Written evidence from David Gregg
Written evidence submitted by Professor David P Gregg (retired). Former head of Systems Science (mathematical modelling and business policy assessment) at Unilever Research; visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde 1985 – 2000; disability rights activist; sole carer of a learning disabled son and husband of a stroke disabled wife.
Executive Summary
* The Troubled Family Projects, like the Family Intervention Projects on which they are closely based, did not include randomised control groups. In terms of normal socio-medical intervention assessment standards this means that any ‘claimed’ changes in family status or behaviour cannot be attributed to project actions. Strictly, current TFP success ‘claims’ are objectively unsupportable by the ‘evidence’.
* There is no overall independent assessment of the success ‘claims’ made by local authorities and their evidence data bases are patchy in coverage and definition.
* TFP attributed family changes relate to observations during the project or shortly after (6 to 12 months) a ‘successful’ exit. As in the earlier FIPs there is no evidence of the impact that ‘claimed’ changes are sustained in the medium or longer term. There is no independent assessment of the impact of family changes on their wider communities, supposedly terrorised by these ‘families from hell’.
* The TFP success criteria in target areas such as school behaviour, family antisocial behaviour and offending by minors are surprisingly lax allowing significant levels of ‘bad’ behaviour to continue in supposedly ‘successful, turned around’ families.
* By clustering crime / ASB / education targets together, moderate ‘claimed’ changes in school absences are misrepresented as significant changes in ASB and criminality.
* Initial frequency of ASB and crime in families was low, contrary to government spin and there are no quantitative measures of the severity of ASB in the evidence base. Earlier FIP data show much claimed ASB is trivial. Serious drug and alcohol misuse is also infrequent. False claims about family behaviour have always been used to justify to the public, an ‘assertive’, ‘non-negotiable’, ‘sanctions based’ approach in the TFPs and other intervention projects.
* The key characteristics defining the troubled families (or chaotic families or ASB families) from today back to 1998 are extreme poverty and high levels of mental and physical health problems and disabilities in children and adults. These families are socially inadequate, of low IQ and frequently victims of local ASB themselves.
* The TFP national savings ‘claims’ are grossly at odds with the claims of potential savings initially used by the DfC&LG to justify the programme. The £9 billion savings forecast was patent fantasy (see below).
* Simple calculations suggest the observed annual cost of a typical troubled family relates primarily to their demographics, poverty, illness and disability. i.e. the costs reflect their socio-economic-medical status generating legitimate benefit claims under normal benefit rules. The claim of high associated criminal justice costs is false.
* Significant reductions in state benefits and support costs for the typical troubled family could only come by curing current chronic mental and physical illnesses and disabilities and, in future, by exercising the obvious eugenic interventions to limit family size. One would hope that the latter are not acceptable in a caring society in 2016: but neither should be, the abusive hounding and denigration of vulnerable families (desperately in need of genuine medical and social support), through intrusive, ineffective, sanctions based, TFPs.
* These are families in hell not families from hell.
* The TFPs are closely based on the many previous FIPs which go back to 1998. Successive, government sponsored, evaluation reports have repeatedly shown the ineffectiveness of this type of intervention. The several evaluation teams involved have reported strong caveats about these projects, about poor data quality, weak protocols and the inferences which could and could not be drawn about claimed ‘success’. These caveats have been repeatedly ignored for 18 years, tens of thousands of vulnerable families have been bullied to no good effect, and hundreds of millions of pounds of public money has been wasted on populist, voodoo social engineering.
Analysis of the TFP Performance
‘As hard as it is to accept, the truth is despite our best efforts over many years - and I include myself in that - we just haven’t got it right. We haven’t succeeded in getting these families to change or stopping the transmission of problems from generation to generation – we just haven’t.’
Dame Louise Casey, Coalition Troubled Families Tsar
Presentation at REFORM, 12.06.14
1. Information & Data
Requests for detailed TFP information were made to the DfC&LG under the FoIA in 2015. Apparently, detailed data is held at local authority level only. FoIA requests were therefore made to the author’s home area, the Wirral. Data is patchy. From the general data this area is not atypical of other areas. The west coast of the peninsula is rural with small, affluent towns. The east coast is heavily urbanised. 74.7% of the economy is service based; 25% is industrial. Birkenhead in the north has high levels of deprivation with 55% of adults (16-64) on out of work benefits. 30% of the population is in the most deprived quintile of the UK population. 50% are in the two most deprived quintiles. The difference in male life expectancy between Birkenhead and the wealthy Wirral areas is 14.6 years. Frank Field MP has recently described his Birkenhead constituency as ‘becoming like Beirut’.
