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The government’s Troubled Families Programme, which helps people with deep-rooted problems to get their lives back on track, will receive a £165m funding boost, enabling it to continue running for another year.
The programme, which was launched by David Cameron in 2012, provides intensive support for some of the country’s most vulnerable families and focuses on early intervention. It was originally set to run for five years from 2015 to 2020.
But housing secretary Robert Jenrick said it had proved a success in transforming lives and relieving the burden on public services, and has committed new funding to keep it running until 2021.
“The Troubled Families Programme will help more people in need get access to the early, practical and co-ordinated support to transform their lives for the better,” he said.
“This is the right thing to do for families and for society as a whole, and these reforms will reduce the demand and dependency on costly, reactive key public services.”
Rather than responding to each problem or single family member separately, assigned Troubled Families keyworkers engage with the whole family to co-ordinate support from a range of services to identify and address family issues as early as possible.
The latest evaluation showed that, compared with families with similar characteristics who have not been on the programme, fewer children went into care, fewer adults went to prison and more people are back in work.
Since the current programme began in 2015, 297,733 families have made improvements with the problems that led to them joining the programme. In 26,848 of these families, one or more adults moved off benefits and into work, the government has said.