Flagship back-to-work scheme for troubled families gets just 720 people off the dole

• David Cameron ordered £450million crackdown in the wake of 2011 riots
• Teams of experts get children back to school and adults into work
• National Audit Office warns work project is under-performing

By Matt Chorley, Mailonline Political Editor

A flagship government scheme to tackle Britain’s troubled families has helped just 720 people back to work.
The Whitehall spending watchdog warned the scheme, which set an overall target of getting 20,000 into jobs, was ‘under-performing’ and urged ministers to intervene more quickly when things go wrong.
The project is supposed to turn around so-called ‘Shameless’ families, with children back in school, crime cut and thousands of parents back in work.

The Department for Work and Pensions project managed to get only 720 into a job, against a target of almost 20,000

Ministers said they wanted to end the ‘it’s not my fault’ culture which allowed up to 120,000 problem families to avoid taking responsibility for their own lives.
The Department for Communities and Local Government’s ‘troubled families’ programme has a budget of £448 million.

The Department for Work and pensions (DWP) aimed to get 22 per cent of people on the programme into work employment over three years to March 2015, with a budget of £200 million.
But the National Audit Office (NAO) said the DWP programme had achieved only resulted in 720 people finding work, just 4 per cent of its target.
None of the firms it was using to provide services had met the department's target.
The NAO said that while there was evidence that families were beginning to benefit from the programmes, there was a risk that expectations will not be achieved.
Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: ‘These innovative and ambitious programmes are beginning to provide some benefits but elements of both are underperforming.

Community Secretary Eric Pickles said the 'no nonsense' approach of the scheme was working

‘This is the result of poor co-ordination between the departments when designing and implementing their programmes and of the risks taken in launching the programmes quickly.’
She claimed there was a lack of understanding about how councils and companies would use the payment by results scheme.
‘To achieve their objectives, the departments need to continue to liaise with one another and monitor the success rate of both programmes, adjusting them when necessary.
‘They must continue to work with local authorities and contractors to understand why performance is so varied, intervene if it does not improve, and quickly build an evidence base to show which interventions work best.’
Local authorities in England have turned around 22,000 families, exceeding a 3 per cent target, but they have attached only 62,000 families to the programme, 13 per cent below an NAO estimate.
The Government has estimated that the cost to the taxpayer of troubled families was around £9 billion annually for the spending review period of 2010-2015, before the programme was introduced.
Of the total, the Government estimated that £1 billion was spent tackling issues including mental health and drug and substance misuse, and £8 billion was spent reacting on areas including social care and the costs of crime, such as court costs.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, said: ‘It's difficult to see the DWP programme as anything other than a catastrophe for the vulnerable families who deserve our help but are being let down.
‘First with the work programme and now this, private companies are proving themselves incapable of providing the kind of complex, dedicated support necessary, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds of public money being funnelled their way.’
Mr Serwotka said the poor results also showed that giving work to private firms was ‘fantastically misguided.’

David Cameron launched the troubled families programme in the wake of the 2011 riots in London and other English cities

A DWP spokesman said the numbers reported by the NAO only told part of the story, adding: ‘Jobcentre Plus is doing far more for members of troubled families, including loaning 150 jobcentre advisers to local authorities to help them support people into work.
‘Data published last week showed that since the troubled families programme started in April 2012, 2,400 members of troubled families started a job. This data only covered fewer than half the number of people from troubled families local authorities are currently working with, so we expect the real number helped into work to be much greater.’