David Cameron has pledged to help 120,000 families turn their lives around before 2015. Amelia Gentleman gains exclusive access to three families on the list
Sometime after midday, Daniel Smith, 19, gets up from the sofa, where he has been sleeping beneath a grey, coverless duvet, and races upstairs to his mum's room, which is open because in a fit of unexplained fury last week he kicked the door off its hinges. The door is leaning against the wall, waiting for someone to fix it. He rummages through some papers on the windowsill and finds an appointment letter for a meeting with the Work Programme, the government's initiative to get people off benefits and into jobs.
When he sees the time of the appointment (11am) he swears and curses the programme officials because he has missed it. His mother, Estelle, who is lying on her bed in a pink leopard-skin onesie, looks at him kindly but doesn't say anything. Tara, the oldest of his three sisters, who is dressed and sitting on the bed, leaning against her mother's knees, stroking the family's black-and-white cat, says maybe he should call to try to rearrange. Daniel shouts that his benefits are going to be sanctioned and stamps downstairs in a fury, but does not make the call.
No one in the house is aware that the family has been placed on a list of the 2,385 most troubled families in the city where they live, Manchester; and among 120,000 across the country. Their key worker, Julie Cusack, is reluctant to tell them they are part of the government's troubled families programme, anxious not to alienate them unnecessarily. She tells them the council has decided to offer "extra support".
Another sister, Sadie, comes in with a friend, with KFC meals for lunch, which they unpack on Estelle's bed. As they eat they examine a framed picture of an older brother's soon-to-be born second daughter, captured in the fuzzy black-and-white outline of the medical scan. A grandmother and an uncle are smoking downstairs and no one wants to sit with them in the grey fog they've created. It has been snowing on and off all morning, but there is no money on the gas meter so the heating is off and everyone complains about the cold. After a while Estelle goes to the kitchen where she makes a start on the washing up.
There is so little drama in this terrace home, where Estelle, a single mother, lives with four of her six children, that it is hard to understand how this household features on the troubled families list. It is obvious they have problems with money, education and work but they do not resemble the "neighbours from hell" model that the government's programme was designed to tackle.
After the 2011 riots David Cameron gave a speech reprising the notion of a broken society and announcing: "I have an ambition, before the end of this parliament, we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families."
He said "rocket boosters" would be attached to projects designed to fix these families. "We need more urgent action on the families that some people call problem, others call troubled," he said. "The ones everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids."
The prime minister highlighted the "moral hazard" within the welfare system that allowed people to think they "can be as irresponsible as they like because the state will always bail them out". These families, the government claims, cost the taxpayer £9bn a year – £75,000 for each family – and there are steep longer term costs too. Because the children grow up in disadvantage, a cycle of low achievement begins. The government has committed £448m to the troubled families programme and will pay councils a £4,000 bonus for each family that displays signs of improvement – finding a job, making sure children attend school or no longer plaguing the police with antisocial behaviour. The Guardian has been given rare access to families on the scheme and will be returning to those interviewed for this article later in the year.
This ambitious scheme has triggered some scepticism – mainly around the haphazard way officials decided Britain has precisely 120,000 families who are, in the words of communities secretary Eric Pickles, "ruining their lives … ruining their children's lives and … ruining their neighbours' lives".
The 120,000 figure is now understood to be a convenient fiction – derived from earlier Labour research which had calculated there were about this number of vulnerable, low-income and needy families with "multiple and complex problems". The Department for Communities and Local Government abandoned Labour's classification around poverty and need, and retrospectively imposed a new definition around antisocial behaviour, truancy and unemployment – switching the emphasis from people who have problems to people who cause problems – and announced there were still precisely 120,000 families in need of urgent attention.
There is also doubt around the capacity of the government to turn around such large numbers of vulnerable families conveniently in time for the next election campaign, and unease about the stigmatising tone of the programme's language.
