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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11534619/manifesto-policies-summary.html

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As David Cameron looks set to remain Prime Minister, we take a look at the Conservatives' pledges made during the election campaign

David Cameron looks set to walk back into Downing Street after a series of defeats for Labour and the Liberal Democrats left the Conservatives as the largest party.

But what did the Conservatives pledge during the general election campaign? Here is a reminder.

A future Conservative government will double the free hours of childcare for working parents of three and four-year-olds from 15 hours to 30 hours a week during term-time.

From 2017, parents will benefit from up to £5,000 worth of free childcare a year in a policy designed to help parents work.

The Tories will also fund 15 hours a week of free childcare for all disadvantaged two-year-olds, worth £2,500 a year per child.

Mr Cameron said: "With a Conservative Government, you will get 30 hours of free childcare a week - equivalent to £5000 a year. So we say to the working parents of three and four year olds: Five thousand pounds of savings for you, only with five more years of Conservatives in government."

The move will be paid for by reducing tax relief on pension contributions for people earning more than £150,000.

The number of hours of free childcare will be doubled by the Conservatives

Mr Cameron has committed to raising the threshold at which the higher rate is paid from £42,385 to £50,000. The move will lift 800,000 people out of the 40p rate.

The Prime Minister also announced plans to raise the personal income tax allowance by £2,000 to £12,500 by 2020, a move which will cost the Treasury £5.6billion a year.

Pensioners over the age of 75 will be guaranteed same-day access to a family doctor as part of a "total revolution" of GP services in Britain.

The Conservatives have also committed to a minimum £8billion of extra funding for the NHS every year by 2020.

The commitment makes Labour the only party to have failed to signed up to the extra funding, amid warnings that Ed Miliband is putting patients at risk.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has said that Britain must 'face up' to the 'demographic time-bomb' caused by the rapidly ageing population.

David Cameron has revived the right to buy scheme and announced that people earning the minimum wage will not pay tax under a future Conservative government.

The move will be seen as an attempt to emulate the success of Margaret Thatcher by broadening the party's base support outside the Middle Class.

The original right to buy scheme, which was set up in the 1980s, was credited with taking the Conservatives to election victory under Baroness Thatcher.

However, the current rules make it difficult for 1.3million people living in housing association properties to purchase their homes. The Tories will give housing association tenants the full right to buy discount.

Mrs Thatcher hands over the keys to 39 Amersham Road, the first Right to Buy council house

No-one on minimum wage will ever pay tax

The Conservatives will also "entrench in law" the principle that no-one working up to 30 hours a week on the minimum wage should ever pay income tax.

Under a Conservative government the minimum wage will be linked to the personal allowance, which the Tories want to raise to £12,500 by the end of the next Parliament.

They want to "permanently link" increases in the personal allowance to the increases in the minimum wage rather than inflation.

The approach means that if the minimum wage rises faster than expected, workers will still be exempt from paying income tax.

It is also an acutely political move, designed to steal Labour's thunder after Ed Miliband announced plans to increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020.

Mr Cameron said: "We're going to make sure work really pays in our country - not just now, but always. If Conservatives are in Government, we will change the law so that no-one earning the Minimum Wage will pay income tax - yes: the tax-free Minimum Wage.

"Its purpose - to link the personal tax allowance to inflation, so the lowest earners weren't over taxed and taxed by stealth. And what we're announcing today is the modern, compassionate Conservative version of that change.

"It means we can proudly say that this is the party of working people. For millions of workers not just the party of low income tax - the party of no income tax."

No-one working up to 30 hours per week on minimum wage will pay income tax

British defence chiefs have been furiously lobbying the Tories to make the commitment amid fears for Britain's military capability and status as a global power.

Barack Obama and the head of the US Army have also urged David Cameron to commit to the spending target amid concerns that failing to so do so could set a damaging example to other European countries.

However, the Conservatives have put off a decision about any future commitment until the spending review after the General Election.

The manifesto highlights the Conservative commitment to a 1 per cent real terms increase in spending on defence equipment and increasing the size of reserve forces.

He will reiterate the Conservative's commitment to replacing all four of Britain's nuclear submarines at a cost of £25 billion.

Party stance...

Conservative: End to cuts in the size of the regular Army, and equipment spending to rise by 1 per cent a year in real terms.

Labour: Immediate strategic defence review, with cuts to Army top brass looming.

Liberal Democrats: Britain to share and pool resources with other EU and Nato members. Trident downgraded.

Ukip: Increased defence spending to £50 billion, and a new 'Veteran's Administration'.

Green: "Immediate" nuclear disarmament, scrapping the Army and massive defence budget cuts.

SNP: Scrapping Trident, and creating a 20,000 strong independent Scottish Defence Force.

Projected UK defence spending

Telegraph verdict

The big parties think there are no votes in defence, so they won't promise to meet the Nato standard of 2pc of GDP on defence. At a time of of rising tensions with Russia and turmoil in the Middle East, that's surely shortsighted. And how depressing that supposedly serious leaders can't put the national interest above electoral calculation

At least 500 extra free schools with enough places for 270,000 children will be built if the Conservatives win the general election.

This will mean that the Free Schools programme - championed by Michael Gove when he was appointed education secretary in 2010 - will have continued at the same rate as the past three years.

However, the Conservatives have not made a commitment to building a new generation of grammar schools - a move which will infuriate traditionalist Tories.

500 new free schools will be created by the Conservatives

The manifesto committed a Conservative Government to "prioritise brownfield development".

It said: "We will ensure that local people have more control over planning and protect the Green Belt. We will encourage more neighbourhood planning and protect the Green Belt.

"Neighbourhood planning gives more power to local people, allowing them to play a much stronger role in shaping their areas."

The manifesto will highlight the 1,400 communities, representing six million people, have now applied to draw up the plans to set out where development can take place. It will say: "We will encourage more communities to draw up such plans."

Brownfield developments will be prioritised by the Conservatives

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Conservative manifesto 2015: summary of key policies

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As David Cameron looks set to remain Prime Minister, we take a look at the Conservatives' pledges made during the election campaign David Cameron looks set to walk back into Downing Street after a series of defeats for Labour and the Liberal Democrats left the Conservatives as the largest party.

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The benefit change that affected almost 600,000 childrenThe Tories' two-child limit on benefits pushed millions of children deeper into poverty and meant 592,000 children went unsupported according to experts.Pioneered by welfare-slashing former Chancellor George Osborne, the limit prevents parents claiming Child Tax Credits or Universal Credit for "third or subsequent" children born after 6 April 2017 - a cut of up to £2,780 per child.That forces families to share the same budget they had for two children among three, four or more.Official figures show most families affected are already in work, making a mockery of Tory claims that the change is to encourage people into the job market.

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8. Left grieving families without bereavement benefitsPeople who lose their partner before pension age can claim a Bereavement Support Payment - worth up to £3,500, plus £350 a month for 18 months.But couples must be married or in a civil partnership to qualify - which deprives the benefit to 2,200 "cohabiting" couples with children each year.DWP slammed for leaving thousands of grieving families in limbo without benefitsThey won a victory in August 2018, when the Supreme Court ruled the situation was incompatible with human rights law.But 14 months later - the situation hasn't improved leaving thousands of people in desperate situations after the loss of a loved one.Bereavement Support Payments launched in 2017 as a "fair" replacement for the old system but have been slammed for hitting thousands of families with cuts.That is because while 52% were estimated to be better off than under the old system, 48% were worse off.The DWP said MPs had already fully debated whether to allow unmarried couples to claim when the benefit was approved.A DWP spokesman said: “We are committed to supporting people during bereavement and with the introduction of Bereavement Support Payment in April 2017, have widened the support available. This is, in addition, to help provided for co-habiting couples through the wider welfare system.

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/23/families-basic-social-structure-conservatives-penalising/

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In this regard we have much to learn from Europe in general and central Europe in particular. Take for instance Hungary, a country whose policies regarding women and families can lay claim to being among the most progressive in Europe. The support Hungary offers is truly staggering.

Public spending on families in the OECD is an average of 2.4 per cent of GDP. In 2019 Hungary is planning to transfer 4.6 per cent of GDP. And it is spending it across the board to combat not just the gender/pregnancy pay gap but everything that is associated with the pregnancy penalty.

This includes housing, where normally young couples would not be able to afford accommodation of sufficient size and who would otherwise create an asset-less class that was forever cut off from property. Plus, they try to enable mothers to find work after their children are born and maintain their connection with the labour market.

For example, every married couple where the woman's age is between 18 and 40 is eligible for an interest free loan of £31, 250 euros on a low repayment scheme, with 30 per cent written off on the birth of a second child. On the birth of the third the loan is entirely forgone.

Now Hungary, like much of central Europe, is in an understandable demographic panic about enormous losses in population, but such a transfer at least reverses the penalty for having large families.

In addition, rather than condemning young families to an asset-free future in rental accommodation, which is what happens in the UK, the Hungarians try to offer real security to family formation, including subsidised mortgage loans at 3 per cent of up to 46,875 euros for a three-child family, including further mortgage tax relief of 3,125 euros for the second child and 12,500 euros for the third. Other family inducements include grants towards a large car and, (this will appeal to Telegraph readers) complete exemption from income tax for a woman with four children or more.

The very fact that all this sounds so unusual should cause us to reflect on the actual price women pay for having children and what, if anything, we are prepared to do to compensate for such choices that, let's face it, are structurally necessary for society and fundamental to our social balance and economic cohesion.

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Families are our basic social structure. So why are the Conservatives penalising them?

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In this regard we have much to learn from Europe in general and central Europe in particular. Take for instance Hungary, a country whose policies regarding women and families can lay claim to being among the most progressive in Europe. The support Hungary offers is truly staggering.

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Outcomes : A small fall in take-up of paternity leave

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Outcomes : A small fall in take-up of paternity leave

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The number of women taking maternity leave increased between 2014-15 and 2019-20, but the number of men taking paternity leave fell slightly. In 2018-19, 31% of eligible new fathers took up their statutory two-week paternity leave, down from 34% in 2014-15.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-programme-guidance-2022-to-2025/chapter-2-delivering-supporting-families

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Supporting Families programme guidance 2022 to 2025
What does this document cover?
Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25
Who is it for?
Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts.

Local Authority sign up commitments

As part of the sign-up process for Supporting Families from April 2022, all upper-tier local authority Chief Executives will be asked to make several key commitments. The release of programme funding will be dependent upon agreement of these conditions and performance against these conditions will be considered before further funding is released.

Detailed Sign-Up Conditions

Performance requirements

To achieve successful outcomes with the minimum number of families allocated each year within the three-year programme by the end of March 2025.

Those who meet the minimum number of successful outcomes early will be expected to continue to provide progress information (families worked with and outcomes) up to the end of March 2025.

Submit quarterly progress information

To adhere to the full Supporting Families programme guidance

Resourcing the programme

To provide sufficient coordination to successfully deliver the programme and achieve these sign-up commitments, all local authorities must nominate a Senior Responsible Officer of at least Assistant Director level. The SRO should:
* Provide strategic oversight of the delivery of the programme in the local area, and be a champion of high-quality whole family working
* Work closely with relevant agencies and partners to develop and maintain a robust system of family support, and rebalance the system towards prevention and early intervention, that offers value for money for local authorities
* Be responsible for strategically aligning Supporting Families with all programmes and projects being developed/delivered in the Early Help space such as Family Hubs, Start for life, Reducing Parental Conflict, Violence Reduction Units and SAFE taskforces/Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces
* Lead the annual self-assessment process against the EHSG.

Local authorities must also nominate a Supporting Families Co-ordinator. The SFC should:
* Provide operational leadership for the programme across the partnership. This should include the promotion of whole family working and achieving successful family outcomes.
* To consider user experience and feedback when developing and delivering services for families
* Provide co-ordination across to other relevant national government programmes.
* Ensure information on family needs and successful family outcomes achieved is reported to the partnership and data governance boards to inform commissioning decisions.
* Leading the programme should be a substantive part of the SFCs role

All local authorities should be assured that they have sufficient data resource aligned to the Supporting Families programme to continue to progress against data maturity milestones as set out in the EHSG. Data teams could be integrated in strategic commissioning or business intelligence teams with oversight and/or management from a data lead. Data leads should report into the data governance board, coordinate the work of the team and facilitate data developments and sharing. The data lead should work closely and reports into the SFC/SRO. This ensures that a local authority is supported by a data team integrated in the wider analytics associated with Early Help and Statutory Childrens' Services and that their main focus remains on the delivery of strong performance data and analytics to continue to develop the Supporting Families approach.

Funding is intended to be used for the delivery of intensive family support and developing the maturity of your Early Help system. This should be driven by evidence and data and use of funding should be discussed and agreed with local partners.

Funding decisions should be driven by evidence and data with consideration given to the use of evidence-based services that are aligned with data on local need.

Service and data transformation

To work with partners, to complete a self-assessment against the refreshed EHSG and identify three descriptors you will work towards in the coming year. Areas should refer to the programme guidance to support identification of the descriptors. The assessment should be with the national team no later than 1 July 2022 and should be signed off by your partnership responsible for Early Help, LA Chief Executive, Directors of Children's Services and key partners involved in the assessment for example the police, representatives of the voluntary and community sector, schools and health visitors, in addition to the council's own services including housing, social care and wider children's services.

The EHSG will help you integrate and transform local public services to embed whole family working and re-balance the system across Early Help and Children's Social Care. Self-assessment should be an ongoing process and submission will be repeated each year.

To achieve key data milestones. In the programme sign up conditions for 2021/22 all local authorities committed to have sufficient development and analytical resource to improve systems to deliver milestones of data maturity. We would now expect that that all local authorities have:
* Data governance at a strategic level - overseeing data sharing and use across all partners to support families.
* access to internally available person level data feeds including youth offending services data and education attendance and expulsions.
* access to or are working towards data sharing for person level data on policing, domestic abuse, health, housing (rent arrears and antisocial behaviour) and homelessness.
* All individual indicators and outcomes (at indicator level) are embedded in the case management system from notification / assessment to closure.

Having delivered your 2021/22 data milestones all local authorities should be moving towards being able to participate in the 'All Early Help data collection' (the collection of data relating to all Early Help interventions that we have been piloting with Earned Autonomy areas in 2021/22) in the forthcoming years.

Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities programme commitments

The Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities commits to offer local authorities the following:

Upfront funding to provide intensive family support services and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems. This funding is to improve provision for all families supported through the Early Help system and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems.

A payment of £800 per family achieving successful outcomes up to an agreed number of families.

Earned Autonomy areas will receive all funding upfront. They will continue to be expected to submit successful family outcomes numbers quarterly via Delta.

Opportunities to share good practice amongst local areas and receive peer support, for example through webinars and focus groups, to accelerate transformation across the country.

Constructive support and challenge for those who fall short of family targets and lack progress against system transformation against the programme sign up conditions

Regular risk-based assurance reviews informed by national learning and experience from local authorities and their partners.

Programme commitments: additional information

Payment terms

A results-based payment of £800 will be offered for each family for whom the local authority claims a successful family outcome. The opportunity to claim results is offered on a regular basis through a rolling claims window that is open for most of the year. Claims must be submitted through the Delta system and we strongly recommend claim submissions are made monthly. The local authority's internal audit service should check and verify at least a representative sample of results for each claim submission before it is made. All claims made must be valid on the date that they are submitted and must be certified by a Section 151 officer or an officer with designated responsibility.

Claims made may be subject to additional checks by DLUHC as part of assurance process. Should invalid claims be found as a result of these checks any corresponding results payments made may be recouped by DLUHC.

Performance requirements

All areas delivering Supporting Families are required to achieve measurable outcomes with the minimum number of families. Where progress towards this minimum is not considered satisfactory DLUHC may decide to review future payments which can be delayed or withheld.

Progress information

Areas are required to submit quarterly progress information including but not limited to:

The number of claims for successful family outcomes made during the year

The forecast number of successful family outcomes to be made during the year

The number of families supported and worked with during the year, where a whole family approach has been demonstrated

The forecast number of families to be supported and worked with during the year

Transformation of local public services to embed whole family working

Upfront funding is to provide intensive family support services and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems. This funding is to improve provision for all families supported through the Early Help system and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems.

Areas are required to:

Work in partnership with local public services to agree how funding should be used to integrate and transform local public services to embed whole family working.

Continue to employ a Supporting Families Coordinator to work with partners to deliver Supporting Families and drive system transformation.

Use the DLUHC Early Help System Guide (including the data maturity model) to inform the development, refinement and implementation of the early help system across their local public service partnership.

Early Help System guide

The Early Help System guide (The Guide) outlines a national vision and descriptors for a mature Early Help System. The vision, shared by DLUHC and DfE, has been widely consulted upon across other government departments and local areas and is based on what is working around the country. The Guide provides a self-assessment tool to support discussion, reflection and action planning against key descriptors of a good Early Help System.

All areas funded through Supporting Families are required to use the Early Help System guide to assess the current position of their Early Help System and use this to support prioritisation of system transformation activity in the coming year.

Completing the Early Help System guide

Action 1: Self-assessment to be carried out between April and June 2022 and the results submitted in Delta by 1 July 2022.

Self-assessment is an opportunity to genuinely reflect with partners, challenge one another and accurately capture the current position. We encourage areas to carry out an honest assessment and use this to provide a basis for prioritisation.

Action 2: Chosen priority descriptors should be submitted to Delta by 1 July 2022.

All areas are also required through the Supporting Families programme to choose 3 specific descriptors they want to work on and progress during the coming year. Areas should use the following methodology to choose the three descriptors:

If the area is data model 2 or below, choose ONLY descriptors from the data section;

If the area is data model 3, choose one descriptor from the data section and two from the service descriptors (family voice and experience, workforce, communities, leaders).

If the area is data model 4 or above, choose ONLY service descriptors.

After applying this methodology, areas are free to choose any descriptor across the 5 sections (family voice and experience, workforce, communities, leaders and data). You can select more than one from individual sections of interest if preferred.

Action 3: Permission to share submitted on Delta by 1 July 2022.

To enable and encourage peer support and joint planning of development activity, we would like to share the scoring (not narrative) for each descriptor and the chosen priority descriptors from each area with all SF Co-ordinators during July 2022.

To facilitate joint working across government, we would like to share the scoring (not narrative) for each descriptor and the chosen priority descriptors from each area with other government departments.

As a result of our partnership working with specifically DfE on the programme, we will share the full results including narrative with DfE.

Indicate on Delta to confirm you are happy for your area's scoring and chosen priority descriptors to be shared with SF co-ordinators to enable networking, joint planning of development activity and peer support.

Indicate on Delta to confirm you are happy for your area's scoring and chosen priority descriptors to be shared with other government departments.

You will also be asked to note that you understand that all content of your self-assessment and chosen descriptors will automatically be shared with DfE.

How DLUHC will use the EHSG self-assessment submissions.

The central team will use the EHSG self-assessments and chosen priority descriptors in the following ways:

1. Areas who have scored highly on individual descriptors may be approached for information around the practice in place, for this to be shared with other local areas. This could be developed into national good practice material to be linked to the individual descriptors.

2. Areas who have chosen the same priority descriptors will be supported to come together in action learning sets to support one another with the development of their work. The beginning of these action learning sets will be facilitated by the national team but handed over to local areas to support continued networking and learning.

3. The narrative text that areas submit in their EHSG self-assessments will be analysed by the national team to inform support and challenge conversations with local areas.

4. The analysis of the narrative will also be used to understand common areas for development and inform national policy making.

Data transformation

Mature data systems are a key part of the infrastructure supporting families and practice, providing a strong evidence base to help support families and commission appropriate services. Upfront funding should also be used to ensure sufficient development and analytical support to improve systems to deliver as a minimum the following milestones of data maturity:

Data governance at a strategic level is established overseeing data sharing and use across all partners to support families. This could be the use of a current, appropriate board, the expansion of a current board or the creation of a board. All key local public service partners should be included on the board to work together to drive local public service data transformation. We would also recommend information governance representation to expediate data sharing issues.

Access regular person level data feeds. At a minimum areas should:

a. Through discussions with police colleagues, work towards sharing datasets (including, where possible, offending data relating to different age ranges, and domestic abuse data) to enable joint analytics to support families. Partners will work together to identify any barriers to data sharing and overcome these barriers, through sharing good practice.

b. work with the youth offending service to receive youth offending data,

c. work with the relevant LA department and schools to receive education data (attendance, expulsions, free school meals and, where possible, attainment)

d. work with the relevant LA department and settings to receive Early Years data

Accessing these as full population, rather than cohort level feeds would help enable local use of these data to conduct needs analysis and allow for the immediate identification of issues at the point of referral for family support.

Work towards or establish data sharing agreements for person level data on health, council tax exemptions, housing (rent arrears and antisocial behaviour) and homelessness.

Embed all issues and outcomes into your case management system. This should be flexible to allow for changes in outcomes and enable the measurement of all issues (at indicator level not headline level), so it might not be limited to your Supporting Families Outcome Plan. You should be able to measure all issues faced by all families referred to Early Help, through to all outcomes achieved by families at the point of closure.

Having achieved the above minimum data maturity markers local authorities should be moving towards being able to participate in the 'All Early Help data collection' in the forthcoming years.

Payment by Results

Payment by Results for family outcomes is a mechanism that helps encourage and maintain a focus on the following:

The outcomes families are achieving - knowing more about how families' lives have been changed

Data maturity - embedding outcomes in case management systems, sourcing, matching and analysing multiple partner data sets to gain insight into outcomes

Engaging partners in delivering whole family working - broadening the range of partner organisations who are part of working with families in a whole family way

These elements are at the core of an effective Early Help System.

Earned Autonomy

The Supporting Families programme has, since its inception Troubled Families, funded and advocated for transformation in the Early Help system.

There are currently 14 areas who operate under Earned Autonomy (EA) where all funding is provided upfront, rather than a proportion of the funding as a payment by results for family outcomes. These 14 areas were granted EA status following a bidding exercise in which they evidenced that having the funding upfront would accelerate transformation.

In our policy narrative 'Supporting Families 2021-22 and beyond' we outlined commitments that would help mature and modernise the programme and do more to encourage transformation.

We want to learn from the achievements of the most ambitious areas, partnering with them to continue to drive innovation and to shape local services for families into the future.

Following a consultation process during 2021, we have now published a prospectus which outlines a new process for areas to apply for EA. This sees EA as a progression from Payment by Results (PbR) for areas who have reached a defined standard of maturity with their Early Help System.

The application process for areas to move to the EA model will take place during 2022/23 with further details of the process set out in the published prospectus.

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Chapter 2: Delivering Supporting Families

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What does this document cover? Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25 Who is it for? Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts. As part of the sign-up process for Supporting Families from April 2022, all upper-tier local authority Chief Executives will be asked to make several key commitments.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-programme-guidance-2022-to-2025/chapter-3-the-national-supporting-families-outcome-framework

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Supporting Families programme guidance 2022 to 2025
What does this document cover?
Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25
Who is it for?
Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts.

The National Supporting Families Outcome Framework

Since April 2015 all local authorities delivering the Supporting Families programme have been required to have in place a local Supporting Families Outcome Plan. In the simplest terms, a Supporting Families Outcome Plan was required to set out what each local authority and its partners considered to be the right indicators of eligibility and successful outcomes - measured at a family-by-family level - against the Supporting Families headline objectives.

Following The Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities (DLUHC) commitment in Supporting Families 2021-22 and beyond, the national team have been working with all local authorities and stakeholders inside and outside of government, to co-design a national Supporting Families Outcome Framework.

Policy teams in six different government departments inputted into a draft framework of ten headline problems. The draft framework then went through extensive engagement and re-drafting with local authorities as well as the Early Intervention Foundation to ensure the outcomes and evidence measures were practical, deliverable and ambitious for families.

The new national framework has been developed to achieve a number of aims.

1. Increased focus on the current needs of families: The updated framework seeks to address the current needs of families, especially in the context of levelling up and recovering from the impact of Covid-19. Increasing the headline outcomes from six to ten reflects the complexity of families' lives and the wide-ranging support provided by local authorities and their partners.

2. Support the programme aims of helping to rebalance the demand levels in children's services and levelling up support for families: The framework tackles the multiple and complex problems families face, such as unemployment, financial insecurity, risk of homelessness and educational inequality, as well as children and risk from abuse and exploitation and families who are experiencing domestic abuse.

3. Improved consistency across all local authorities: The framework sets the standard for what outcomes families should be achieving and what problems local areas should be focusing on, for example the new framework puts a renewed focus on early years, housing, child exploitation, and substance use.

4. Increased use of good evidence and data measures: Suggested data measures for both programme eligibility and successful outcomes are set out in the new national outcomes framework. This allows for greater national comparison and wider sharing of good data practices across local authorities and across government.

5. Reduced bureaucracy: Data checks at the point of outcome submission have been reduced and instead focus on the priority areas of school attendance and accepted rereferrals into early help or children's social care.

This national framework will come into effect from 3 October 2022.

Framework changes and eligibility

The new Supporting Families Outcomes Framework sets out ten headline outcomes. Below these outcomes sit descriptors of the family needs that make up the eligibility criteria for the Supporting Families programme, as well as suggested data sources for identifying families with these needs.

Each family must demonstrate a minimum of three eligibility criteria or family needs as set out in the national Supporting Families Outcomes Framework.

The framework also includes predetermined outcomes that must be achieved with all families before a successful family outcome is submitted.

Further chapters of this guidance provide detailed information about how to identify and work with families under the new national outcomes framework, and the requirements for submitting successful family outcomes.

Some outcomes are harder to measure than others and whilst some data is easily accessible for all local authorities this is not the case for all outcomes and all areas. The National Supporting Families Outcome Framework therefore offers local authorities flexibility to use locally available and measurable evidence sources. DLUHC will regularly review the framework to ensure it continues to recommend the most up-to-date and robust data, outcomes and evidence.

The 10 headline outcomes are:

Getting a good education

Good early years development

Improved mental and physical health

Promoting recovery and reducing harm from substance use

Improved family relationships

Children safe from abuse and exploitation

Crime prevention and tackling crime

Safe from domestic abuse

Secure housing

Financial stability

The national Supporting Families Outcome Framework is attached in full at Annex A of this guidance.

Getting a good education

Children in families on the programme are nearly three times more likely to be persistently absent (i.e. they missed 10% or more education sessions) compared to school children nationally. Supporting Families sets out to tackle school absence and improve the life outcomes of children by requiring sustained good attendance for all children in the family, across two consecutive school terms.

Not able to participate and engage with education - motivation, emotional regulation and behaviour difficulties, risk of, or subject to, exclusions, concerns around suitability of Elective Home Education, child is off-roll and not receiving an education otherwise, risk of NEET

Improved engagement with education (e.g., pupils no longer on report, reduction/no detentions)

Child's special educational needs not being met

SEND data, Education Health and Care (EHC) plan

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral.

Family happy that special educational needs being met, and school/ early years settings are providing adequate support.

Child's needs have been appropriately assessed and suitable package of support is in place as per the SEND Code of Practice.

Family engaging with package of support and has a trusted relationship with the team around the family (Supplementary)

Good Early Years Development

Good early years development improves children's life chances. The framework recognises the importance of these earliest years, including the first 1001 days, for achieving the best possible start in life.

Support for families may begin before a child is born and expectant or new parents who require additional support may be eligible for the programme. Providing guidance for parents and developmental support for babies and young children is essential for delivering strong health and educational outcomes for children, ensuring they have a positive start in their early years.

Expectant or new parent/carers who require additional or specialist support (e.g., young parents, parents who have been in care, parents with learning needs)

GP, Dentist, Health Visitor, Midwife, Family Nurse Partnership, Health records

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral.

Families are engaged with appropriate support that can be seen to be making a difference; capacity for positive, effective parenting increased and they are accessing and engaging with services

Completed evidence-based parenting course with evidence of parents/carers implementing those strategies and improved outcomes

Practitioner and/or self-assessment - improved outcomes

Child's (0-5 yrs) physical health needs not met (e.g., immunisations not up to date, concerning accidental injuries, dental hygiene)

A&E records, GP, Dental, Midwife, Family Nurse Partnership, Health Visitor.

