Government misled public with 99% success rate claim on troubled families, say MPs
I find this a really interesting story. We do a lot of evaluation and I am always suspicious when hype challenges facts – which it often does in our post truth world. A number of rural councils were involved in this scheme, which the stats now tell us didn’t deliver all that was ascribed to it. The story tells us:
Claims that a flagship intervention project had turned around the lives of 99% of England’s most troubled families were misleading, a Commons committee has said.
The government also overstated the financial benefits of the scheme when it claimed it had saved taxpayers £1.2bn, MPs found.
They attacked the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for “unacceptable” delays and “obfuscation” in publishing an evaluation of the troubled families programme.
Rewarding local authorities that carried out the programme encouraged “perverse” behaviour, with some families pushed through the scheme too quickly, the public accounts committee (PAC) also found.
MPs called for the government to review the payment-by-results system for the programme to stop councils trying to speed families through the system. Local authorities claimed reward payments for 116,654 families out of the maximum 117,910 for which they could claim in the first phase, the report said.
MPs said the government had failed to prove the effectiveness of the initiative, which was launched by David Cameron in the wake of the 2011 riots to turn around the lives of 120,000 families in England by 2015 and later extended to help an additional 400,000 families.
It follows the release of research in October by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), which had been commissioned to carry out an official national study, that found the scheme had “no significant impact”.