A relatively small number of problem families soak up adisproportionate amount of local resources. A range of agencies including, police,probation, social services, schools, housing, the benefits agency and the localGP’s our focusing a lot of time, professional expertise and scarce resource onthe same few families. What is required is a coordinated response across agencyboundaries and what better way to ensure this than by rewarding councils whocan demonstrate that they have reduced truancy, juvenile offending, anti socialbehaviour or unemployment amongst these targeted families. This payment by results system gives councils £3,900per family if they can hit targets such as getting their children to school 85%of the academic year or reducing “nuisance neighbourliness” by 60%.You would have thought that after the A4e scandal thatthe Government would have been wearier of payment by results schemes whichencourage organisation to manipulate the system and even fiddle the figures toget the money. Its not hard to imagine a situation in which as the end of theacademic year approaches a school is put under pressure not to suspend or excludean unruly pupil in case this jeopardises the reward payment or a housing officeis “encouraged” to view the latest incident between a family and theirneighbours as something other than “nuisance” behaviour. Having identified that a council has x problem familieswithin its boundaries why doesn’t the government simply multiply that by £3,900and give it as a three year grant to support joint initiatives to provide extrahelp to these families. A condition of the grant being that a local universityevaluates the effectiveness of the initiates and the government agrees to fundwhat works. Simple really just give up micro managing local councils and reallyadopting the principles of localism.Blair McPherson author of equipping managers for an uncertainfuture published by www.russellhouse.co.uk
