Time for tough love
Family intervention projects have been hailed as a major advance in dealing with the small but significant number of families whose behaviour blights neighbourhoods and costs public bodies hundreds of thousands of pounds. But a lack of resources could mean they fail to deliver on their initial promise, reports Grania Langdon-Down.
So-called ‘families from hell’ can have a devastating impact on their communities. They can also be an enormous drain on the resources of those public bodies – including local authorities – that have to deal year after year with the consequences of their behaviour.
Could Family Intervention Projects (FIPs) be the answer? Launched in 2006 as part of the government’s Respect Action Plan, pilot FIPs have offered families involved in persistent anti-social behaviour an intensive twin track approach of sanctions and support to help end cycles of drug and alcohol misuse, behavioural problems and poverty.
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) has been monitoring the pilots since 2007. It found that by October last year, 2,655 families had accepted an anti-social behaviour FIP. Just over a thousand had completed the intervention with a formal, planned exit, while 410 families had failed to engage with the programme.
Based on those families that formally completed an ASB FIP, the researchers found:
- A 64% reduction in anti-social behaviour
- A 58% reduction in truancy, exclusion and bad behaviour among children and young people
- A 70% reduction in drug and substance misuse, and
- A 53% reduction in alcoholism.
Other areas – such as child protection concerns, reports of domestic abuse and the percentage of families facing eviction – also saw significant reductions. Importantly, follow-up research, conducted by NatCen with 100 families a year after the FIP ended, found that the improvements were continuing.
Making the resources available
Bolstered by this research, the government has unveiled ambitious plans for a national roll-out of FIPs, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown announcing last year that it aims to help more than 50,000 families during the life of the next Parliament.
Funding for ASB FIPs is allocated to local authorities through the ring-fenced ‘Think Family Grant’. Housing Challenge Fund FIPs are run by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in partnership with the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Tenant Services Authority and National Housing Federation.
However, question marks have been raised over whether the amounts allocated will mean the projects will be stretched too thinly.
Caroline Hunter, professor of law at York University and a tenant at Arden Chambers, is concerned that the new projects are not being given the same resources as the initial pilot projects and so will find it harder to achieve successful results.
Hunter was part of the research team from the Centre for Social Inclusion at Sheffield Hallam University, which evaluated six pilot projects. They then went on to monitor 28 families who had worked with Intensive Family Support Projects over the period 2004-2007 and track them for one year. For seven out of ten families, positive changes had been sustained. However, just under a third of families continued to experience complaints about anti-social behaviour, placing the family home at risk.
“These projects are probably the most effective response to ASB that we have,” Hunter says. “Commentators have described FIPs as going back to old fashioned social work as provided in the 1970s when social workers had smaller caseloads. It’s a bit back to the future.
“But it is fair to say that the national roll-out has not had the intensive resources put into it that the pilots had. There is a danger that once the profile of FIPs is raised and more families are referred, they may become overstretched. Both our research and that of NatCen found families stayed in the projects a considerable time – [the NatCen research found families stayed an average of just over 12 months] – but the government is now talking about 13 weeks, which isn’t long at all.”
While the success rates identified by the NatCen research sound high, the key issue is whether this can be sustained once the families are back in the community, she says. “It is difficult to do follow up work as some of these families just disappear.”
There is also the question of value for money. Louise Casey, the government’s neighbourhood crime adviser, told the Home Affairs Select Committee last year that problem families can cost the taxpayer £330,000 a year each as police and social services attempt to tackle the consequences of bad behaviour.
This compared with the average cost of between £8,000 and £20,000 for providing intensive help for families, she said, adding: “I am very clear that we need to have residential projects that I would almost equate with taking a family into care.”
Hunter says the Centre for Social Inclusion did some work looking at whether the pilots provided value for money. “However, it is very hard to pin down what the other notional costs might be and to know what you are saving.”
A good FIT
There are three ways in which FIPs can be delivered: the majority offer outreach support to families in their own home; followed by support in temporary (non-secure) accommodation located in the community; and a very small number of residential core units where the whole family is effectively put in care and lives with project staff.
The latter two models led to the introduction of Family Intervention Tenancies (FITs) under Section 297 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008. Since January 2009, local authorities and registered social landlords may offer these tenancies where the tenant is likely to be evicted on the grounds of anti-social behaviour or, in the opinion of the landlord, could have been so evicted.
Under the tenancy, the family loses their security of tenure and must sign up to a behaviour support agreement, drawn up by the local FIP team, the agencies who are providing support, and the landlord. If they breach the agreement, they may face eviction.