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

Child's physical health needs met, better awareness of home safety and accident prevention

A&E records, GP, Dental, Midwife, Family Nurse Partnership, Health Visitor

Practitioner and/or self-assessment - improved outcomes

Child's (0-5 yrs) developmental needs not being met (e.g. communication skills/speech and language, problem-solving, school readiness, personal social and emotional development)

Improved mental and physical health

The national evaluation shows that complex families have disproportionately high levels of health problems compared with the general population. Poor mental health is particularly pertinent, with over two fifths of families on the programme having a family member with a mental health problem. Health needs have a significant impact on the whole family and may require specialist support.

The programme seeks to reach families with a range of physical and mental health needs. These can affect the whole family who may, in turn, require additional support and service coordination. The outcomes below also refer to improvements to wellbeing, as well as mental health. We recognise that not all problems can be solved or improved in all circumstances, but in those instances lead practitioners should be aiming to see some level of improved wellbeing before recording a successful outcome.

If practitioners would like guidance, the best place for general well-being and mental health advice is the NHS Every Mind Matters website. The Department for Education also has a longer resources pack aimed at teachers, but which may be helpful to any practitioner supporting people with their mental health.

Child needs support with their mental health

The child's mental health and/or wellbeing has improved

Family/parents/carers feel better equipped to manage the child's mental health and well-being

Adult needs support with their mental health

The adult's mental health and/or wellbeing has improved

Family/parents/carers feel better equipped to manage the adult's mental health and well-being

Child and/or parent/carer require support with physical health needs that affect the family (e.g., long-standing health conditions requiring management, physical disabilities requiring adaptations)

Physical health needs are being well-managed, and family have sufficient / the right support in place

*e.g., Improved SDQ scores, improvement on Short Warwick - Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing scale (SWEMWS) (11+), Generalised Anxiety, Assessment (GAD-7), The Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) (for children aged 8-18), Kessler psychological distress scale (K10) and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS)

Substance misuse is a long term and complex problem that may have a significant impact on vulnerable families. Around one in six families on Supporting Families has an individual dependent on non-prescription drugs or alcohol in the year before joining the programme.

The framework recognises that recovering from addiction and substance misuse is complex and, in many cases, recovery is not a linear process. This is reflected in the predetermined national outcomes which require a reduction in substance use alongside a better understanding of the associated risks.

There is clear evidence that growing up in a family affected by parental (or significant other adult's) substance misuse can cause significant harm to a child's wellbeing and to their long-term outcomes. The framework recognises the importance of supporting the children who are affected by parental substance misuse, by ensuring that assessment and support for an 'affected by' child is included on the predetermined national outcomes.

An adult has a drug and/or alcohol problem

Treatment Outcomes Profile (TOP)

Improved scores on AUDIT, AUDIT-C, Severity of Alcohol Dependence Questionnaire (SDAQ), ASSIST-Lite.

Adult engaging with appropriate level of support and completing specialist treatment

Practitioner or self-assessed improved outcomes

Adult engaged in evidence-based whole-family interventions with evidence of adult implementing those strategies and improved outcomes for children and the family (Supplementary)

Improved score on child's Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, if in receipt of specialist 'affected-by' support (Supplementary)

A child or young person has a drug and/or alcohol problem

Improved family relationships

Families who face multiple and complex needs may require support to develop positive and supportive relationships within the family. The National Outcomes Framework recognises the long-term benefit of positive parenting and attachment, and the impact that family conflict can have on children in the family. Forty percent of keyworkers working on the programme said they provide inter-parental relationship support at least once a week.

Conflict in relationships is expressed through many different behaviours which can have an impact on families' lives. When conflict is between parents, it can have negative effects on their children's mental health and wider development.

Some level of arguing and conflict between parents is often a normal part of everyday life. However, there is strong evidence to show how inter-parental conflict that is frequent, intense and poorly resolved can have a significant negative impact on children's mental health and long-term life chances.

Where parental conflict is being addressed by DWP's Reducing Parental Conflict programme, it is that which is below the threshold of domestic abuse. Where domestic abuse is present there will be an imbalance of power and/or control and one parent may feel fearful of the other.

The framework also recognises the impact of violence or abuse inflicted by children towards other members of the family, and the impact of unmet needs for young carers.

Parent / carers require parenting support

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referrals.

Parent / carer demonstrates improved, positive parenting (e.g., improved parent / child interactions; positive attachment etc)

Completed evidence-based parenting course with evidence of parents implementing those strategies and improved outcomes

Practitioner / self - assessed improved outcomes

Harmful levels of parental conflict i.e., when it is frequent, intense or poorly resolved

Police report

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referrals

No harmful parental conflict and improved family relationship

Parents /carers understand the impact of the conflict on the children

Child / young person violent or abusive in the home (to parents/carers or siblings)

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referrals.

Unsupported young carer or caring circumstances changed requiring additional support

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referrals.

Unsupported young carer now supported, including with change in caring circumstances

Children safe from abuse and exploitation

Children who experience, or who are risk of, abuse and exploitation are amongst the most vulnerable in society. The national Supporting Families Outcome Framework includes five indicators of eligibility under this headline outcome reflecting the complex nature of the needs that a family might be experiencing.

In the indicators below children could be at risk from harms within or outside the home or both. They also identify factors that put children at additional risk from harm, such as going missing and radicalisation.

Effective multi-agency working that operates across geographical boundaries can prevent the needs of these children and their families from escalating to more intensive statutory services.

For practitioners who would like further guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children provides the framework for child safeguarding.

Emotional, physical, sexual abuse or neglect, historic or current, within the household

Open Early Help, CIN or CP plan

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals

Early help, CIN or CP plan closed and/or stepped down, Practitioner assessed - improved outcomes

Child going missing from home

Police report

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals.

Child no longer going missing

Child/family has been supported following missing episodes

No missing reports in month prior to closure and no re-referral into services 6 months following closure

Practitioner assessed - improved outcomes

Child identified as at risk of, or experiencing, sexual exploitation

Police report

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals.

Practitioner and self-assessed - improved outcomes

And

No more police reports

Child identified as at risk of, or experiencing, criminal, or pre-criminal, exploitation (e.g., county lines)

Police report

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals.

Practitioner and self-assessed - improved outcomes

And

No more police reports

Child identified as at risk of, or being affected by, radicalisation

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals.

Practitioner and self-assessed - improved outcomes

Child experiencing harm outside of the family (e.g., peer to peer abuse, bullying, online harassment, sexual harassment/offences)

Police report, School report

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals.

Practitioner or self-assessed improved outcomes, closure of plan, no police or school reports

Crime prevention and tackling crime

Crime and anti-social behaviour have a significant negative impact on individuals and communities - including the victims, the relatives of offenders, and the offenders themselves - as well as a significant financial cost to society. For example, reoffending costs society approximately £18 billion per year.

This framework covers young people who are involved in crime and anti-social behaviour as well as young people who are at risk of becoming involved in crime. This allows local authorities to support families at the earliest opportunity and may be particularly helpful when identifying families where there is strong intelligence about a family's involvement in activities such as gangs, youth violence or serious organised crime, but no proven offence.

The outcomes framework also covers adults who are involved in crime and anti-social behaviour. This reflects the evidence that parental anti-social or criminal behaviour is a significant factor in youth offending. The children of offenders are also more likely to be excluded from school and twice as likely to suffer from behavioural and mental health problems. The framework also reflects the importance of tackling the causes of reoffending - unemployment, insecure accommodation and substance.

These outcomes relate only to number of incidents. However, lead practitioners will also be considering severity of crime in deciding where a case is appropriate for a successful outcome. If someone commits a very serious crime it may warrant a discussion with the team about where that should be recorded and the appropriate outcome.

Adult (18+) involved in crime and/or ASB (at least one offence/arrest/named suspect report/ASB incident) in the last 12 months

Police report, Probation data, multi-agency safeguarding panels

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

(7 or fewer incidents in 12 months) Adult no longer involved in crime
Or
(8 or more incidents in 12 months) Adult demonstrates at least a 50% reduction in incidents of crime

Where number of incidents* is 7 or fewer, the person must not have any offences, arrests, named suspect reports, or ASB for 6 months.

Where number of incidents* is 8 or more, the person must demonstrate a reduction in the number of incidents (offence/arrest/named suspect report/ASB) of at least 50% which is sustained for a period of at least 6 months.

Young person (u18) at risk of crime - including gangs, serious violence and weapons carrying, or involved in harmful risk-taking behaviour

Young person not involved in crime or anti-social behaviour.

Young person supported to better manage risks of becoming involved with crime, through accessing relevant services and fully engaging in this process.

Young person must not have any offences, arrests, named suspect reports, or ASB for 6 months

Engaging with, and benefitting from, relevant and appropriate services (e.g., VRUs, CAMHS, Education, AP, youth offending services) regularly and maintains positive behaviour (Supplementary)

Young person (u18) involved in crime and/or ASB (at least one offence/arrest/named suspect report/ASB incident) in the last 12 months

Multi-agency safeguarding panels, Asset Plus, Police data, Probation data

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

(4 or fewer incidents in 12 months) Young person no longer involved in crime
Or
(5 or more incidents in 12 months) Young person demonstrates at least a 50% reduction in incidents of crime provided none of these are a severe offence as defined by the list of severe offences.

And

Young person supported to better manage risks of becoming further involved with crime, through accessing relevant services and fully engaging in this process.

Where number of incidents* is 4 or fewer, the young person must not have any offences, arrests, named suspect reports, or ASB for 6 months

Engaging with, and benefitting from, relevant / appropriate services (e.g., VRUs, CAMHS, education, AP, probation, youth offending services) until problems have resolved/ solutions progressed (Supplementary)

*Consistent measure required i.e., if identifying on arrests, arrests must be measured for outcome

Safe from domestic abuse

At least a quarter of families previously supported by the programme had at least one family member affected by domestic abuse in the year before intervention. Domestic abuse remains an important problem for the programme to tackle, and positive outcomes may rely on changes in perpetrator behaviour. This is why we have included an indicator and outcomes specifically focused on perpetrators of domestic abuse, as part of a whole family approach.

Supporting Families applies the following definition of domestic abuse in accordance with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021:

'any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling or coercive; violent or threatening behaviour or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. Abuse can encompass, but is not limited to psychological, physical, sexual, economic and emotional abuse. Sexual abuse is defined as any sexual act or attempted act committed against someone without their consent, regardless of the relationship to the victim. Economic abuse means any behaviour that has a substantial adverse effect on a person's ability to acquire, use or maintain money or other property or obtain goods or services'.

Further information on the types of domestic abuse and the impact it can have can be found in the Domestic Abuse statutory guidance document which will be published in 2022.

All forms of domestic abuse can have a significant impact on children and young people, including coercive and controlling behaviour. Children and young people may experience domestic abuse directly, including in their own intimate relationships, or indirectly due to the impact the abuse has on others such as the non-abusive parent. If a child is demonstrating abusive behaviours towards family members, this should be considered under the headline outcome 'Improved Family Relationships'.

Family affected by domestic abuse or inter-personal violence and abuse - historic, recent, current or at risk (victim)

Domestic abuse has stopped

Victim has a clear safety plan in place and knows how to seek help, victim feels safe at home

And

Victim has received (or is receiving) appropriate support

Adult in the family is a perpetrator of domestic abuse

Domestic abuse has stopped

And

Perpetrator understands crime, and impact on the victim(s) (including children), and is engaging with perpetrator support

No incidents of domestic abuse in the month prior to closure, and no referral into services for 6 months following closure

And (at least one of the below)

Where available, perpetrator engaged with specialist programmes

Perpetrator engaged with local multi-agency partnership arrangements

Practitioner or self-assessment (e.g., DASH / reduction in risk tool)

Child currently or historically affected by domestic abuse

Domestic abuse has stopped

Child feels safe at home

And

Child has received appropriate support

Secure housing

Secure and suitable housing provides stability for families. It is linked to positive health and wellbeing outcomes, provides a base for children to attend school, for parents to sustain employment and for the family to contribute to their communities. This is why secure housing for families and young people is recognised in the outcomes framework. The programme's multi-agency and early intervention approach will help to identify vulnerable families and young people with housing issues or at risk of homelessness. It will also support them to resolve these issues by maintaining existing housing or, if necessary, helping them to secure suitable settled accommodation.

Families who are in local authority temporary accommodation and are at risk of losing this

Homelessness data

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

Family no longer at risk of losing temporary accommodation and have sustained temporary accommodation for 6 months or have moved into settled housing.

Families not in suitable, sustainable housing and/or threatened with eviction /at risk of homelessness

Homelessness data

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

Family no longer at risk of eviction* and/or in suitable and sustainable housing for 6 months

Young people aged 16/17 at risk of, or who have been, excluded from the family home

Young person no longer at risk of homelessness - remains with or is returned to family or wider family network with support available for 6 months

Practitioner assessment - improved outcomes

*Notice not served or withdrawn; or (for social housing tenants) have a suspended possession order and have sustained the accommodation for 6+ months

Financial stability

Supporting Families continues to prioritise employment and financial stability as these are key factors in building families' resilience. Adults on the programme were five times more likely to be claiming benefits, and over ten times more likely to be claiming Jobseeker's Allowance compared to the general population. Feedback from local authorities and their partners delivering the programme suggest it has a transformative impact not only on family outcomes, but also on the approach and design of local family services.

Supporting Families eligibility indicators also reach those who are workless, those who require support with their finances and families where a young person in the household is not in employment or education (NEET).

Adult in the family is workless

Universal Credit or legacy benefit, ADMS

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

Adult is in work
Or
Adult has made progress to work (e.g., gained a qualification, completed training, volunteering, is attending job interviews)

Universal Credit or legacy benefit data, ADMS

Practitioner or self-assessed - adult has gained employment / made progress to work measured by Employment Advisor or keyworker (including use of DWP milestone plan)

Family require support with their finances and / or have unmanageable debt (e.g., rent arrears)

Family feels able to manage their finances

Debt is being managed or has been resolved

Young person is NEET

NEET data, CCIS statutory dataset

Information from practitioner assessments, contacts and referrals, including self-referral

Young person is in education, employment or training

Implementing the new National Supporting Families Outcomes Framework

The new national Supporting Families Outcome Framework will come into effect on 3 October 2022. Set out below is the timeline that local authorities should work to when implementing the new outcomes framework.