No control groups were used in Wirral or in any TFP evaluation. The gold standard
for social-medical intervention evaluation is the randomised , controlled trial as recommended in the Cabinet Office paper ‘Test, Learn, Adapt : Developing Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials’ (2012) which tells us
‘RCTs are the best way of determining whether a policy or intervention is working.’
The ministers commissioning the several FIP evaluations since 1998 failed to accept the repeated advice of the evaluators to set up proper performance monitoring schemes. As a result all of the alleged changes in family behaviour and health cannot be attributed to the projects. In fact hidden in Appendix A of ‘Working With Troubled Families’; DfC&LG, December 2012, we find
‘evaluations have not, or have not been able to, establish suitable control or
comparison groups…most studies are limited in what can be concluded from
them about the degree to which improvements for the families are attributable
to the intervention…’
Even accepting the doubtful official data on family changes, TFP performance is unimpressive at best and in many areas, grossly exaggerated in public presentation.
2. TFP In Work Targets.
In the Wirral TFP 74.7% of the families were workless. As ‘a result’ of project participation 2.6% of families allegedly gained an adult in work. The national figure was 8.9%. However it is impossible to say that the projects were responsible for these changes since there were no comparison or control groups in place.
3. The TFP ‘Crime / ASB / Education’ Target.
This aggregate target has 3 components (3):
1. Partial reductions in fixed term school exclusions and unauthorised absences over
3 school terms.
2. Partial reduction in ASB across the family in the last 6 months.
3. Partial reduction in offending rate by minors in the last 6 months.
In practice ‘success’ payment is made if 2 or even 1 out of 3 criteria are met (see 3.4).
3.1. Fixed Term [temporary] Exclusions from School.
This issue involved just 13% of all children in the project. Note that 87% had not been excluded. However we also know from other work that nationally ~2 / 3 of children excluded from school had mental health issues or learning disabilities. TF children had high levels of mental health / disability problems. At project conclusion the claim is that 94% of families had children with fewer than 3 exclusions. But at entry 65% of the families already met the criterion so the improvement over the project is 94 – 65 = 29% or in ~6% of children. Note that the ‘successful’ families could have experienced 2 exclusions per child and still meet the criterion. The exclusion rate could still be 2 / 3 of that at project entry.(3). Note that this improvement was while the families were under close supervision by a ‘key worker’. What happened a year or two years after the project ended? We do not know since the TF projects, like the Family Intervention Projects before them, are not monitored long term. However the arguments that these projects will save the state big money depend on sustained savings over many years, having ‘turned around’ the families ’once and for all.’
3.2. Unauthorised Absences from School.
At project entry 52% of the Wirral families had 15% or more child unauthorised absences over 3 terms. This involved 42% of the children in the project, a high number. But a majority, 58% were not involved in truancy. At project exit it is claimed that again 94% of families had all children with less than 15% absences so the improvement was in 94 – 48 = 46% of families or ~36% of children. We will also see below that these families have remarkably high levels of adult and child physical and mental health problems and disabilities. This may be pertinent to absences. In the first, Dundee Family Project, which set the pattern for later interventions, 70% of the children had been bullied (5). N.B. A ‘successful’ family could still have a child absent for 1 day out of 7 (3). Note again that the absence ‘improvement’ was monitored only while the families were under supervision. We do not know what happened over one or two years, never mind the long term.
3.3 .Reduction in Family ASB.
