Does the 'troubled families' agenda demonstrate joined-up government?

What does joined-up government actually mean? A common theme of our work at the Institute is that government doesn’t always ‘join-up’ as well as it might. Think of how it typically goes about setting budgets and saving money – it’s usually done on a department by department basis, with ministers making trade-offs and deals to protect their own budgets and programmes. Departments are primarily loyal to their own goals and their minister rather than a cross-government agenda. Out in local communities, policy and public services can be just as siloed. As we concluded at the end of the first year of our ‘Connecting Policy with Practice’ programme, (and we will be returning to address this soon) “people’s lives, particularly those who are vulnerable and excluded, are messy and complicated. Practice suggests that services work best when they deal with the ‘whole person’, start with their needs and collaborate across different agencies.” Isn’t that exactly what the troubled families work is supposed to do? Yes. Recently the redoubtable Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a report of its inquiry into ‘programmes to help families facing multiple challenges’. Confusingly there are two government programmes aimed at helping these families, DCLG's Troubled Families initiative and the DWP-led Families with Multiple Problems. The PAC praised the way the Troubled Families programme “has helped to galvanise a range of local services around families”, giving them a single point of contact to help navigate the multitude of agencies they would otherwise have to deal with individually – social workers, job centre advisers, mental health teams, youth offending teams and the like. Does that model work? Largely. A tried and tested model is to appoint a ‘keyworker’ to coordinate services and advocate for the family or individual that needs support. Evidence suggests that this works, but measuring impacts is notoriously tricky. The PAC was pretty scathing about how government collects and shares data on performance and value for money on this issue, something the National Audit Office has also identified. (Elsewhere there are some serious concerns about the starting assumptions of the data used to identify 'troubled' families). Committee members were also concerned that the programmes will not meet their targets.  This doesn’t entirely surprise me – all of the voluntary sector organisations we’ve been working with who help people with complex needs talk about how challenging it is and how long it takes.  At one roundtable, a participant described the challenge of getting some of the most excluded young offenders to even engage with services, the first step in helping them fulfil their potential. Just getting them out of bed in the mornings, to turn up to appointments, to start to trust others takes patience, he noted, and often more time than short term contracts allow. So is this the future model for joined-up government? Whether the troubled families agenda will last across future political cycles remains to be seen. While the PAC report praised the way it has joined up central and local services, it does criticise co-ordination within Whitehall where the two very similar programmes were developed separately, “resulting in confusion and a lack of integration”. Whitehall itself will need to coordinate more closely if it is to promote cohesion across the public sector. Of course the longer term prize is to make services more joined up to start with rather than to run top-down coordination programmes like these ones. Any government should wish to avoid what Julian Corner of the Lankelly Chase Foundation describes as the “surreal levels of inefficiency” that can occur when working with people with multiple needs and the rather bizarre situation where government will “employ one set of workers to try to persuade another set of workers to do the right thing”.