The programme guidance for 2021-22 sets out the requirements for making a successful outcome claim under local outcomes plans. All local authorities should continue to follow this guidance until the new framework comes into effect on 3 October 2022.

All local authorities should continue to claim and identify families under their agreed, local Supporting Families outcome plan from April 2022. This includes families who have already been identified and those who are already being supported through the programme.

From 3 October 2022 all local authorities should cease to identify families under their local outcome plans and begin to identify families under the new framework.

Successful outcomes for families who have been identified and worked with under local outcomes plans and whose cases have been closed on or before October 2nd can be claimed using agreed local outcome plans. These claims must be in line with the programme guidance relating to local outcome plans as set out in the programme guidance 2021-22.

To make sure that there is enough time for the requirement for all outcome measures to be sustained for six months local authorities may continue to submit successful outcome claims for these families until July 2023.

This will also allow local authorities to demonstrate the required improved school attendance. To ease the administrative burden on local authorities, only two regression checks will be required to evidence these successful family outcomes.

Before an outcome is submitted:

1. All outcomes must be achieved and evidenced at case closure. Where a particular outcome specifies a period of sustainment (e.g., 'families diverted from crime' and 'safe from domestic abuse'), that must also be evidenced and can be done at any point after work has begun with the family.

2. There must be no accepted referral into children's services (early help or children's social care) between closure and claim (which must be a minimum of six months).

3. 90% average attendance for all children in the family for two consecutive terms prior to claim. Or, where a child was identified as attending for less than 50% of the time, at least a 30% improvement in attendance must be shown with a minimum of 50% average attendance, over 2 consecutive terms.

If families were identified using the criteria set out in local outcome plans but their cases remain open on 3 October 2022, these families will need to be confirmed as remaining eligible for the programme under the new National Supporting Families Outcomes Framework.

Any successful outcomes must be submitted in line with the new outcomes framework and the rules set out in this programme guidance. The deadline for submitting successful outcomes for these families is July 2023.

Data and evidence sources

The Supporting Families Outcome Framework provides a number of suggested data and evidence sources. Local authorities are required to decide with their partnership which data and evidence sources will/can be used and return this to the national Supporting Families team by 3 October 2022.

Agreement from the national Supporting Families team will be required where data and evidence sources other than those suggested in the National Supporting Families Outcome Framework are used.

Data sharing agreements and sources are constantly evolving therefore any future changes to data and evidence sources used will require an updated submission to the national Supporting Families team.

Whilst data and evidence sources are suggested the national Supporting Families team may provide future guidance which requires the use of set data and evidence sources that are available nationally to all local authorities.

1 April 2022 - 2 October 2022

Case progress: All cases

Identification: 2021/22 outcome plan: Identify eligibility under agreed local outcomes plans

Evidencing successful outcomes: 2021/22 outcome plan: submit successful outcomes under agreed local outcomes plans including regression checks. This includes continuous employment.

From 3 October 2022

Case progress: Families with open cases (for these purposes 'open' means most recent case work is currently open to a lead practitioner)

Identification: Originally identified on local outcome plans will now need to be reassessed for eligibility under the new Supporting Families framework.

Evidencing successful outcomes: New framework: All Supporting Families framework outcomes will need to be achieved AND cases must achieve the reduced regression checks (outlined above). Families who have been assessed under the new framework can be claimed six months following case closure, assuming regression checks are met, at the earliest this would be April 2023.

Case progress: Families with closed cases that have not yet been submitted as a successful outcome (for these purposes 'closed' means closed to case work/intervention has stopped and case has been closed).

Identification: No need for reassessment for eligibility

Evidencing successful outcomes: Can be claimed under local outcome plan until July 2023 (this is to allow all relevant regression checks to be made 6 months post closure). Outcomes as per local outcome plans will need to be achieved AND cases must achieve the reduced regression checks (outlined above). This includes continuous employment.

Case progress: Families presenting for support (no case work yet conducted)

Identification: Eligibility assessed under the new supporting families framework

Evidencing successful outcomes: New framework: All Supporting Families framework outcomes will need to be achieved AND cases must achieve the reduced regression checks (outlined above). Families who have been assessed under the new framework can be claimed six months following case closure, assuming regression checks are met, at the earliest this would be April 2023.

From August 2023

Case progress: All cases

Identification: Eligibility assessed under the new supporting families framework

Evidencing successful outcomes: New framework: All supporting families framework outcomes will need to be achieved AND cases must achieve the two regression checks outlined above.

For the purposes of the above 'closed' means closed to case work/intervention has stopped and case has been closed. Open means most recent case work is currently open to a lead practitioner.

Summary of changes

The table below sets out the key changes to the national Supporting Families Outcomes Framework when compared to local defined family outcome plans.

National Supporting Families Outcome Framework

Local Outcomes Plans (Programme guidance 2021-22)

Families need to have three of the ten headline outcomes to be eligible

Families need to have two of the six headline problems to be eligible

Family needs included in headlines are prescribed by national team

Local authorities decide what they include in each headline

Pre-determined outcomes for each indicator

Limited guidance on outcomes - local authorities choose their own measures

Suggested good evidence and data measures

This will provide the national team with the ability to compare what data and evidence measures local authorities us

Local authorities choose their own data measures, with some guidance on what other areas are doing, this is hard to compare on a large scale

Simplified data checks at the point of claim. Reducing bureaucracy and focusing on priority areas (children's social care referral rates and school attendance)

Local authorities must evidence there has been no regression against any headline problem- even practitioner assessed measures 6 months post closure, this is very bureaucratic

Removal of continuous employment claim

Local authorities are able to submit outcomes for families who have found employment but not made progress on any other outcome

Good practice when using the framework: Delivering positive, sustainable outcomes

The National Supporting Families Outcome Framework is a guide and lead practitioners will still need to exercise their own judgement when working with families to make sure they are working towards sustainable, positive outcomes for families.

Generally, successful family outcomes should be claimed in accordance with the spirit of the programme and the aim of achieving positive, sustained change for each family. Supporting Families Co-ordinators are able to contact the national team for advice regarding any aspect of this programme guidance including the validity of claims under the Supporting Families Outcome Framework.

Good practice when using the framework: Data Sources

The new framework gives local authorities significant guidance regarding which data sources and evidence measures should be used to identify families and measure success. There is, however, still flexibility for local authorities to choose their own data sources or evidence measures not listed in the framework, if they wish. Where local authorities do choose to use their own measures, they must agree this with the national team in advance.

Where ' And ' is included in the outcome or evidence, this means that more than one outcome must be achieved at the same time; often, this is where quantitative data should be supported by qualitative data, or 'hard' outcomes should be accompanied by continued support or engagement with services.

Where a suggested evidence measure is 'supplementary', this means it cannot be used in isolation but only to support another evidence measure. For example, when evidencing involvement in crime local authorities cannot just evidence that a family member is engaging with services, there must also be evidence that there have been no further incidents.

Where examples are provided they are only suggestions of groups local authorities may want to include or prioritise, not an exhaustive list. Local authorities can include other problems or groups of people where relevant and are advised to use professional judgement as to what constitutes a real need under that sub-heading.

For example: Expectant or new parent/carers who require additional or specialist support (e.g., young parents, parents who have been in care, parents with learning needs).

Measuring outcomes: What are measurement tools?

For the purposes of this guidance, measurement tools refer to instruments used to collect data on individuals. They are different to service and system level tools which do not collect information on individuals but on systems and processes such as management tools or quality assessment tools.

Individual measurement tools can be used for a variety of purposes which, for the purpose of the Supporting Families programme, can broadly be defined into categories set out below:

Screening and diagnostic tools. These tools are used to detect (screening) and/or establish (diagnose) the presence or absence of a need or issue. Many Multi Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASHs)/Single Front Door or Early Help assessments fall into the category of a screening tool. Often a broad assessment is undertaken (screening) to assess need, which is then followed up with a more detailed assessment if an issue is detected, so that it can be diagnosed. These tools can sometimes be used for eligibility purposes, such as to determine whether an individual may benefit from certain support and if so, what type of support would best suit them.

Support and therapeutic tools. These tools are used as part of the support or therapy itself to aid practitioners. They are often used to facilitate conversations and reflection between practitioners and service users by assessing or understanding or seeing change in needs, behaviours, attitudes, or actions.

Monitoring and evaluation tools. These are tools used to monitor or evaluate change. An outcome measure assesses change on an individual from one point to another on a specific outcome.

It is important to note that some tools may be suitable for one, some or all of these purposes.

Throughout the framework reference is made to validated outcome measures. A validated measure is one that has been carefully tested to make sure that they produce reliable and accurate results and reduce the likelihood of any bias. Measures are viewed as valid if they have been subjected to a series of tests to check that it measures what it was developed to measure - for example, a measure assessing symptoms of anxiety needs to measure anxiety and not another concept, such as stress or depression. Measures are viewed as reliable if they yield the same results if repeated in the exact same way.

Using a validated measure (one that is valid and reliable) helps local authorities to be confident that the results are a true representation of what they are trying to measure.

Whilst local authorities may be confident that the services that they provide support families, without measuring outcomes robustly they cannot be sure that these services have impacted the outcomes they are focused on improving for the people they are designed to help. Measuring the impact of services on areas such as family relationships, parenting quality, mental health or well-being is not easy, and it is important, where possible, to use tools that have been validated through testing to ensure they capture what is intended.

Administering validated outcome measures can be done by frontline practitioners delivering services or by external, commissioned, evaluators. These can be used alongside other tools and methods to assess and understand progress when working with individuals, however it is strongly recommended that, where they exist, validated outcome measures be used to report on outcomes.

How to select the right measure?

A number of validated assessment measures to assess need and outcome measures to evidence outcomes are suggested within the National Supporting Families Outcome Framework. But there are a number of factors that should be considered when deciding what measures are best given the purpose, specific context, and resources available.

When selecting outcome measures, the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) recommends selecting those which are:

1. Validated, to ensure you can be confident in their results

2. measuring outcomes you expect to see, and therefore consistent with your 'theory of change'

3. appropriate, for the target population, paying special attention to participant age, level of need, capability (such as literacy levels and disabilities) and preferred language which would impair them from completing the measures

4. practical, considering the time, cost, ease of scoring and training requirements so as not to overburden participants and those administering the measures who need to be confident in using them within their practice.

The Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) have produced a short guide to selecting appropriate outcome measures (in the context of reducing parental conflict) which provides more information.

EIF have also produced a guidebook which includes information about early intervention programmes that have been evaluated and shown to improve outcomes for children and young people. The link to the guidebook, and further information can be found in Annex B of this guidance.

Key terms

Family need

What the family requires support with, as identified by practitioner or self-referral by person/family.

These are pre-determined and will be the same for every area. These are the eligibility criteria for Supporting Families.

Data source

The mechanism used to identify and evidence this need in a family.

Included here are suggested data sources, but areas will have flexibility to input their own.

Outcome

The high - level outcome practitioners are aiming to achieve with families with the associated need.

These are pre-determined and will be the same for every area. These outcomes must be achieved and sustained with families before areas can report to us on the outcome, and (for the majority) receive PbR funding. Some of the indicators suggest multiple outcomes should be achieved before success can be reported. These are indicated using ' And '.

Evidence

How practitioners measure progress and evidence that the outcome has been achieved Included here are suggested evidence sources, but areas will have flexibility to input their own. Where a measure has (Supplementary) this means this will only be accepted alongside another evidence measure.

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Chapter 3: The National Supporting Families Outcome Framework

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What does this document cover? Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25 Who is it for? Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts. Since April 2015 all local authorities delivering the Supporting Families programme have been required to have in place a local Supporting Families Outcome Plan.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-programme-guidance-2022-to-2025/chapter-2-delivering-supporting-families

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Supporting Families programme guidance 2022 to 2025
What does this document cover?
Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25
Who is it for?
Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts.

Local Authority sign up commitments

As part of the sign-up process for Supporting Families from April 2022, all upper-tier local authority Chief Executives will be asked to make several key commitments. The release of programme funding will be dependent upon agreement of these conditions and performance against these conditions will be considered before further funding is released.

Detailed Sign-Up Conditions

Performance requirements

To achieve successful outcomes with the minimum number of families allocated each year within the three-year programme by the end of March 2025.

Those who meet the minimum number of successful outcomes early will be expected to continue to provide progress information (families worked with and outcomes) up to the end of March 2025.

Submit quarterly progress information

To adhere to the full Supporting Families programme guidance

Resourcing the programme

To provide sufficient coordination to successfully deliver the programme and achieve these sign-up commitments, all local authorities must nominate a Senior Responsible Officer of at least Assistant Director level. The SRO should:
* Provide strategic oversight of the delivery of the programme in the local area, and be a champion of high-quality whole family working
* Work closely with relevant agencies and partners to develop and maintain a robust system of family support, and rebalance the system towards prevention and early intervention, that offers value for money for local authorities
* Be responsible for strategically aligning Supporting Families with all programmes and projects being developed/delivered in the Early Help space such as Family Hubs, Start for life, Reducing Parental Conflict, Violence Reduction Units and SAFE taskforces/Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces
* Lead the annual self-assessment process against the EHSG.

Local authorities must also nominate a Supporting Families Co-ordinator. The SFC should:
* Provide operational leadership for the programme across the partnership. This should include the promotion of whole family working and achieving successful family outcomes.
* To consider user experience and feedback when developing and delivering services for families
* Provide co-ordination across to other relevant national government programmes.
* Ensure information on family needs and successful family outcomes achieved is reported to the partnership and data governance boards to inform commissioning decisions.
* Leading the programme should be a substantive part of the SFCs role

All local authorities should be assured that they have sufficient data resource aligned to the Supporting Families programme to continue to progress against data maturity milestones as set out in the EHSG. Data teams could be integrated in strategic commissioning or business intelligence teams with oversight and/or management from a data lead. Data leads should report into the data governance board, coordinate the work of the team and facilitate data developments and sharing. The data lead should work closely and reports into the SFC/SRO. This ensures that a local authority is supported by a data team integrated in the wider analytics associated with Early Help and Statutory Childrens' Services and that their main focus remains on the delivery of strong performance data and analytics to continue to develop the Supporting Families approach.