At project entry 11% of the Wirral families had an adult with reports of ASB. We learn that only 6.5% of individual adults had such reports. 93.5% of adults had no ASB. 26% of families at entry had one or more children with reports of ASB. This involved just 10.4% of all children. 89.6% of the children had no ASB. This seems a long way from the impression given to the public that the troubled families are heavily involved in ASB and crime. Also by reporting headline results at the family level the prevalence of ASB and other problems is magnified and the public further misled. As in the FIP projects we have no published data on the severity or frequency of the ASB individuals were allegedly involved in. However for Wirral we know that only 1.2% of the project children had an ASBO or Acceptable Behaviour Contract. This is even lower than the 3-5% typically seen in the FIPs. The ASB success criterion required a 60% reduction in ASB incidents across the family over the ‘last 6 months’. It is claimed that 87% of the Wirral families achieved this. Clearly if that is reported without context it is very misleading. In fact the local media were told by the Council (1, 2) of a
‘95% reduction of ASB across all families engaged in the service’
In fact ‘claimed success’ occurred in just 11x 0.87 = 9.57% of all families based on adult ASB or 26 x 0.87 = 22.6% based on child ASB. N.B. ‘success’ involved just several percent of the individual adults and children in the project. Individuals commit offences. Note that in ‘turned around’ families ASB incidents are still occurring at up to 40% of the project entry rate (3). This criterion uses a rather low threshold to claim success and is not known to the public at large who are told ASB has been eliminated. PM Cameron famously said at the start of the TF programme that no TFP bounties would be paid unless ‘anti-social behaviour stops completely, and I mean completely’. Yet again we have no information on the longer term sustainability of these improvements beyond 6 months. In earlier FIP projects a claimed 85% of families ‘turned around’ on ASB fell to 35% within 14 months (4 ).
In reporting TFP results local authorities happily copy the DfC&LG in making wildly inaccurate claims of success. In business such false product performance claims would surely result in legal action for false advertising or fraud.
3.4. Minor Offending Rate.
At project entry 31% of families had one or more minors with an ‘offence’ as defined by the TFP. 69% of families had no minors offending. Nationally just 16% of individual minors in the projects had ‘offended’. 84% had not offended. An ‘offence’ is defined as ‘a formal court or out of court disposal’. These include reprimands, warnings, cautions, penalty notices, fines, orders and custody (3). This is a very wide net in terms of implied severity of offence. We have no published information on severity but recall that only 1.2% of the Wirral project children had received ASBOs or ABCs. The author made a FoIA request to Wirral Council requesting details of the more serious offending ‘disposals’. The answer was
‘This information is not available as we did not record a breakdown of sentences or fines.
Children were identified through having an offence as defined by the TFP financial framework’
In other words a box was ticked somewhere: severity evidence was not recorded…the payment system did not require it. Such evidence might undermine the DfC&LG claims about the high criminality of the families and children. Indeed a similar FoIA request to the DfC&LG confirmed that
‘Details of sentencing are not available through the Family Monitoring Data’
The minor offending success criterion called for a 33% fall in offending rate by all minors in the family over 6 months. It is claimed that 82% achieved this. This implies that 31 x 0.82 = 25.4% of families were ‘turned around’, perhaps 13% of project minors.
Note that in the ‘successful’ families minor offending rates could still be up to 67% of the entry level.(3). Yet again the improvement was only monitored over a 6 month period. What happened after close supervision and support ended? The Ministry of Justice tells us that the current youth re-offending rate amounts to 36.7% in a year and ~65% longer term.
3.5 The Overall ‘Crime / ASB / Education’ Success Claims
According to the DfC&LG data base 77.2% of Wirral project families had been ‘turned around’ in the ‘crime / ASB / education’ area. How was this number obtained? According to the TF financial framework tables (3) a payment of £700 per family is made when all crime / ASB / education sub-criteria are met. Recall that families are selected on the basis of having multiple problems. If we applied the criteria rigorously this would imply that for families with all three sub-problems no more than 22.6% were ‘turned around’. The 77.2% estimate assumes that each of the families involved had only one of the sub-problems in the cluster although these problems are significantly correlated. That is we have a doubtful claim of 29 + 25.4 + 22.6 = 77% of project families ‘turned around’.