But here in Manchester, family intervention workers have made a start at working with 1,150 of the 2,385 troubled families the city has been told it has – according to the calculations of a centralised computerised data trawling exercise which identifies households where adults are out of work, children are absent from school and there is a history of antisocial behaviour.
Cusack dislikes the term "troubled families". She says: "We wouldn't say to a family: 'You have been identified as being troubled'." They wouldn't let her through the door if that was her approach, she thinks.
When Cusack sets out the scale of the problems which existed here 18 months ago, it becomes clearer why they were identified as in need of support, although it's not clear that the root of the problems is, as Cameron put it, "a culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations". Instead, it looks like at the heart of it there is something less morally explosive but profoundly difficult to solve.
"Mum struggled to understand her responsibilities as a parent," Cusack's report on the family states. "She presented with a low level of understanding and potentially an undiagnosed learning disability. The children had taken on the role of parenting and decision-making."
When the family was first put on the scheme, they were about to be evicted from the home where they had lived for 15 years because the house had become a meeting point for young people who would drift in and out throughout the evening until the early hours, without asking Estelle if she minded. Neighbours objected to the noise and chaos which spilled from the front door. Police were investigating allegations of sexual assault by men who visited the house, against two of the daughters. Estelle faced prosecution because Sadie's school attendance was at a rate of just 7%. Sadie, 15, had been excluded on a couple of occasions and had taken to cutting her arms when she felt stressed (which was often).
The police were also involved because of alleged cruelty to animals; two dogs and 10 of the family's 11 cats have been removed. "Much of the property was covered in animal faeces and flies," Cusack's report states. Four of the children had been taken into care a few years earlier because of their living conditions and concerns about neglect, and the youngest remains on the child protection register. When Cusack began working with them, two of the children were very underweight, and at least two were being bullied at school because (and she struggles for a sensitive way of putting it) "they were not managing their hygiene". Partly this was because someone had kicked off the bathroom door so it was difficult – what with all the comings and goings and the position of the bathroom in full view from the front door – to take a bath privately.
Since Cusack's involvement things have improved considerably. The concept of a family intervention programme – which is the preferred model for turning these families around – means the key worker is intensively involved in their life, liable to make unannounced visits four or five times a week to begin with, any time between 7am and late at night. Unlike a social worker, who might have 30 children on their list, key workers on a family intervention programme work with five families. Usually they take over from other people – health visitors and social workers – and will be charged with sorting out every aspect of their lives – bills, health, education, debt. Their role is hands on and often described as similar to old-fashioned social work.
Cusack turned up frequently in the evening to help Estelle get rid of the unwelcome visitors who were having parties downstairs. She signed her up for parenting classes and self-esteem courses, which Estelle believes are helping her to say no to her children and their friends.
The dogs were rehoused, with Cusack's help. She drew up cleaning rotas for the family and told them almost daily that the state of the house was unacceptable; gradually they began to tidy up and she helped them remove the layers of chaos that had built up.
The children were given clothes from a charity, when Cusack found cat excrement among the unwashed clothes. A charity gave the family a cooker and paid for flooring and for the bathroom door to be repaired. The girls were signed up for a course about sexual health and were given contraceptive injections. When Cusack found out that the other students at Tara's hair and beauty course were refusing to work with her because they didn't like the way she smelt, she persuaded the college course to let her take showers on the premises, and organised money for her to buy soap and shampoo.
"I have done a parenting survival course. I know now how to set boundaries," Estelle says, and belatedly reprimands her son for shouting and swearing.
Clearly Cusack's work is unfinished. Although they are no longer on the point of eviction and the antisocial behaviour has disappeared, Daniel still has rages, and no one seems to know why he kicked down his mother's door. Cusack challenges him about his missed appointment and tells him firmly (while his mother remains silent) that it is not acceptable to call the jobcentre workers "dicks", when it was his fault he missed the appointment. She wonders if he has some mild, undiagnosed learning difficulties. The payment-by-result system depends in part on Estelle and Daniel finding work, and that does not look imminent, although Estelle (who had a full-time job in a jam factory before she had children) would like to work in theory, and is open to volunteering, perhaps in a charity shop.