Funding is intended to be used for the delivery of intensive family support and developing the maturity of your Early Help system. This should be driven by evidence and data and use of funding should be discussed and agreed with local partners.

Funding decisions should be driven by evidence and data with consideration given to the use of evidence-based services that are aligned with data on local need.

Service and data transformation

To work with partners, to complete a self-assessment against the refreshed EHSG and identify three descriptors you will work towards in the coming year. Areas should refer to the programme guidance to support identification of the descriptors. The assessment should be with the national team no later than 1 July 2022 and should be signed off by your partnership responsible for Early Help, LA Chief Executive, Directors of Children's Services and key partners involved in the assessment for example the police, representatives of the voluntary and community sector, schools and health visitors, in addition to the council's own services including housing, social care and wider children's services.

The EHSG will help you integrate and transform local public services to embed whole family working and re-balance the system across Early Help and Children's Social Care. Self-assessment should be an ongoing process and submission will be repeated each year.

To achieve key data milestones. In the programme sign up conditions for 2021/22 all local authorities committed to have sufficient development and analytical resource to improve systems to deliver milestones of data maturity. We would now expect that that all local authorities have:
* Data governance at a strategic level - overseeing data sharing and use across all partners to support families.
* access to internally available person level data feeds including youth offending services data and education attendance and expulsions.
* access to or are working towards data sharing for person level data on policing, domestic abuse, health, housing (rent arrears and antisocial behaviour) and homelessness.
* All individual indicators and outcomes (at indicator level) are embedded in the case management system from notification / assessment to closure.

Having delivered your 2021/22 data milestones all local authorities should be moving towards being able to participate in the 'All Early Help data collection' (the collection of data relating to all Early Help interventions that we have been piloting with Earned Autonomy areas in 2021/22) in the forthcoming years.

Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities programme commitments

The Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities commits to offer local authorities the following:

Upfront funding to provide intensive family support services and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems. This funding is to improve provision for all families supported through the Early Help system and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems.

A payment of £800 per family achieving successful outcomes up to an agreed number of families.

Earned Autonomy areas will receive all funding upfront. They will continue to be expected to submit successful family outcomes numbers quarterly via Delta.

Opportunities to share good practice amongst local areas and receive peer support, for example through webinars and focus groups, to accelerate transformation across the country.

Constructive support and challenge for those who fall short of family targets and lack progress against system transformation against the programme sign up conditions

Regular risk-based assurance reviews informed by national learning and experience from local authorities and their partners.

Programme commitments: additional information

Payment terms

A results-based payment of £800 will be offered for each family for whom the local authority claims a successful family outcome. The opportunity to claim results is offered on a regular basis through a rolling claims window that is open for most of the year. Claims must be submitted through the Delta system and we strongly recommend claim submissions are made monthly. The local authority's internal audit service should check and verify at least a representative sample of results for each claim submission before it is made. All claims made must be valid on the date that they are submitted and must be certified by a Section 151 officer or an officer with designated responsibility.

Claims made may be subject to additional checks by DLUHC as part of assurance process. Should invalid claims be found as a result of these checks any corresponding results payments made may be recouped by DLUHC.

Performance requirements

All areas delivering Supporting Families are required to achieve measurable outcomes with the minimum number of families. Where progress towards this minimum is not considered satisfactory DLUHC may decide to review future payments which can be delayed or withheld.

Progress information

Areas are required to submit quarterly progress information including but not limited to:

The number of claims for successful family outcomes made during the year

The forecast number of successful family outcomes to be made during the year

The number of families supported and worked with during the year, where a whole family approach has been demonstrated

The forecast number of families to be supported and worked with during the year

Transformation of local public services to embed whole family working

Upfront funding is to provide intensive family support services and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems. This funding is to improve provision for all families supported through the Early Help system and increase the maturity of Early Help Systems.

Areas are required to:

Work in partnership with local public services to agree how funding should be used to integrate and transform local public services to embed whole family working.

Continue to employ a Supporting Families Coordinator to work with partners to deliver Supporting Families and drive system transformation.

Use the DLUHC Early Help System Guide (including the data maturity model) to inform the development, refinement and implementation of the early help system across their local public service partnership.

Early Help System guide

The Early Help System guide (The Guide) outlines a national vision and descriptors for a mature Early Help System. The vision, shared by DLUHC and DfE, has been widely consulted upon across other government departments and local areas and is based on what is working around the country. The Guide provides a self-assessment tool to support discussion, reflection and action planning against key descriptors of a good Early Help System.

All areas funded through Supporting Families are required to use the Early Help System guide to assess the current position of their Early Help System and use this to support prioritisation of system transformation activity in the coming year.

Completing the Early Help System guide

Action 1: Self-assessment to be carried out between April and June 2022 and the results submitted in Delta by 1 July 2022.

Self-assessment is an opportunity to genuinely reflect with partners, challenge one another and accurately capture the current position. We encourage areas to carry out an honest assessment and use this to provide a basis for prioritisation.

Action 2: Chosen priority descriptors should be submitted to Delta by 1 July 2022.

All areas are also required through the Supporting Families programme to choose 3 specific descriptors they want to work on and progress during the coming year. Areas should use the following methodology to choose the three descriptors:

If the area is data model 2 or below, choose ONLY descriptors from the data section;

If the area is data model 3, choose one descriptor from the data section and two from the service descriptors (family voice and experience, workforce, communities, leaders).

If the area is data model 4 or above, choose ONLY service descriptors.

After applying this methodology, areas are free to choose any descriptor across the 5 sections (family voice and experience, workforce, communities, leaders and data). You can select more than one from individual sections of interest if preferred.

Action 3: Permission to share submitted on Delta by 1 July 2022.

To enable and encourage peer support and joint planning of development activity, we would like to share the scoring (not narrative) for each descriptor and the chosen priority descriptors from each area with all SF Co-ordinators during July 2022.

To facilitate joint working across government, we would like to share the scoring (not narrative) for each descriptor and the chosen priority descriptors from each area with other government departments.

As a result of our partnership working with specifically DfE on the programme, we will share the full results including narrative with DfE.

Indicate on Delta to confirm you are happy for your area's scoring and chosen priority descriptors to be shared with SF co-ordinators to enable networking, joint planning of development activity and peer support.

Indicate on Delta to confirm you are happy for your area's scoring and chosen priority descriptors to be shared with other government departments.

You will also be asked to note that you understand that all content of your self-assessment and chosen descriptors will automatically be shared with DfE.

How DLUHC will use the EHSG self-assessment submissions.

The central team will use the EHSG self-assessments and chosen priority descriptors in the following ways:

1. Areas who have scored highly on individual descriptors may be approached for information around the practice in place, for this to be shared with other local areas. This could be developed into national good practice material to be linked to the individual descriptors.

2. Areas who have chosen the same priority descriptors will be supported to come together in action learning sets to support one another with the development of their work. The beginning of these action learning sets will be facilitated by the national team but handed over to local areas to support continued networking and learning.

3. The narrative text that areas submit in their EHSG self-assessments will be analysed by the national team to inform support and challenge conversations with local areas.

4. The analysis of the narrative will also be used to understand common areas for development and inform national policy making.

Data transformation

Mature data systems are a key part of the infrastructure supporting families and practice, providing a strong evidence base to help support families and commission appropriate services. Upfront funding should also be used to ensure sufficient development and analytical support to improve systems to deliver as a minimum the following milestones of data maturity:

Data governance at a strategic level is established overseeing data sharing and use across all partners to support families. This could be the use of a current, appropriate board, the expansion of a current board or the creation of a board. All key local public service partners should be included on the board to work together to drive local public service data transformation. We would also recommend information governance representation to expediate data sharing issues.

Access regular person level data feeds. At a minimum areas should:

a. Through discussions with police colleagues, work towards sharing datasets (including, where possible, offending data relating to different age ranges, and domestic abuse data) to enable joint analytics to support families. Partners will work together to identify any barriers to data sharing and overcome these barriers, through sharing good practice.

b. work with the youth offending service to receive youth offending data,

c. work with the relevant LA department and schools to receive education data (attendance, expulsions, free school meals and, where possible, attainment)

d. work with the relevant LA department and settings to receive Early Years data

Accessing these as full population, rather than cohort level feeds would help enable local use of these data to conduct needs analysis and allow for the immediate identification of issues at the point of referral for family support.

Work towards or establish data sharing agreements for person level data on health, council tax exemptions, housing (rent arrears and antisocial behaviour) and homelessness.

Embed all issues and outcomes into your case management system. This should be flexible to allow for changes in outcomes and enable the measurement of all issues (at indicator level not headline level), so it might not be limited to your Supporting Families Outcome Plan. You should be able to measure all issues faced by all families referred to Early Help, through to all outcomes achieved by families at the point of closure.

Having achieved the above minimum data maturity markers local authorities should be moving towards being able to participate in the 'All Early Help data collection' in the forthcoming years.

Payment by Results

Payment by Results for family outcomes is a mechanism that helps encourage and maintain a focus on the following:

The outcomes families are achieving - knowing more about how families' lives have been changed

Data maturity - embedding outcomes in case management systems, sourcing, matching and analysing multiple partner data sets to gain insight into outcomes

Engaging partners in delivering whole family working - broadening the range of partner organisations who are part of working with families in a whole family way

These elements are at the core of an effective Early Help System.

Earned Autonomy

The Supporting Families programme has, since its inception Troubled Families, funded and advocated for transformation in the Early Help system.

There are currently 14 areas who operate under Earned Autonomy (EA) where all funding is provided upfront, rather than a proportion of the funding as a payment by results for family outcomes. These 14 areas were granted EA status following a bidding exercise in which they evidenced that having the funding upfront would accelerate transformation.

In our policy narrative 'Supporting Families 2021-22 and beyond' we outlined commitments that would help mature and modernise the programme and do more to encourage transformation.

We want to learn from the achievements of the most ambitious areas, partnering with them to continue to drive innovation and to shape local services for families into the future.

Following a consultation process during 2021, we have now published a prospectus which outlines a new process for areas to apply for EA. This sees EA as a progression from Payment by Results (PbR) for areas who have reached a defined standard of maturity with their Early Help System.

The application process for areas to move to the EA model will take place during 2022/23 with further details of the process set out in the published prospectus.

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Chapter 2: Delivering Supporting Families

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What does this document cover? Guidance relating to the delivery of Supporting Families in 2022-25 Who is it for? Intended for use by local authority Supporting Families teams and their partners, auditors and analysts. As part of the sign-up process for Supporting Families from April 2022, all upper-tier local authority Chief Executives will be asked to make several key commitments.

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https://freemovement.org.uk/the-conservative-plan-for-immigration-after-brexit/

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The Conservative Party has won the general election and a mandate for its policy of an "Australian-style points based system" for immigration, whatever that means. The party manifesto leaves readers none the wiser.

We can reveal that more details do exist. Last weekend, a rash of media stories emerged stating that the Conservatives had " published" or " set out " more details of their plan for a points based system. But there was no document published for voters to read: the plan was circulated by email to selected journalists, meaning that those interested in the detail could only read second-hand accounts.

Free Movement has a copy, reproduced in full below. Beneath the political spin is the governing party's most detailed account of its plans for the immigration system since last year's white paper.

The document describes three categories of visa after Brexit. The first is "exceptional talent/contribution", with some tweaks that had already been announced. This category incorporates entrepreneur and investment visas - so Tier 1, as we call this category today, rebranded but essentially unchanged.

The second is "skilled workers", what we know today as Tier 2. The "vast majority" of these visas would require a job offer, which is in line with how work visas for non-EU citizens are allocated now, but of course would be a big change for European citizens who would eventually come under this regime with the end of free movement. It is also unlike the Australian points based visas that the system is supposedly modelled on, which do not require a job offer. That will fuel suspicion that the Australian comparison is merely a branding exercise.

The third category is "sector-specific rules-based". This is the replacement of free movement of labour from Europe with state planning, outsourced to the Migration Advisory Committee. This is where the government will attempt to match the demand for workers in specific sectors with enough visas to supply that demand - a task so fraught with difficulty in the real world that the Home Office will not touch it with a bargepole, instead offloading it to the MAC. The MAC's expanded role will also include the thankless remit of, simultaneously, "lowering overall immigration" and "meeting the needs of the UK's economy".

The document's final section is about the Conservatives' recent record on immigration, mostly examples of where they have reversed their earlier policies.

Readers with long memories will also be amused at the solemn promise that "the points system must be clear and easy for applicants and employers to understand". A 2006 white paper, A points-based system: making migration work for Britain, pledged that "applicants will find the system simpler to understand and the rules for entry clearer and more consistently applied. It will be quicker and simpler for employers and educational institutions to bring in the migrants they need".

While many of the ideas in the document are reheated, the governing one - ending free movement of workers from the European Union - suffices to make it radical. But the plan only covers economic migration. The Conservative manifesto envisages that the often ugly status quo will persist in many other areas of the immigration system: a "compliant environment" of citizen-on-citizen document checking, restrictive rules on visas for spouses and elderly relatives, sky-high fees and a creaking asylum system. The manifesto also heralds an attack on judicial review, which with the erosion of appeal rights in immigration cases represents a more important tool than ever for vindicating the rights of migrants.

The press release follows in full.

THE CONSERVATIVE PLAN FOR IMMIGRATION AFTER BREXIT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For too long, politicians have been out of touch with the hardworking majority's concerns about immigration. The vote to leave the EU was, amongst other things, a vote to take back control of our borders. That is why, with a functioning Conservative majority government, we will get Brexit done, end free movement and introduce a new Australian-style points-based immigration system.

This new system will give us control over who comes to this country on the basis of the skills they have to offer - not where they come from. Only by installing proper controls and ending the preferential treatment of EEA migrants will we be able to attract the brightest and the best from around the world to come here and contribute to our society and economy, while relying on far fewer low-skilled migrants and getting overall migration down.

Here we outline three key changes a majority Conservative government would make after Brexit:

1. A points-based system

Our single new system will allocate points on a range of criteria. It will, de facto, allocate people into three separate categories:

'Exceptional talent / contribution' - highly educated migrants who have received world-leading awards or otherwise demonstrated exceptional talent, sponsored entrepreneurs setting up a new business or investors. These will not require a job offer and will receive fast-track entry.

