Ministers’ claims about troubled families scheme ‘grandiose’, MPs told
This story suggests to me a very interesting debate about how we interpret data. The scheme under review has run in a number of rural locations and I would be interested in any Hinterland reader reflections on its impact. More generally does “payment by results” really deliver public sector improvement – especially on a tilted playing field where issues such as rurality are often not factored into any assessment? The article itself tells us:
Dawes (permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government) said that while the payment-by-results method had “galvanised” changes in the way services were delivered, officials were exploring other ways of financing the scheme in future.
MPs challenged officials as to why the evaluation was slipped out without fanfare at 6.15pm on Monday evening, more than a year later than its original publication date.
The committee’s chair, Meg Hillier, demanded to know if the report, which had delivered a devastating critique of one of the government’s top policy priorities, had been delayed as a way of suppressing its findings. She asked: “Who are you protecting in all of this? Are you protecting your department, your minister?”
Dawes denied the report had been buried and blamed some of the delays on problems with some of the data analysis carried out by members of the consortium of independent evaluators that produced the reports.
Casey (Former Head of the Programme) criticised individuals who had been involved in the evaluation and who made strong criticisms of the programme earlier this week, believed to be a reference to the economist Jonathan Portes, who accused ministers in an article in the Guardian of having misrepresented the troubled families data
Casey said: “I think that lots of comment made by those closely involved in the evaluation who have been leading in the press in the past few days has been unedifying.”