This headline figure is grossly misleading when we recall that 87% of the project children had no fixed school exclusions; 93.5% of adults had no ASB incidents; 89.6% of children had no ASB incidents; 84% of project minors had not offended; all measured at project entry. N.B. if a family was selected on ‘local discretion’ (to get the numbers up to the local target) it was deemed to be ‘turned around’ if only one of the three criteria in the crime / ASB / education arena was met. By lumping together results for sub-criteria and reporting an overall figure, without comment, a false impression is created that the families had high levels of crime and ASB which the projects have greatly reduced. This fits with the government’s narrative of the criminal, dysfunctional families responsible for the ‘moral collapse’ of the country. This can only be seen as a deliberate and unacceptable distortion of the evidence. The only statistic vaguely in line with the headline claims is that 37% of children in the families had reduced unauthorised absences from school. Temporary success in significantly reducing absences is a legitimate and welcome claim but there is a very big difference between reduced school absences in children and a high, non-existent incidence of adult criminality and ASB falsely claimed to be greatly reduced by the TFP.
4. National ‘Troubled Family’ Characteristics
If criminality and ASB were at low frequency in the families why else were they targeted, other than truancy? In fact they were targeted because of ‘risk factors’: being poor, unemployed and in social housing, with high levels of mental and physical health problems and disabilities …and therefore costing the state too much in benefits and social support (8). As PM Cameron told us: they are a costly nuisance.
‘They [the troubled families] are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society. Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A cult of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through the generations… These families cost us £9 billion per year.’
The PM, December 2011
Cameron also used the familiar derogatory tags: ‘shameless’, ‘criminal’, etc…We will see that for a very large proportion of families these claims are grossly false. Most of the families are not involved in crime, nor had addiction problems. They were merely chronically ill or disabled, socially inadequate, unable to work, having more children than average and poor. Another shared characteristic stands out over the history of family intervention (4, 5). The families were carefully selected for their compliance with the process. That is, they were those who could be bullied into cooperating by ‘assertive, non-negotiable’ interventions and threats of ‘tough sanctions’: benefit cuts, eviction and removal of children into care. Even so large numbers of families typically dropped out. The TF Programme follows the same pattern. Let us take a quote from Dame Louise Casey, the Troubled Families Tsar, to give a flavour of the approach
‘We are not running some cuddly social workers’ programme…we should be better at talking about things like shame and guilt…we have lost the ability to be judgemental because we worry about being seen as nasty to poor people’
In many cases local authorities discovered that their pro-rated family number targets, assigned by the DfC&LG on the official criteria, could not be met. This problem was met by allowing ‘local discretion’. According to the NAO
‘over 50% of local authorities used domestic violence or abuse, drugs, alcohol or substance abuse, and mental health for their criteria.’
In some councils unambiguous measures of deprivation alone, such as having free school meals or receiving a carers allowance, were used to target families. In fact issues such as drug and alcohol abuse were at a low frequency but they helped to get the family numbers up, secure the bounty money, and avoid embarrassment at the DfC&LG.
If you include a long enough list of target sub-criteria you can get any number of families you require. This kind of intervention programme design is perfectly acceptable to politicians if it is to be applied to powerless, underclass ‘folk devils’ already disdained by an ignorant public (6). However if this cavalier, subjective, sloppy, approach to state intervention design was used in a major public health initiative, say on cancer, the government would be vilified and the public outraged.
The best source of data to date on family characteristics is the report ‘National Evaluation of the TF Programme’; ECORYS, July 2014. We learn that 74% of families are unemployed. 97% are in state supported housing : 70% in housing associations; 18% in private rented accommodation; 9% in temporary accommodation i.e. technically homeless. In addition we learn that 27% are in rent arrears. We learn that families have adult and child health problems with the following high frequencies
Adult problems Child problems
Mental health 45% 33%
Long standing illness or disability 33 19
Children with SEN statements - 39
Children in special schools - 28
Children with school behaviour issues - 46
Children with safeguarding issues - 34
Parenting issues (defined by social workers) - 66% of families -
The government and PM Cameron, regularly stressed that in addition to being criminal the families have high levels of drug and alcohol abuse. However we find that only 12% of adults are alcohol dependent and only 13% are dependent on non-prescription drugs. Only 3% were receiving formal treatment for addiction. What we actually see are high levels of physical and mental health issues and evidence for a high level of child mental health and learning disability problems resulting in SENs and school behaviour issues. Two thirds of the families are finding it difficult to look after their children. These are not lifestyle choices. These are families with severe problems, not families causing problems ...other than high state support costs. Remember that on Wirral 93.5% of adults and 89.6% of children were not involved in ASB and crime. Only 1.2% of children had an ASBO or ABC. What successive governments call ‘irresponsibility’ is a reflection of socially inadequate, sick parents failing to cope with disabled children. This is not the claimed ‘moral degeneracy’ supposedly justifying state bullying, sanctions and inhumane invitations to the families to feel ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’.