'Skilled workers' - workers who meet the criteria of the points-based system and have a confirmed job offer. Special types - such as our NHS Visa - will also receive fast-track entry and reduced fees.

'Sector-specific rules-based' - made up of specific temporary schemes such as for low-skilled labour, youth mobility or short term visits (e.g., touring). These will be revised on an ongoing basis based on expert advice from the MAC. These visas will be time-limited and will not provide a path to settlement.

The new system will give us control of migration, allow us to reduce total net migration, while meeting the needs of our economy and improving the UK's productivity.

Once we have ended free movement and introduced electronic travel authorisation (ETAs), we will be able to screen all prospective migrants on the basis of previous criminality, and bar those with serious convictions from coming here.

2. A new role for the Migration Advisory Committee ('the MAC')

The MAC will be required to publish an annual report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising the Government on how to deliver on its objectives - i.e. to get net migration down while addressing emerging gaps in the labour market - including sector specific advice.

The role of the MAC will continue to be advisory and the Home Secretary will have full discretion over decisions related to the future immigration system.

The MAC will also be required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

Once the new digital immigration status is in place, this will enable the MAC to better understand the impact of immigration on specific communities.

3. A digital immigration status to crack down on illegal overstaying beyond 2022

The fundamental principle of the new immigration system is that the government will be in control.

Beyond 2022, all migrants will have a full digital status, making it easier for legal migrants to prove their status, as well as allowing for improved enforcement.

All visas will be time-limited, with usual indefinite leave to remain rules applying for those who are identified as 'exceptional' or 'high-skilled'. In-country switching between visas will be allowed, but overstaying a visa will count against an individual in their new application.

All migrants will pay the health surcharge for every year of their visa, unless and until they have gained settled status - usually not before they have been here for five years.

We will ensure equal treatment of EEA and non-EEA migrants' regarding access to benefits, making sure people pay in before they can take out.

In order to achieve this we will:

Immediately begin work to set up a formal exchange programme with the Australian and Canadian governments to allow experts to come to the UK and share best practice with officials during the development of the system.

Appoint an expert implementation group to ensure roll-out of the new immigration system from January 2021.

Commenting, Priti Patel, Home Secretary said:

"The vote to leave the EU was a vote to take back control of our borders, and that is exactly what a Conservative majority government will do by getting Brexit done and ending freedom of movement.

"Immigration will finally be subject to democratic control. We will be able to create a fairer system, which will attract the brightest and the best from around the world to come here and contribute to our society and economy, while getting overall immigration down.

"Corbyn's Labour want uncontrolled and unlimited immigration, placing huge strain on public services like our NHS."

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS

A POINTS-BASED IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

Our single new system will allocate points on a range of criteria. It will, de facto, allocate people into three separate categories:

'Exceptional talent / contribution' - highly educated migrants who have received world-leading awards or otherwise demonstrated exceptional talent, sponsored entrepreneurs setting up a new business or investors. These will not require a job offer and will receive fast-track entry.

'Skilled workers' - workers who meet the criteria of the points-based system and have a confirmed job offer. Special types - such as our NHS Visa - will also receive fast-track entry and reduced fees.

'Sector-specific rules-based' - made up of specific temporary schemes such as for low-skilled labour, youth mobility or short term visits (e.g., touring). These will be revised on an ongoing basis based on expert advice from the MAC. These visas will be time-limited and will not provide a path to settlement.

We will work with stakeholders and businesses as we develop the details of how the points framework will be set and updated. We have already commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to examine this model, and they are due to report in January 2020 (HM Government, 6 September 2019, link). We will follow these principles:

The points system must be clear and easy for applicants and employers to understand;

The points system must be flexible so it can be adjusted according to changing economic or social circumstances;

The government will reassess the points system annually upon receiving the advice of the MAC;

Ultimate decision making powers for how the immigration rules will apply will continue to reside with the Home Secretary.

Exceptional talent / contribution

Additional points will be awarded to those who have received awards in a qualifying field and have been endorsed as a recognised leader (exceptional talent) or an emerging leader (exceptional promise). This category will also include those who are bringing funds to set up businesses in the UK (entrepreneurs) and those who want to invest in the UK (investors).

This category will encompass the fast-track visa route for the brightest and best scientists that we have announced (HM Government, August 2019, link). In practice this will mean the following changes compared to the current system:

There will be no cap on numbers for exceptional talent.

We will expand the pool of UK research institutes and universities able to endorse candidates.

We will define a set of criteria that confer automatic endorsement, subject to immigration checks (i.e., for criminal history and good character).

We will ensure that dependents of those who come in via this new route will have full access to the labour market.

We will remove the need for those who come in via this route to hold an offer of employment before arriving.

We will establish an accelerated path to settlement, allowing these visa-holders to apply for early settlement after three years rather than five.

Skilled workers

The new immigration system will enable skilled workers to come to the UK to help grow our economy and contribute to public services. This will be a global system which prioritises those who can add the most to our economy and society, wherever they are from.

We will streamline and speed up the sponsorship process for skilled workers to significantly reduce the time it takes to bring in a migrant to meet labour market demands, reducing the burden on both individuals and businesses. Currently, the end-to-end process for a general work visa under Tier 2 can take 8-20 weeks.

Confirmed job offers will confer extra points and employer sponsorship will remain a key requirement for the vast majority of migrants as we believe that employers are best placed to determine which skills are required for their business, as well as to prevent abuse of our immigration system.

The MAC will advise annually on whether caps or incentives are required based on whether there are shortages or an excess of migration via this skilled worker category.

In our manifesto we committed that the new system will prioritise people who:

"Can prove their knowledge of the English language;

Are coming to do important work, including in priority industries;

Are setting up businesses that would employ and invest in British people and pay taxes in the UK;

Have been law abiding citizens in their own countries; and

Have the skills the country needs."

(Conservative Party Manifesto 2019, link)

The NHS visa that has already been announced is an example of a route which would fall within the skilled worker category of the new points-based system.

For as long as there is a shortage of NHS workers, extra points will be awarded if an individual comes to the UK to work in the NHS (irrespective of what NHS body is the sponsoring employer).

The visa will be tied to NHS employment and geared around filling acute job shortages in the NHS.

Three main roles will be included: qualified doctors, nurses and Allied Health Professionals.

There will be no cap on the number of qualified applicants who can migrate to the UK with an NHS Visa.

Sector-specific rules-based schemes

The general principle will be that there will not be a general route for low or unskilled workers, unless there is a specific labour market shortage identified by the independent MAC in their annual forecast to the Home Secretary.

The Home Secretary will, on the advice of the MAC, have the ability to set up capped schemes to fill specific labour shortages, such as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' scheme. We have already pledged to raise the cap for the next year of this pilot scheme from 2,500 to 10,000 places in 2020-21 (Telegraph, 9 Nov 2019, link).

There will also be a specific scheme for short term visits such as touring and work assignments.

The rules for each scheme are likely to vary but all visas will be time-limited and will typically not lead to settlement.

A NEW ROLE FOR THE MIGRATION ADVISORY COMMITTEE ('THE MAC')

The MAC will be required to publish an annual report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising the Government on how to get overall immigration down while meeting the needs of the UK economy and improving productivity - including sector specific advice. This will inform the Home Secretary's decision-making on the points-based system and sector-specific schemes.

The MAC will be expanded and given extra resources as required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

From 2022, new digital immigration status will enable the MAC to better understand the impact of immigration on specific communities.

The governance of the MAC

The MAC will continue to provide expert independent advice to government on migration issues.

The Home Office will review the MAC's framework document in conjunction with the MAC at the earliest possible opportunity.

In future, the MAC will be required to produce an annual public report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising on how to meet the following three objectives (this will include sector specific advice):

1. Lowering overall immigration;

2. Meeting the needs of the UK economy;

3. Improving the UK's productivity.

During the review of the MAC's framework document, the Government will consider if the MAC needs increased resource to improve its analytical and reporting capability.

The Home Secretary will continue to appoint the committee, including the Chairman.

The role of the MAC will continue to be advisory and the Home Secretary will have full discretion over decisions related to the points system and the immigration rules.

As with the usual process, the MAC's framework document will be reviewed and agreed every three years, or within two months of a new Chair appointment, a new senior sponsor being appointed, or significant changes in policy relating to the MAC's business.

The MAC will also be expanded and given extra resources as required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

A DIGITAL IMMIGRATION STATUS TO IMPROVE COMPLIANCE AND TACKLE ILLEGAL OVERSTAYING

Beyond 2022, we will begin to count people in and out by introducing world-leading border crossing arrangements to keep our country safe. The Conservative 2019 Manifesto pledges that 'We will keep track of who is coming in and out of our country' (Conservative Manifesto 2019, link). This is vital so that we are able to restrict illegal immigration, identify offenders who have breached the terms of their visa, and prevent another Windrush disaster.

The end-to-end user journey will be friendly, digital by default and will provide individuals with a smooth journey into the UK. It will reduce the processing time for the majority of applicants and minimise the burden on individuals and businesses. Data protection will be of the utmost importance.

An illustrative end to end user journey of a skilled worker arriving here from 2022:

1. Sponsor (employer) starts user-friendly registration process.

2. Individual (migrant) applies for e-visa, citing their employer/sponsor.

3. Criminality and eligibility checks take place.

4. ID verification app to confirm passport and submit facial biometrics.

5. Arrive at airport when immigration status granted, an automated check by the carrier shows you have Home Office authorisation to board the plane.

6. Land in UK and use e-gates to cross UK border (digital "stamp in").

7. Individual has their digital immigration status easily accessible, supporting our existing measures to control access to benefits and allowing the individual to easily share proof of status with employers, NHS, landlords, banks etc.

8. Regular data exchange between the Home Office and HMRC shows every individual migrant is employed and not working outside the conditions of their visa.

9. Digital status "stamped out" during exit checks upon departure from the UK, whichever port they leave from.

A core part of having control of our border is ensuring that people do not overstay their authorisation to reside in the UK, and that they do not unfairly gain access to our public services. This fully digital status will allow for improved enforcement of visa conditions.

All migrants will have a fully digital status, allowing for improved enforcement, and providing legal migrants with a simple way to prove their status in the UK;

All visas will be time-limited. In-country switching will be allowed, for example from study to skilled worker visa, but overstaying a visa would count against an individual in their new application.

All migrants will pay the health surcharge for every year of their visa unless and until they have gained settled status.

We will ensure equal treatment of EEA and non-EEA migrants' regarding access to benefits. Our new immigration system will mean non-UK nationals will typically need to wait five years before being eligible to claim benefits (Conservatives.com, 17 November 2019, link).

LABOUR WOULD CONTINUE FREE MOVEMENT, WITH NO CONTROL OF OUR BORDER

Jeremy Corbyn has no plan for Brexit and will not even say if he thinks we should leave or remain. Rather, on the biggest issue he would face as Prime Minister, Corbyn has committed to staying neutral (Guardian, November 2019, link).

The only thing Corbyn is clear about in his Brexit plan, is that he would keep free movement, whether we leave or remain - he is an advocate of the UK being subject to uncontrolled and unlimited immigration, forever. The Labour manifesto states that 'freedom of movement would continue', either via continued EU membership or via a negotiation which 'will seek to protect those [free movement] rights' (Labour Manifesto 2019, link)

This departs from the earlier promises in the Labour Party's 2017 Manifesto, that 'Freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union' and that 'Labour accepts the result of the referendum' (Labour Party, Manifesto 2017, accessed 27 November 2019, link).

Leading members of the Shadow Cabinet have confirmed that their intention is to 'extend' free movement:

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell confirmed ahead of the finalising and release of the party's manifesto that Labour's policy is to have 'as much freedom of movement as possible' (BBC Radio 4, The Today Programme, 30 October 2019, link).

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott pledged on Twitter ahead of the Manifesto having been finalised that "The Labour Party is committed to maintaining & extending Freedom of Movement rights. Labour will scrap [the income requirement], and extend Freedom of Movement rights to all those legally entitled to be here" (Sun, 15 November 2019, link).

Corbyn himself said that there would be a 'great deal of movement' (BBC One,The Andrew Marr Show, 17 November 2019, link).

The Labour manifesto makes makes clear that Corbyn will 'end the minimum income requirements' on family reunion, opening the door to a vast increase in the number of dependents coming to the UK from around the world and putting huge pressure on our NHS and other vital public services (Labour Party, Manifesto 2019, 27 November 2019, link).

The Labour manifesto also commits to scrapping the Immigration Act 2014 which will severely undermine the UK's ability to crack down on illegal immigration and investigate sham marriages (Labour Party Manifesto 2019, accessed 27 November 2019, link).

Protected the rights of EU citizens who have made the UK their home. We want EU citizens who came to live in the UK before Brexit to stay. That is why we have guaranteed their rights with the EU Settlement Scheme free of charge, which we will also put into law at the earliest opportunity. Over 1.9 million EEA/Swiss citizens have received settled or pre-settled status so far (Hansard, EU Settlement Scheme, Volume 667, 28 October 2019,link).

Allowing international students to stay in the UK for two years after graduating to enable them find a job. International students who have successfully completed a degree from a trusted UK university or higher education provider will be able to stay in the UK for two years to find work. This will attract more talented international students to the UK to allow them to gain valuable work experience as they go on to build successful careers (Prime Minister's Office, News Story, 11 September 2019,link).

Removing doctors and nurses from the Tier 2 visa cap so the NHS can recruit more international staff to care for patients. As part of our long-term plan for the NHS, this means there is no restriction on the numbers of highly skilled doctors and nurses who can be employed through the Tier 2 visa route (UK Visas and Immigration, News Story, 15 June 2018,link).

Ensured that people are coming to the UK for the right reasons. We imposed tougher rules on universities and colleges who sponsor international students to study in the UK, limited access to benefits for migrants and stopped people sending benefits home. We also introduced measures to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing public services like our NHS, as well as housing, driving licences and bank accounts (Prime Minister's Office, Press Release, 29 July 2014,link; HTM/DWP, News Story, 8 April 2014,link;Immigration Act 2014, accessed 23 September 2018,link).

