NEARLY a third of troubled families in Worcestershire have had their fortunes turned around in the last two years, new figures reveal.
The statistics released on Wednesday (October 29) by the Cabinet Office show a total of 291 of the 900 families identified under the Troubled Families programme within the county in 2012 have been helped.
Families are included in the scheme for a number of reasons including being involved in anti-social behaviour, having a child excluded from school or regularly truanting and having an adult on out-of-work benefits.
They are considered ‘turned around’ when one adult in the household has moved off out-of-work benefits and into continuous employment, with other aims of the scheme including getting children back into school, cutting youth crime and anti-social behaviour and reducing the costs to the taxpayer of tackling their problems.
In all 13,960 families have been identified under the scheme across the West Midlands and 7,783 are considered turned around.
Programme lead Louise Casey said: “This programme is working so effectively because it deals with the whole family and all of their problems, with one key worker going in through the front door and getting to grips with an average of nine different problems, rather than a series of services failing to engage or get the family to change.”