We can look at this in another way which may give some insight into the families’ conditions. The 120,000 families represent 0.6% of the ~20 million families nationally. We know the families are at the bottom of society financially and most are mentally disordered and cognitively inadequate in one way or another. Let’s consider IQ, a parameter not, unfortunately, explicitly measured in the projects. The standardised IQ distribution is normally distributed with a mean of 100 points and a standard deviation of 15 points. What is the upper IQ threshold for the lowest 0.6 % of the population? Consulting standard tables we find an IQ of ~ 62. If societal ‘performance’ correlated perfectly with IQ all our families would have IQs less than 62. That is, in the moderate learning disability to severe learning disability, range. In many civilised democracies the cut off for adult ‘legal responsibility’ is an IQ of 70. The author suggests that it is not surprising that some of our project families (11% on Wirral) fall foul of the law. The prevalence of a general learning disability (IQ<70) in young offenders is 9.2 X that in the general population. The prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders is 16.6 X greater (9).
5. Troubled Families Programme National ‘Savings’ Claims
In March 2015 the DfC&LG website announced an analysis of the ‘savings’ obtained as a result of the TF Programme. Note that these were projected savings based on estimated historical costs per family and future hypothetical costs using a ‘calculator’, both requiring many, complex assumptions (7). In ‘The Benefits of the TFP to Taxpayers’ report 2015 we read that
‘Over the last few months the TFP has been working with a small group of ‘exemplar’councils to develop and complete this piece of work.’
We do not know how or why this ‘small’ sample group was chosen. We do not know how representative, or not, it was of the overall programme. It involved 7 councils out of 152, or 4.6%. The use of small, unrepresentative, samples to justify intervention success claims has an 18 year history. Typically local authorities collected data on only 22 to 29 of the 39 family problem indicators. One local authority had just 14 out of 39 indicators recorded. Yet we learned that nationally 117,910 families had been processed. 95,163 had met the ‘crime / ASB / education’ criterion or 80.6%. 10,508 had met the employment criterion, some 8.9%. Overall, families ‘claimed’ to be turned around’ amounted to 89.5%. But remember our many earlier caveats. Remember also this ‘improvement’ had been monitored for only six months. Here are the claimed key costs.
A TF on average ‘cost taxpayers’ £26,000 per annum before project entry (based on benefits, social care and justice, estimated costs). The ‘most complex cases’ cost £44,000 per annum ‘on average’ whatever that means. There is no sign of the £75K average cost per family implied by the initial £9 billion savings promise from the government which was used to justify the programme.
Cost of intervention per family £5,214. Average financial benefit £11,200 per family.
The implied total saving claimed by Eric Pickles becomes £1.18 billion.
The TFP we are told repeatedly, is aimed at families who cost the state excessive amounts of money because of their lifestyles and bad behaviour. A typical TF allegedly cost £26K per annum before reprogramming. By a remarkable coincidence £26K was also the benefit cap set by the Coalition government. An interesting question is how we might explain it by looking at a family with the same demographics and medical problems as the typical TF. We can approximate the cost by consulting government benefit and other databases. We know that 83% of the families subsist on out of work benefits; 74% get income support; 88.6% get housing benefit; 83% get council tax credit. They are very poor.
In 2014 JSA for a family with 2.5 children was £86 per week. Our families have 1.7 adults on average. The unemployment cost is roughly 0.74 x 1.7 x 86 x 52 = 5.63K per annum.
Child tax credit would be £2.8K per child with an additional £3.14K for any disabled child. Recall 19% have a child with a long standing illness or disability and 39% have a child with an SEN statement.
Let’s say that 25% of children count as disabled. The cost is then 2.5 x 2.8 + 0.625 x 3.14 = 8.96K per annum.