According to government guidance on their usage, FITs are designed to be used where intensive support is being delivered to households who have been accommodated in dispersed accommodation or purpose-built units in order to help maximise the success of such support. They cannot be used if the behaviour support services are provided in situ through outreach support delivered in the household’s original home.
While FITs have been used by local authorities and have the backing of housing associations, few have been used by social housing landlords so far.
Jonathan Hulley, a partner with law firm Devonshires’ housing management department, acts for landlords, both local authorities and registered providers. He has a high success rate in securing ASBOs for clients and advises them on FITs – how they fit in with FIPs and how they can work in practice.
“I have knowledge of the legalities of them but not yet, unfortunately, much experience of how they actually work in practice,” he says. “I think they are a good idea because they give people a chance to address their behaviour. If you evict a family, they still need to be housed and it just becomes someone else’s responsibility.”
However, he says few FITs have been drawn up by social housing landlords because many local authorities cannot resource the network of support and counselling services that the family must engage with under the behaviour support agreement
FITs have no time limit on them but, Hulley says, government guidance is that they should be offered for at least one year so the family has sufficient time to demonstrate that they have reformed.
But what are the protections for tenants who sign away their security of tenure with a FIT? Hulley says landlords have to advise the families to get independent advice. “If you try to pull wool over their eyes and coerce them into signing a FIT, that could be challenged because social landlords are regarded as public authorities for the purposes of judicial review.”
He says there are few safeguards for tenants who fail to co-operate. “But if they do engage with the behavioural support agreement, then the landlord can sign them up as a secure tenant, if they are a local authority tenant, or as an assured tenant if they are a registered provider tenant. They have a choice.”
The housing charity Shelter runs two FIPs – one in Birmingham and one in Rochdale – in partnership with the local authority.
Policy officer Francesca Albanese, says FITs are designed for families with entrenched problems. “Often they aren’t just the perpetrators of ASB but often victims themselves. The families have to be given information about whether they want to move into a tenancy which gives them less security.
“We had issues with the tenancies initially because, under the legislation, families only had to be given 28 days’ notice to quit if they breached the agreement but often that isn’t straightforward. We successfully pushed for the guidance to allow families up to 12 weeks until the long term outcome of the children is decided.”
Child protection
The issue of child protection crops up consistently in these cases. Local authority lawyers can find that they are asked to intervene when a FIP has failed but it can also work the other way round.
Judith Gribble, senior solicitor (Social Care and Health) in South Tyneside’s Legal Services Section, describes two recent cases of chronic neglect, involving families with mental health issues, instability, prison and addictions.
“In each case we had gone to court for applications for care orders. One family had four children aged from 11 to one and the other had seven children. The baby twins had been adopted very quickly but there were five others aged from six to three. The county court refused to give us the orders and said try something else. The FIP team became involved and, nine months on, one of the families has made such progress the intervention has been closed by the team. The other family is also doing well.”
Gribble says it is encouraging to see how the families have improved. “They are never going to do brilliantly but they are doing okay and the alternative is three children being adopted and the older ones spending the rest of their childhood in long-term foster care.”
Christina Blacklaws is child care representative on the Law Society Council and senior partner of leading family law firm, Blacklaws Davis. She says many of the local authority FIPs have “really got their acts together” over the last couple of years and now provide a comprehensive and supportive assessment regime.
“In one of our cases, where five children and their parents had a range of special needs, the local authority’s initial care plan was for removal. However, the court decided against removal and the local authority had to put a FIP in place. The family have been able to work successfully with the family intervention team and have found their support very helpful.
“The only negative that I can see to greater use of FIPs is the family’s perception of fairness and objectivity. However, any interventions which enable children to remain safely with their families has got to be a good thing and those local authorities who have recognised this and put in place successful FIPs are to be warmly congratulated.”
Running a successful FIP programme does throw up a range of legal issues, and one key area is over a client’s personal information held by agencies. As a general rule, they owe their client a duty of confidentiality and cannot share their information with third parties, though there are exceptions – for instance, the public interest in safeguarding a child’s welfare overrides the need to keep information confidential.
Shelter’s Birmingham FIP, in partnership with the city council, has drawn up an information sharing protocol with Birmingham and Solihull Adult Mental Health Trust. This details confidentiality, consent forms, data protection and information sharing and provides common boundaries so they can request or offer information about the families.
While there may be obstacles in the way, it nevertheless does look as though ‘tough love’ can work.
Grania Langdon-Down is a freelance journalist.
