News

Hundreds Of 'Troubled' Families Targeted By Scheme

Thursday September 13 2012

BARNSLEY Council could be paid £4,000 for each troubled family it manages to turn around under a new government scheme.

More than 600 families who have been involved in crime and antisocial behaviour; whose children are not in school; have adults on out-of-work benefits; or are causing costs to the public purse will be targeted as part of the scheme.

For each one that gets their problems resolved, the council will be paid £4,000 which could earn it more than £2 million over the next three years.

The government will pay by results - which means the council has to tackle truancy, youth crime and antisocial behaviour, or puts parents on a path back to work.

The government estimates it costs £10,000 to 'turn around' a problem family and councils are expected to find the rest of the £6,000 per family to match fund the programme.

Families will get a key worker and specialist services to help work though their problems.

A spokeswoman for the council said: "Preparatory work is well underway, supported by two partner task groups which include representatives from South Yorkshire Police, family intervention project, South Yorkshire probation service, public health, the youth offending team, work and skills, and children and young people's services.

"The groups have met once to establish some of the early preparatory work on identifying the families."

Reply Posted by Jamey on Thursday September 13 2012 at 16:16

What about the rest of the families in barnsley, the ones that don't commit crime, that don't drink excessivley, that don't take drugs, the ones that go to work and work 40+ hours per week just so they can pay their bills and feed their families and have nothing left to treat their children. Basically we all live in Barnsley so we have all had a simular schooling and the same choices to make in life, but us people that choose to work and provide get nothing in return and the people that choose to sit on their back side and let their kids run wild get all the benifits. If you ask me, the money that the council will get for helping these families should be put back into the system and help us other families with lower rents and council tax and then it works both ways, they get the troubled families on the straight and narrow and also help the rest of us families struggling with our bills and the risk of getting arrears.

Reply Posted by greenginger on Thursday September 13 2012 at 19:26

@Jamey what you are not taking into account is the amount of money that is spent already on these families. For example police, social services, probation officers, truancy officers, pcso's, housing dept and housing costs and so on and so on.
What the government and council hope to achieve is to try to spend money to educate, decriminalise these people and help future generations by way of their kids.
It is easy when we are all struggling financially to demand money or services for ourselves but as decent moral people we don't really need it and we can get through these tough times however if we leave these problem families alone they will spread and become even worse and more of a drain on tax payers.

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