All of the families are in social housing or temporary accommodation. Housing benefit for a 2.5 children family is £93 per week. The annual cost is £4.84K.
The UK average child social services cost is £14.36 per week per child or £1.87K per annum for 2.5 children. However for the poorest group of families the cost is 14.36+56.3 = £70.6 per week per child. For the poorest families the cost would be £9.2K per annum.
Having taken out the cost of adult social care in care homes or at home an estimate of the non-residential social services cost for working age adults is £2.2K per annum.
So for families demographically like ours, troubled or not, the benefits and social support costs could be roughly
5.63+8.96+4.84+1.87 (or 9.2K) = 21.3 to 28.6K per annum.
However in estimating this cost we have not included any consideration of criminal justice costs which our TFs all supposedly generate. But we are told the TFs cost on average £26K per annum before project entry. It looks as though most of the cost of our families is related to their family demographics, disabilities and lack of work. Unless we gas the children, or cure chronic illnesses and disabilities, these costs are not going to disappear just because a family is in a project. These families are being denigrated and condemned because they make legitimate claims under the rules the state itself set up. Is that logical? Is that fair? As for work, the TFP got an adult into employment for six months in just 8.9% of families nationally but initially 74.2% were unemployed.
On the Wirral the success rate was 2.6%. We can check out the implications using the published claims. The average saving is said to be £11.2K per annum. So the average expected cost per family, post project, must be 26 – 11.2 = 14.8K per annum.
So even on the government claimed figures, 14.8 x 100 / 26 = 56.9% of the initial costs are still there although 8.9% of families have gained work and 80.6% of families met the ‘crime / ASB / education’ criterion. In total 89.5% of families are ‘turned around’. Is the government really saying that the remaining 56.9% of the original costs are now due solely to the 100 – 89.5 = 10.5% of families not ‘turned around’? Or is the ‘turned around’ figure political window dressing, not closely related to the actual composition
of a typical ‘family cost to the state’? Let us see.
100 x (74.2 – 8.9) / 74.2 = 88% of the entry unemployed families are still unemployed. The average cost saving from employment must be ~ (1-0.88) x 5.63 = 0.68K per annum. This compares with the ‘gera job bounty’ of 0.8K per family. We still have 11.2 – 0.68 = 10.5K projected saving per family unaccounted for. Only the 9.2K child social services cost comes near this amount, or JSA plus housing benefit at 10.47K. Perhaps the government has plans for the families we do not yet know. In May 2015 the new majority Conservative government announced that, initially, the total benefit cap per family would be reduced from £26K to £23K. This is still not enough to explain the TFP projections. The pre-election Conservative promise was for a cut of £12 billion a year in benefits.
The DfC&LG also tells us that 5.21K per family was spent on ‘intervention’ during the projects. As of March 2015 117,910 families had been processed so the total cost to date must be 5.21 x 117,910 = £ 614.8 million. However the TFP programme cost was flagged as £448 million based on paying £4,000 per ‘turned around’ family. With 105,600 turned around the total spend must be ~£422.6 million +3,200 x 12,310 = £462 million. We must assume that up to 614.8 – 462 = £152.8 million was associated costs paid by local authorities themselves. But as Eric Pickles said in 2014, it’s worth it.
‘We have sometimes run away from categorising, stigmatising, laying blame…It’s time to wake up to that …to realise the state is no longer willing to subsidise a life of complete non-fulfilment on just about every level’
For ‘complete non-fulfilment’ read: being socially inadequate, poor, chronically sick and disabled. As Pickles reported on his TFP ‘triumph’ in the HoC (10th March, 2015) a few outstanding points emerged. Hilary Benn asked about the £9 billion which, according to Pickles and Cameron the troubled families cost us, in comparison with the £1.2 billion now supposedly ‘saved’ by the TFPs. Pickles replied
‘The Rt. Hon. Gentleman made a number of points on how we can demonstrate success and square the £1.2 billion with the £9 billion …this is notoriously difficult territory because governments of all types are absolutely terrible at measuring outcomes…’
Perhaps this is because some ministers and their preferred, go to, civil servants have a cavalier attitude to the rules of evidence. Consider Dame Louise Casey who has long been central in intervention schemes for dysfunctional families including the TFPs.