Clamped down on illegal immigration and protecting migrants from abuse. We have introduced sanctions on illegal workers and rogue employers, who often take advantage of vulnerable migrants, and made it easier and quicker to remove people with no right to be here (Immigration Act 2016, accessed 23 September 2018, link).

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The Conservative plan for immigration after Brexit - Free Movement

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The Conservative Party has won the general election and a mandate for its policy of an "Australian-style points based system" for immigration, whatever that means. The party manifesto leaves readers none the wiser. We can reveal that more details do exist.

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Financial support for households with children

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Financial support for households with children

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In the July 2015 budget, Cameron’s government announced the two-child limit for tax credits and Universal Credit across the UK. For new claims and new births from April 2017, only the first two children would be recognized in a benefit claim (with a few exceptions). After a concession from then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, the policy was amended so that it would only apply to new births from April 2017. By spring 2020 all households affected therefore had a child aged three or younger.

The Conservative administrations also implemented wider benefit cuts across the UK which have affected families with young children. These included the four-year freeze on working-age benefits from April 2016; the lowering of the benefit cap to £20,000 (£23,000 in London) from November 2016; and the abolition of the family element of Child Tax Credits for families with first children born after 6 April 2017.

In the 2016 Welfare Reform and Work Act, the government removed all mentions of child poverty from the Child Poverty Act 2010, renamed it the Life Chances Act 2010, and removed all four income-based child poverty indicators and their targets. They replaced these targets with a requirement to report on measures of household worklessness and educational attainment at age 16. In 2017 the Scottish Parliament overrode these changes and reinstated child poverty targets.

The 2016 act also increased work conditionality for responsible carers (lone parents or main carers in couples) of children under five, reducing the age at which parents have to start attending work-focused interviews (age one), take ‘active steps’ to prepare for work (age two), and be available for and actively seeking work (age 3-4). Parents face sanctions if they do not meet these conditions.

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A Conservative government will introduce 30 hours of free childcare for three and four year olds. People will be able to take a year of unpaid sabbatical leave to care for a family member and a new statutory bereavement leave will be offered to parents.

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Aiming to create 250,000 extra childcare places during the holidays for primary school-age children - about 5% of that age group. It would cost £250m per year for three years, with £250m for one-off costs such as buildings.

This recalls the era of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, with its pre-austerity expansion of breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and holiday clubs. Much of this will be delivered through schools, so it will depend on them being able to make their premises available over the summer holidays.

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for the Tories this is a much more strategic offer - aiming to create 250,000 extra childcare places during the holidays for primary school-age children - about 5% of that age group. It would cost £250m per year for three years, with £250m for one-off costs such as buildings.This recalls the era of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, with its pre-austerity expansion of breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and holiday clubs. Much of this will be delivered through schools, so it will depend on them being able to make their premises available over the summer holidays.

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The UK's homes are so poorly insulated that to meet the country's 2050 climate commitments we need a nationwide programme to upgrade them. This pledge to spend £2,860 per household on improving the energy efficiency of social housing would affect 2.2m homes. But there's no mention of what would be done for those who own their own home. The claim that households could save up to £750 a year on their energy bills sounds optimistic and could only apply to homes with terrible energy efficiency. The typical saving after such work on housing, experts say, tends to be more like £50. The policy is dwarfed by Labour's promises of spending £9,300 per home on almost all of the 27 million homes in the UK, at a cost of £250bn.

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Spend £6.3bn on 2.2 million disadvantaged homes

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Spend £6.3bn on 2.2 million disadvantaged homes

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This pledge to spend £2,860 per household on improving the energy efficiency of social housing would affect 2.2m homes.

The claim that households could save up to £750 a year on their energy bills sounds optimistic and could only apply to homes with terrible energy efficiency. The typical saving after such work on housing, experts say, tends to be more like £50. The policy is dwarfed by Labour's promises of spending £9,300 per home on almost all of the 27 million homes in the UK, at a cost of £250bn.

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https://freemovement.org.uk/the-conservative-plan-for-immigration-after-brexit/

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The Conservative Party has won the general election and a mandate for its policy of an "Australian-style points based system" for immigration, whatever that means. The party manifesto leaves readers none the wiser.

We can reveal that more details do exist. Last weekend, a rash of media stories emerged stating that the Conservatives had " published" or " set out " more details of their plan for a points based system. But there was no document published for voters to read: the plan was circulated by email to selected journalists, meaning that those interested in the detail could only read second-hand accounts.

Free Movement has a copy, reproduced in full below. Beneath the political spin is the governing party's most detailed account of its plans for the immigration system since last year's white paper.

The document describes three categories of visa after Brexit. The first is "exceptional talent/contribution", with some tweaks that had already been announced. This category incorporates entrepreneur and investment visas - so Tier 1, as we call this category today, rebranded but essentially unchanged.

The second is "skilled workers", what we know today as Tier 2. The "vast majority" of these visas would require a job offer, which is in line with how work visas for non-EU citizens are allocated now, but of course would be a big change for European citizens who would eventually come under this regime with the end of free movement. It is also unlike the Australian points based visas that the system is supposedly modelled on, which do not require a job offer. That will fuel suspicion that the Australian comparison is merely a branding exercise.

The third category is "sector-specific rules-based". This is the replacement of free movement of labour from Europe with state planning, outsourced to the Migration Advisory Committee. This is where the government will attempt to match the demand for workers in specific sectors with enough visas to supply that demand - a task so fraught with difficulty in the real world that the Home Office will not touch it with a bargepole, instead offloading it to the MAC. The MAC's expanded role will also include the thankless remit of, simultaneously, "lowering overall immigration" and "meeting the needs of the UK's economy".

The document's final section is about the Conservatives' recent record on immigration, mostly examples of where they have reversed their earlier policies.

Readers with long memories will also be amused at the solemn promise that "the points system must be clear and easy for applicants and employers to understand". A 2006 white paper, A points-based system: making migration work for Britain, pledged that "applicants will find the system simpler to understand and the rules for entry clearer and more consistently applied. It will be quicker and simpler for employers and educational institutions to bring in the migrants they need".

While many of the ideas in the document are reheated, the governing one - ending free movement of workers from the European Union - suffices to make it radical. But the plan only covers economic migration. The Conservative manifesto envisages that the often ugly status quo will persist in many other areas of the immigration system: a "compliant environment" of citizen-on-citizen document checking, restrictive rules on visas for spouses and elderly relatives, sky-high fees and a creaking asylum system. The manifesto also heralds an attack on judicial review, which with the erosion of appeal rights in immigration cases represents a more important tool than ever for vindicating the rights of migrants.

The press release follows in full.

THE CONSERVATIVE PLAN FOR IMMIGRATION AFTER BREXIT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For too long, politicians have been out of touch with the hardworking majority's concerns about immigration. The vote to leave the EU was, amongst other things, a vote to take back control of our borders. That is why, with a functioning Conservative majority government, we will get Brexit done, end free movement and introduce a new Australian-style points-based immigration system.

This new system will give us control over who comes to this country on the basis of the skills they have to offer - not where they come from. Only by installing proper controls and ending the preferential treatment of EEA migrants will we be able to attract the brightest and the best from around the world to come here and contribute to our society and economy, while relying on far fewer low-skilled migrants and getting overall migration down.

Here we outline three key changes a majority Conservative government would make after Brexit:

1. A points-based system

Our single new system will allocate points on a range of criteria. It will, de facto, allocate people into three separate categories:

'Exceptional talent / contribution' - highly educated migrants who have received world-leading awards or otherwise demonstrated exceptional talent, sponsored entrepreneurs setting up a new business or investors. These will not require a job offer and will receive fast-track entry.

'Skilled workers' - workers who meet the criteria of the points-based system and have a confirmed job offer. Special types - such as our NHS Visa - will also receive fast-track entry and reduced fees.

'Sector-specific rules-based' - made up of specific temporary schemes such as for low-skilled labour, youth mobility or short term visits (e.g., touring). These will be revised on an ongoing basis based on expert advice from the MAC. These visas will be time-limited and will not provide a path to settlement.

The new system will give us control of migration, allow us to reduce total net migration, while meeting the needs of our economy and improving the UK's productivity.

Once we have ended free movement and introduced electronic travel authorisation (ETAs), we will be able to screen all prospective migrants on the basis of previous criminality, and bar those with serious convictions from coming here.

2. A new role for the Migration Advisory Committee ('the MAC')

The MAC will be required to publish an annual report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising the Government on how to deliver on its objectives - i.e. to get net migration down while addressing emerging gaps in the labour market - including sector specific advice.

The role of the MAC will continue to be advisory and the Home Secretary will have full discretion over decisions related to the future immigration system.

The MAC will also be required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

Once the new digital immigration status is in place, this will enable the MAC to better understand the impact of immigration on specific communities.

3. A digital immigration status to crack down on illegal overstaying beyond 2022

The fundamental principle of the new immigration system is that the government will be in control.

Beyond 2022, all migrants will have a full digital status, making it easier for legal migrants to prove their status, as well as allowing for improved enforcement.

All visas will be time-limited, with usual indefinite leave to remain rules applying for those who are identified as 'exceptional' or 'high-skilled'. In-country switching between visas will be allowed, but overstaying a visa will count against an individual in their new application.

All migrants will pay the health surcharge for every year of their visa, unless and until they have gained settled status - usually not before they have been here for five years.

We will ensure equal treatment of EEA and non-EEA migrants' regarding access to benefits, making sure people pay in before they can take out.

In order to achieve this we will:

Immediately begin work to set up a formal exchange programme with the Australian and Canadian governments to allow experts to come to the UK and share best practice with officials during the development of the system.

Appoint an expert implementation group to ensure roll-out of the new immigration system from January 2021.

Commenting, Priti Patel, Home Secretary said:

"The vote to leave the EU was a vote to take back control of our borders, and that is exactly what a Conservative majority government will do by getting Brexit done and ending freedom of movement.

"Immigration will finally be subject to democratic control. We will be able to create a fairer system, which will attract the brightest and the best from around the world to come here and contribute to our society and economy, while getting overall immigration down.

"Corbyn's Labour want uncontrolled and unlimited immigration, placing huge strain on public services like our NHS."

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS

A POINTS-BASED IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

Our single new system will allocate points on a range of criteria. It will, de facto, allocate people into three separate categories:

'Exceptional talent / contribution' - highly educated migrants who have received world-leading awards or otherwise demonstrated exceptional talent, sponsored entrepreneurs setting up a new business or investors. These will not require a job offer and will receive fast-track entry.

'Skilled workers' - workers who meet the criteria of the points-based system and have a confirmed job offer. Special types - such as our NHS Visa - will also receive fast-track entry and reduced fees.

'Sector-specific rules-based' - made up of specific temporary schemes such as for low-skilled labour, youth mobility or short term visits (e.g., touring). These will be revised on an ongoing basis based on expert advice from the MAC. These visas will be time-limited and will not provide a path to settlement.

We will work with stakeholders and businesses as we develop the details of how the points framework will be set and updated. We have already commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to examine this model, and they are due to report in January 2020 (HM Government, 6 September 2019, link). We will follow these principles:

The points system must be clear and easy for applicants and employers to understand;

The points system must be flexible so it can be adjusted according to changing economic or social circumstances;

The government will reassess the points system annually upon receiving the advice of the MAC;

Ultimate decision making powers for how the immigration rules will apply will continue to reside with the Home Secretary.

Exceptional talent / contribution

Additional points will be awarded to those who have received awards in a qualifying field and have been endorsed as a recognised leader (exceptional talent) or an emerging leader (exceptional promise). This category will also include those who are bringing funds to set up businesses in the UK (entrepreneurs) and those who want to invest in the UK (investors).

This category will encompass the fast-track visa route for the brightest and best scientists that we have announced (HM Government, August 2019, link). In practice this will mean the following changes compared to the current system:

There will be no cap on numbers for exceptional talent.

We will expand the pool of UK research institutes and universities able to endorse candidates.

We will define a set of criteria that confer automatic endorsement, subject to immigration checks (i.e., for criminal history and good character).

We will ensure that dependents of those who come in via this new route will have full access to the labour market.

We will remove the need for those who come in via this route to hold an offer of employment before arriving.

We will establish an accelerated path to settlement, allowing these visa-holders to apply for early settlement after three years rather than five.

Skilled workers

The new immigration system will enable skilled workers to come to the UK to help grow our economy and contribute to public services. This will be a global system which prioritises those who can add the most to our economy and society, wherever they are from.

We will streamline and speed up the sponsorship process for skilled workers to significantly reduce the time it takes to bring in a migrant to meet labour market demands, reducing the burden on both individuals and businesses. Currently, the end-to-end process for a general work visa under Tier 2 can take 8-20 weeks.

Confirmed job offers will confer extra points and employer sponsorship will remain a key requirement for the vast majority of migrants as we believe that employers are best placed to determine which skills are required for their business, as well as to prevent abuse of our immigration system.

The MAC will advise annually on whether caps or incentives are required based on whether there are shortages or an excess of migration via this skilled worker category.

In our manifesto we committed that the new system will prioritise people who:

"Can prove their knowledge of the English language;

Are coming to do important work, including in priority industries;

Are setting up businesses that would employ and invest in British people and pay taxes in the UK;

Have been law abiding citizens in their own countries; and

Have the skills the country needs."

(Conservative Party Manifesto 2019, link)

The NHS visa that has already been announced is an example of a route which would fall within the skilled worker category of the new points-based system.

For as long as there is a shortage of NHS workers, extra points will be awarded if an individual comes to the UK to work in the NHS (irrespective of what NHS body is the sponsoring employer).

The visa will be tied to NHS employment and geared around filling acute job shortages in the NHS.

Three main roles will be included: qualified doctors, nurses and Allied Health Professionals.

There will be no cap on the number of qualified applicants who can migrate to the UK with an NHS Visa.

Sector-specific rules-based schemes

The general principle will be that there will not be a general route for low or unskilled workers, unless there is a specific labour market shortage identified by the independent MAC in their annual forecast to the Home Secretary.