But the family is well-disposed to Cusack and very grateful for what she is doing. "At first I didn't want to know," Estelle says. "I thought she was going to be like the social services, quite snotty. But Julie's office is much calmer. They talk to you with more respect. They put a lot of effort in."
Tara, 18, is quietly appreciative for the help Cusack has given in terms of persuading her mother to clean up, and supporting her to get some new clothes. "We didn't really know where to start," she says. "There were so many people living here. Julie would come over and say, 'You can do this better, you can do that better.' It's much better than it was. It looked like a bomb had hit it."
She shows the redecorated bedroom she shares with her sister, stroking away a pile of cigarette ash from her sister's unmade bed. "Words can't describe how it used to be," she says.
She is grateful that Cusack's intervention has meant she wasn't asked to leave her course. "The tutor told me what people were saying," Tara says. How did it make her feel? "Not good," she says. She would like to open a beauty salon. Pressed to be more realistic, she says she would be happy to work in a care home.
Sadie says she refused to go to school after years of being told by other pupils that her clothes smelt bad. "It made me feel really bad. Sometimes I reacted really badly. I'd seen my sisters being bullied, but I was not going to let it happen to me," she says; she fought back, was excluded and refused to go. With Cusack's help she has transferred to a school which specialises in helping unwilling pupils, her attendance has risen to around 35% and last summer she took a maths GCSE. She thinks she got an F, but Cusack tells her this was still an achievement worth noting.
"Have you seen my colouring book?" she asks her mum, and she disappears into her room with a jumbo colouring book and felt tips, of the sort designed for a nursery school child, and begins colouring in dolphins leaping over the waves. Cusack says she finds colouring therapeutic and an alternative to self-harming when she is under pressure.
Few family policy experts dispute the value of this kind of intensive support, but there are widespread concerns about the way such a constructive policy has been cloaked in the language of scroungers and skivers, and more significantly, about the broader state of family support services.
Rhian Beynon, policy director with Family Action, which supports vulnerable families, said the climate of welfare cuts was going to create a new generation of troubled families. "A big contributor to neglect is the income and budget. There is going to be a limit to how far you can impact on some families if their welfare is cut back," she said.
Research by the NSPCC, Action for Children and the Children's Society predicted government austerity projects will cause the number of vulnerable families (it has a slightly different definition) to increase by 14% by 2015.
Beynon welcomes the troubled families programme but is concerned it is not being funded for long enough, was confused by the process by which the families had been identified and also wonders if the government is paying out for the right results.
"The money being paid to local authorities for working with families is positive, but ideally we wouldn't fund anything in a payment-by-results way. We would just accept that these families need help," she said. "We work with families with multiple and complex needs and only a quarter would match up to this criteria."
Helen Donohue, director of public policy with Action for Children, which has been running family intervention projects for 15 years, is uneasy about the cutoff point of 2015 for funding. Some think the structure of the programme is designed for a pre-election update of the number of families helped. "If any government was passionate about addressing this, they wouldn't have imposed a timeframe that leads up to the next election. The political cycle does not help children," she says.
The main concern about the initiative is the decision to pour money into crisis intervention when money for early intervention children's services is being cut. Sure Start centres, which aimed to address problems much earlier, no longer receive priority funding, and large numbers have closed. In Manchester, the children's services budget has had £45m (25%) cut since 2011 and will have another £20m (15%) cut by 2015.
The government's calculation in investing money and intensive support in these families is that the work will recoup dividends in terms of money which is no longer spent on the families by the police, the NHS, the Department for Education, and by the Department for Work and Pensions in benefits payments. Manchester estimates it can save an average of £35,000 a year from each family that it works with successfully.