‘Topic for the evening: ‘Research: Help or Hindrance’. Hindrance thanks very much...
There is an obsession with evidence based policy…If No. 10 says bloody evidence based
policy to me one more time, I’ll deck them one.’
Home Office / ACPO formal dinner; June 2005.
The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC news, etc, etc…
6. An 18 Year History of Failure
The TFPs are direct design descendents of various Family Intervention Project schemes going back to 1998. This author has analysed all the official government sponsored evaluation reports from their beginning (see bibliography 1 to 17, below). All share the serious technical failings described for the TFPs. All show very limited changes in the families even if we accept the highly doubtful ‘official’ data. Success criteria are often laughable. The evaluations and their conclusions would never pass the peer review process of a respectable journal in the social or medical sciences. I understand that the collected TFP data are not even recognised as official government statistics. We should ask on what basis can the proposed spending of up to £1 billion (8) on TFP Phase 2 be justified, given the above evidence?
2 October 2016
References
www.wirral.gov.uk/news/17-03-15
www.catch-22.org.uk/programmes-services/wirral-intensive-family-intervention
How successful were the projects?
Stephen Crossley; https //akindof trouble.wordpress.co
8. ‘Financial Framework for the Expanded TFP’; DfC&LG website, November
2014.
young offenders’; The Children’s Commissioner, October 2012.
Bibliography of TFP / FIP Evaluations 2000 - 2015
1. ‘Evaluation of The Dundee Family Project’; Glasgow University, 2000.
www.Scotland.gov.uk/library3/housing/edfp
2. ‘The Dundee Family Project: A Commentary On The Government Evaluation
Report’; D P Gregg January 2007.
3. ‘ASB Intensive Family Support Projects-An Evaluation of Six Pioneering Projects’
Centre for Social Inclusion website, Sheffield Hallam University. (see also ‘ASB
IFS Projects’, Housing Research Summary No. 230, 2006; Department For
Communities & Local Government)
4. ‘The Longer Term Outcomes For Families Who Had Worked With Intensive Family
Support Projects’; Department For Communities & Local Government (see also
DfCLG Housing Research Summary No 240, 2008)
www.communities.gov.uk/publications/housing/familysupportprojects
5. ‘Interim Review of the Government Evaluation report On Six ASB FIPs’;
D P Gregg, March 2007.
6. ‘Review of Claimed ‘Longer Term Outcomes’ From Six ASB Family Intervention
Projects’; D P Gregg, 2008.
7. ‘Family Intervention Projects: An Evaluation of Their Design, Setup & Early
Outcomes’; National Centre For Social research, 2008.
www.dcsf.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/ACF44.pdf
8. ‘A Review of the report ‘Family Intervention Projects: An Evaluation of Their
Design, Setup & Early Outcomes’; D P Gregg, October 2008.
9. ‘Intensive Family Support can turn around ASB in 8 / 10 cases’; Home Office press
release on October 30 2006; see also ASB practitioners Area , HO website.
www.respect.gov.uk/members/news/articel.aspx?id=8792
10. ‘Disabled Peoples’ Experiences of ASB and Harassment In Social Housing:
A Critical review’; CEIR, Sheffield Hallam University, for the Disability Rights
Commission, August 2007. See the DRC website or
www.shu.ac/research/ceir/DRC
11. ‘Antisocial Behaviour & Disability In The UK’; CEIR, Sheffield Hallam University
: People, Places & Policy Online 2007; 2 /1 , pp 37-47
12. ‘Success for family intervention projects’; Dept. For Children, Schools &
Families press release, 10th July 2008.
13. ‘Tackling families’ anti-social behaviour’; National Centre for Social Research,
Research Findings section, 2008.
14. ‘DCSF-RR 215’, NCSR government sponsored report, March 2010.
15. ‘Family Intervention Projects’; David P Gregg, Centre for Crime & Justice Studies
policy review paper, 2011.
16. ‘Family Intervention Projects: More Coalition Policy Based Evidence’
David P Gregg, published by the CfC&JS in abridged form, January 2013.
17. ‘Troubled Families: state lies, demonization & voodoo social engineering’;
David P Gregg, Green Man Books, 2015.