we have to be bold about getting past their front doors and we

have to be tough about the consequences for them if they say they

don't want help.

In one area where they were running family intervention services

for years, I asked them if any family had ever refused them. They

said one family had. They’d been threatened with eviction, they’d

evaded that eviction, they’d not accepted help and the family were

still in a mess.

This time round, consequences need to be actioned if they still

refuse help. This programme will not accept that families stay in a

mess. The consequences for their children are too great.

This is a tough job and tough jobs need good leaders.

And I’m hoping that you as leaders in youth services will make the

decision to be part of this. In fact of course, you are already part of

this - your staff could name off the top of their heads a good

proportion of the young people who will be on the lists of families

your local authorities will be working with.

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Lists that will include children who aren’t in school and who are

already involved with youth offending services and may also

include young parents.

We know that through family intervention we can reduce truancy,

reduce crime and anti-social behaviour and I hope also that we will

see an impact on teenage pregnancies – so that young people see

options for themselves beyond becoming mothers – or indeed

fathers - at 14 or 15 years old.

We know from evaluation of Family Intervention Projects that there

are high numbers of working age dependent children in the

families they work with: 29% of families include dependent children

who are 17 or over.

We set the programme up so that as well as being able to claim

payments for getting children back into school and crime and anti-

social behaviour down, councils can claim payment from us when

they help someone in the family off benefits and into work.

And that means includes anyone over 17, so those older

dependent children as well as parents.

So in a family where, for example, getting a job isn’t realistic for the

35 year old mother with three small children to look after, her 18

year old son could perhaps be helped to cast off that label of

NEET.

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So I am asking you to be part of this because the youth sector has

something really important to offer in terms of that upfront,

assertive and honest approach I’ve talked about - something a

successful youth worker knows all about.

When you hear, ‘You are stigmatising people’ or ‘We are already

doing all that’ or ‘We will still need to have an assessment

meeting’ perhaps you could be the person who stands up and

questions that – because if no one does, there’s a real danger that

things will go on as they have before.

And that just isn’t good enough for the children and young people

born into troubled families.

Before I draw to a close, I want to pause and look for a minute at

the recent serious case review into the baby who died after being

given methadone by his parents.

I’m not suggesting that I know whether that baby’s life could have

been saved by taking a different approach in that case, but there

were some very familiar things said in that review - parents not

‘engaging’ so being left, multiplicity of agencies all over the family

but no-one gripping what was really going on, parents knowing

how to play the system, lack of information sharing, lack of a

‘family focus’.

But what struck me this time, was something that cropped up

again and again, and here today I am quoting directly:

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“Practitioners need to improve their ability to challenge families

and to challenge within the multi-agency arenas.”

“The extent of the parents’ lack of engagement, avoidance and

dishonesty grew over time and although this was recognised by

practitioners there was insufficient challenge by professionals and

no sustained, planned approach to protecting the children.”

“However a better planned and authoritative approach to the family

may also have prevented his death.”

“What was lacking was the authoritative challenge to this lack of

cooperation there was a lack of enforcement of consequences.

There was a lack of challenge by practitioners across the range of

agencies.”

“There is a sense that practitioners had a view that the sharing of

information with the social worker absolved them of responsibility

for authoritative action.”

Quite clearly this lack of sanction, this lack of challenge, this lack

of authority is not something unique to this sad case – and I think

many of us here do recognise it.

If we’re talking about using sanction, challenge and authority that

means workers using their beliefs, their values and yes, their

judgements. That will take honesty, but we have to have the

courage of our convictions.

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So it’s OK for us to say that it should be the norm for every child to

be in school every day and full time.

It’s OK for us to say that we should have aspirations for these

families beyond a life spent on the settee.

It’s OK to stand up on behalf of their neighbours and the wider

community when some of these families are making their lives hell.

And we should be looking to use this programme to slash the

number of children of care – not for the wrong reason, by changing

the threshold at which we remove a child, but for the right reason,

because we are changing the family and changing the generations

that come after them.

I know I’ve talked quite a lot about the financial cost of troubled

families. So I’d just like to bring it back to what drove me to take

this job and probably part of what drove you to take yours.

The reality of the lives of troubled families was brought home to

me very starkly when I interviewed 16 highly troubled families for

the report I published in July. I don’t mind admitting that as battle-

worn as I am, I was in fact shocked by some of the things they told

me.

And you might be forgiven for thinking that some families’

problems are just too complex, the people in them are just too

challenging, that they can’t be helped, but these 16 families were

coming out the other side.

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They were well on the road to changing their lives. I’ve seen it,

many of you here have seen it and it can be done. Yes, these

families are troubled but their lives can be turned around with the

help of effective family intervention.

I look at the woman I met who said she felt sorry for her kids for

being born to such a bad mum and I think, I don’t want another

generation of women who feel like that.

I think we have a chance here that may not come again and I think

the prize is worth the fight. But it won’t happen without the support

of people like you in this room - so I’m asking for your help, to

consider whether you could to be that authoritative and challenging

voice - and I hope that you’ll make that decision.

Ends

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