An official calculation of how much Cusack's work with Estelle's family has saved the state will only be done once her work there has finished. However, she has fed data for an earlier case into an official computerised system for ascertaining how much the work has saved and come up with an estimated saving of £427,195 a year – taking into account the previous annual cost of arrests, police visits, prison stints, antisocial behaviour orders, ambulance callouts and drug counselling.
When you meet Lisa and her children in their quiet end-of-terrace home it is hard to believe that a couple of years ago they were costing the state so much, but Cusack's report outlining the mother's heroin, crack and alcohol problems, petty offending to raise drug money, serious health problems that stemmed from the alcoholism, involvement of child protection officers, homelessness, school exclusions, the gang involvement of one of her six children and some firearms offences, sets out why.
"It feels a lifetime ago," Lisa, 46, says. "Julie would come every day and sort everything out. When you are a drug addict, all you think about is the money and the drugs. The kids took care of themselves. I wasn't bothered about whether they went to school. I was only bothered about making money. You think you're a good parent but when you haven't got drugs, you haven't got time for them."
Cusack would arrive in the morning, find Lisa in bed and the children still at home, and tell her that her behaviour was unacceptable. She arranged for her children to be looked after while Lisa went into a three-week detox course. "I had more motivation from Julie; she was saying you have to do it or you're going to end up dead. She took me to hospital appointments, to drugs appointments."
Lisa's family were not told they were categorised as troubled. She is dismayed when she hears the programme's title. "I think it's an insult – just the name. It makes you sound as if people should keep away from you, because you are trouble. You wonder how they came up with that name," she says, adding that she would have told Cusack to "get stuffed" if she had told her.
Her youngest daughter, six, asks if they can go together to an after-school club, and wonders if she can get a prize for the ticks she has accumulated on her wall chart (for tidiness at home). Her 14-year-old comes in with a friend. Cusack helped the family move to an area where no one knows about their past difficulties. Lisa is volunteering as a drugs mentor for people trying to stop.
"We talk about it openly with the kids. I just want them to be well and working, and not to make the mistakes I made," she says.
It is difficult to assess how achievable is Cameron's pledge to turn around 120,000 similar families by 2015. Manchester is a useful showcase, because it was already more advanced than most councils in its work with families that it prefers to categorise as having "multiple and complex needs". It is using the government's funding to expand a project that was under way, which was – crucially – staffed with dedicated workers like Cusack, on whom the success of the exercise depends. In other areas, there were no pre-existing programmes, so councils will have a hard time getting schemes going before 2015 when the funding runs out.
Cusack visits a third family on her list – Emma, 40, who lives alone with her three youngest children aged between three and nine. Last year she was depressed and struggling to cope and left her children alone in the house while she visited a friend. The eldest one called the police, and she was arrested. It was the second time they had been left at home alone. Her children had been out of school for a while, because she had been ill, so she fitted the classification of a troubled family (unemployment, absences from school and police involvement). She is grateful for the support she has had from the programme – help with housing, with schools and encouragement to get treatment for her depression. New schools have been found for the children and they no longer have a child protection plan, so are not in danger of being removed. But she says she had spent months asking social services to help her and wonders if there is something wrong with a system that makes you wait until crisis point before it steps in to help.
"You have to do something bad before you get this support. You don't get it until you do something serious."
Names have been changed
Reported by guardian.co.uk 20 hours ago.
Patch Essex-Middle River, MD --
Patch Wayne, NJ --
Patch Crystal Lake-Cary, IL --
This is Essex --
Patch Perry Hall, MD --
This is Lincolnshire -- A Lincoln man has been arrested over five thefts in the city. 34-year-old Daniel Duncan Barnett, of Welton Gardens, Lincoln, is facing charges of five counts of shoplifting. He was charged on April 6 and released on police bail. Daniel Barnett will appear at Lincoln Magistrates' Court on April 30.
Reported by This is 1 hour ago.
Patch Wayne, NJ --
Patch Wayne, NJ --
Patch Lawrenceville, GA --