The Home Secretary will, on the advice of the MAC, have the ability to set up capped schemes to fill specific labour shortages, such as the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' scheme. We have already pledged to raise the cap for the next year of this pilot scheme from 2,500 to 10,000 places in 2020-21 (Telegraph, 9 Nov 2019, link).

There will also be a specific scheme for short term visits such as touring and work assignments.

The rules for each scheme are likely to vary but all visas will be time-limited and will typically not lead to settlement.

A NEW ROLE FOR THE MIGRATION ADVISORY COMMITTEE ('THE MAC')

The MAC will be required to publish an annual report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising the Government on how to get overall immigration down while meeting the needs of the UK economy and improving productivity - including sector specific advice. This will inform the Home Secretary's decision-making on the points-based system and sector-specific schemes.

The MAC will be expanded and given extra resources as required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

From 2022, new digital immigration status will enable the MAC to better understand the impact of immigration on specific communities.

The governance of the MAC

The MAC will continue to provide expert independent advice to government on migration issues.

The Home Office will review the MAC's framework document in conjunction with the MAC at the earliest possible opportunity.

In future, the MAC will be required to produce an annual public report via a public letter to the Home Secretary, advising on how to meet the following three objectives (this will include sector specific advice):

1. Lowering overall immigration;

2. Meeting the needs of the UK economy;

3. Improving the UK's productivity.

During the review of the MAC's framework document, the Government will consider if the MAC needs increased resource to improve its analytical and reporting capability.

The Home Secretary will continue to appoint the committee, including the Chairman.

The role of the MAC will continue to be advisory and the Home Secretary will have full discretion over decisions related to the points system and the immigration rules.

As with the usual process, the MAC's framework document will be reviewed and agreed every three years, or within two months of a new Chair appointment, a new senior sponsor being appointed, or significant changes in policy relating to the MAC's business.

The MAC will also be expanded and given extra resources as required to monitor the needs of the labour market on an ongoing basis to ensure that the Home Secretary has the information needed to make decisions rapidly.

A DIGITAL IMMIGRATION STATUS TO IMPROVE COMPLIANCE AND TACKLE ILLEGAL OVERSTAYING

Beyond 2022, we will begin to count people in and out by introducing world-leading border crossing arrangements to keep our country safe. The Conservative 2019 Manifesto pledges that 'We will keep track of who is coming in and out of our country' (Conservative Manifesto 2019, link). This is vital so that we are able to restrict illegal immigration, identify offenders who have breached the terms of their visa, and prevent another Windrush disaster.

The end-to-end user journey will be friendly, digital by default and will provide individuals with a smooth journey into the UK. It will reduce the processing time for the majority of applicants and minimise the burden on individuals and businesses. Data protection will be of the utmost importance.

An illustrative end to end user journey of a skilled worker arriving here from 2022:

1. Sponsor (employer) starts user-friendly registration process.

2. Individual (migrant) applies for e-visa, citing their employer/sponsor.

3. Criminality and eligibility checks take place.

4. ID verification app to confirm passport and submit facial biometrics.

5. Arrive at airport when immigration status granted, an automated check by the carrier shows you have Home Office authorisation to board the plane.

6. Land in UK and use e-gates to cross UK border (digital "stamp in").

7. Individual has their digital immigration status easily accessible, supporting our existing measures to control access to benefits and allowing the individual to easily share proof of status with employers, NHS, landlords, banks etc.

8. Regular data exchange between the Home Office and HMRC shows every individual migrant is employed and not working outside the conditions of their visa.

9. Digital status "stamped out" during exit checks upon departure from the UK, whichever port they leave from.

A core part of having control of our border is ensuring that people do not overstay their authorisation to reside in the UK, and that they do not unfairly gain access to our public services. This fully digital status will allow for improved enforcement of visa conditions.

All migrants will have a fully digital status, allowing for improved enforcement, and providing legal migrants with a simple way to prove their status in the UK;

All visas will be time-limited. In-country switching will be allowed, for example from study to skilled worker visa, but overstaying a visa would count against an individual in their new application.

All migrants will pay the health surcharge for every year of their visa unless and until they have gained settled status.

We will ensure equal treatment of EEA and non-EEA migrants' regarding access to benefits. Our new immigration system will mean non-UK nationals will typically need to wait five years before being eligible to claim benefits (Conservatives.com, 17 November 2019, link).

LABOUR WOULD CONTINUE FREE MOVEMENT, WITH NO CONTROL OF OUR BORDER

Jeremy Corbyn has no plan for Brexit and will not even say if he thinks we should leave or remain. Rather, on the biggest issue he would face as Prime Minister, Corbyn has committed to staying neutral (Guardian, November 2019, link).

The only thing Corbyn is clear about in his Brexit plan, is that he would keep free movement, whether we leave or remain - he is an advocate of the UK being subject to uncontrolled and unlimited immigration, forever. The Labour manifesto states that 'freedom of movement would continue', either via continued EU membership or via a negotiation which 'will seek to protect those [free movement] rights' (Labour Manifesto 2019, link)

This departs from the earlier promises in the Labour Party's 2017 Manifesto, that 'Freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union' and that 'Labour accepts the result of the referendum' (Labour Party, Manifesto 2017, accessed 27 November 2019, link).

Leading members of the Shadow Cabinet have confirmed that their intention is to 'extend' free movement:

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell confirmed ahead of the finalising and release of the party's manifesto that Labour's policy is to have 'as much freedom of movement as possible' (BBC Radio 4, The Today Programme, 30 October 2019, link).

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott pledged on Twitter ahead of the Manifesto having been finalised that "The Labour Party is committed to maintaining & extending Freedom of Movement rights. Labour will scrap [the income requirement], and extend Freedom of Movement rights to all those legally entitled to be here" (Sun, 15 November 2019, link).

Corbyn himself said that there would be a 'great deal of movement' (BBC One,The Andrew Marr Show, 17 November 2019, link).

The Labour manifesto makes makes clear that Corbyn will 'end the minimum income requirements' on family reunion, opening the door to a vast increase in the number of dependents coming to the UK from around the world and putting huge pressure on our NHS and other vital public services (Labour Party, Manifesto 2019, 27 November 2019, link).

The Labour manifesto also commits to scrapping the Immigration Act 2014 which will severely undermine the UK's ability to crack down on illegal immigration and investigate sham marriages (Labour Party Manifesto 2019, accessed 27 November 2019, link).

Protected the rights of EU citizens who have made the UK their home. We want EU citizens who came to live in the UK before Brexit to stay. That is why we have guaranteed their rights with the EU Settlement Scheme free of charge, which we will also put into law at the earliest opportunity. Over 1.9 million EEA/Swiss citizens have received settled or pre-settled status so far (Hansard, EU Settlement Scheme, Volume 667, 28 October 2019,link).

Allowing international students to stay in the UK for two years after graduating to enable them find a job. International students who have successfully completed a degree from a trusted UK university or higher education provider will be able to stay in the UK for two years to find work. This will attract more talented international students to the UK to allow them to gain valuable work experience as they go on to build successful careers (Prime Minister's Office, News Story, 11 September 2019,link).

Removing doctors and nurses from the Tier 2 visa cap so the NHS can recruit more international staff to care for patients. As part of our long-term plan for the NHS, this means there is no restriction on the numbers of highly skilled doctors and nurses who can be employed through the Tier 2 visa route (UK Visas and Immigration, News Story, 15 June 2018,link).

Ensured that people are coming to the UK for the right reasons. We imposed tougher rules on universities and colleges who sponsor international students to study in the UK, limited access to benefits for migrants and stopped people sending benefits home. We also introduced measures to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing public services like our NHS, as well as housing, driving licences and bank accounts (Prime Minister's Office, Press Release, 29 July 2014,link; HTM/DWP, News Story, 8 April 2014,link;Immigration Act 2014, accessed 23 September 2018,link).

Clamped down on illegal immigration and protecting migrants from abuse. We have introduced sanctions on illegal workers and rogue employers, who often take advantage of vulnerable migrants, and made it easier and quicker to remove people with no right to be here (Immigration Act 2016, accessed 23 September 2018, link).

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The Conservative plan for immigration after Brexit - Free Movement

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The Conservative Party has won the general election and a mandate for its policy of an "Australian-style points based system" for immigration, whatever that means. The party manifesto leaves readers none the wiser. We can reveal that more details do exist.

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7 Core Principles of Conservatism

Individual Freedom. The birth of our great nation was inspired by the bold declaration that our individual,God-given liberties should be preserved against government intrusion

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While in 2015 the Conservatives committed themselves to ‘backing the institution of marriage in our society’ by retaining the transferable tax allowance between married spouses and undertaking to ensure that ‘the transferable amount will always rise at least in line with the Personal Allowance’, the only reference to marriage this time around appears in a statement of opposition to forced marriage in a section headed ‘Supporting all victims of crime’.

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The government has successfully negotiated a deal with Japan to replace the EU–Japan deal. It has also formally launched negotiations with the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

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Reintroduce maintenance grants for nursing students. The party hopes to train more nurses by reintroducing maintenance grants of between £5,000 and £8,000 a year for students. The scrapping of these grants in 2017 was controversial and was followed by a fall in applicants. So, it is something of a U-turn.

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https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/611991/Supporting_disadvantaged_families.pdf

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https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/5-big-changes-cities-policy-since-2015-general-election/

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Two years ago, as the UK prepared for the 2015 general election, it seemed that the political and economic centralisation that had set the UK apart from the majority of its western peers was about to change. In the run-up to that election, each of the three main political parties was engaged in a ' race to the top ' on cities policy and devolution - with the Chancellor George Osborne promising to build a 'Northern Powerhouse' (illustrated by the devolution deal with Greater Manchester struck in late 2014), Labour's pledge to boost decentralised funding to the tune of £30 billion, and the Liberal Democrats' proposals for 'devolution on demand'.

As we gear up to go to the polls once again on 8 th June, it would be a huge understatement to say that a great deal has changed in the last two years. The vote for Brexit, the departure of David Cameron and George Osborne from the political stage, and the ascent of a new Conservative government much more willing to intervene in the economy (and less confident about the benefits of open markets) has resulted in a dramatically altered political landscape to that inhabited ahead of the last election.

But while the Cameron/May governments were only around for two years - and despite the upheavals following the EU referendum vote - there has nonetheless been significant activity and progress on policies that relate to cities, devolution and growth in that time. Here are the five most important developments in the urban agenda - and some ideas on how the next Government can build on that progress:

Making the most of Mayors

Almost immediately after winning a slender overall majority, the then Chancellor George Osborne and Greg Clark (then the Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government), confirmed and ramped up their commitment to cities, devolution and the Northern Powerhouse, despite the scepticism of many in their own party (and the Labour Party). During 2016, Greater Manchester was joined on the devolution journey by firstly Liverpool City Region, West Midlands and Tees Valley, and subsequently the West of England and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough. Unfortunately the North East and Sheffield ended their respective journeys, and the Leeds City Region never left the starting line.

After a more vigorous and engaging set of campaigns than many anticipated, the first metro mayor elections took place last week. As expected, the Conservatives won in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough and the West of England (which includes the Tory-led councils of Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire as well as Labour-led Bristol). But back in May 2015, few would have predicted that the Tories would also win in the West Midlands and Tees Valley-places where Labour had 10 and 13 point leads respectively at the 2015 general election, but where concerns about Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, support for Brexit and strong campaigns by Conservatives have put paid to Labour hopes.

Two years on, even Osborne (who has now exited the political stage) must be surprised at how successfully his vision has been realised - and while it is disappointing that not all of England's big cities elected mayors in 2017, the progress made over the last 24 months should not be underestimated. The UK is one of the most centralised countries in the OECD and rectifying this will take time and continued commitment from Westminster, Whitehall and cities.

Return of Industrial Strategy

Some feared that a change in Prime Minister and Chancellor following the EU referendum would lead to a reduced appetite for local economic growth policies. However, the difficulties faced by Tata Steel in early 2016 combined with the Brexit vote resulted in the new Prime Minister Theresa May promising a new industrial strategy that would drive growth "up and down the country, in rural areas and our great cities". The Government took a while before producing a green paper in January 2017 which was broadly welcomed for its scope and intent, but was also criticised for being too general, for not prioritising specific policy interventions, and for not being place-based enough.

During the current general election campaign Theresa May has repeated her commitment to the industrial strategy and further details are expected early in the next parliament. The big question is whether it will adopt a sector-based approach - which is typically what previous government approaches have been - or to adopt a place-based approach. The latter seemed to be the preference of the most recent Secretary of State for Business Greg Clark, but traditionally the Treasury have been less keen. Whatever form it takes, to be successful the strategy will need to reflect the nature of the national economy and how it is changing; recognising why businesses choose to locate and invest where they do, the global trends that influence which industries the UK is best-placed to compete in, and the policy mix needed to support them.

Shift from home ownership to building more housing

Despite a commitment by the Cameron government to build a million more homes before 2020, much of his administration's housing agenda was very much focused on boosting home ownership (Right to Buy, equity loans, ISAs, etc.). It was only after the referendum that there was a shift in emphasis towards boosting supply. A key plank in this refocus was the Housing White paper which was finally published in January 2017 and billed by the government as the biggest shake up to the housing sector in thirty years.

Despite its rhetoric, it turned out not to be as radical as was trailed for two significant reasons - the lack of recognition of the different housing challenges that places up and down the country face and the solutions they need, and the failure to address the fundamental problem of land supply particularly in and around cities with high housing demand. In the field of housing, promises are easy to make but delivery is harder to achieve. New housing starts and completions are still below their pre-recession peaks and it will take more concerted effort by the next government to turn rhetoric into reality.

Reforming education and skills

Like many governments before it, the Cameron/May government sought to address the long-standing problems associated with the education and skills systems - reducing the stark disparities in school attainment across the country, providing greater parity between technical and academic education, connecting training and skills provision to the needs of business, encouraging businesses to invest more in training their workers - by introducing a raft of new initiatives, and reforming or removing existing programmes.

A flagship policy proposed by the Cameron government and introduced by the May government aimed at addressing some of these issues was the Apprenticeship Levy which came into force in April 2017, alongside a new digital apprenticeship service and the Institute for Apprenticeships. The Levy will raise over £2 billion in the government's efforts to hit their 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020. Concerns raised that the new reforms are unlikely to address the need and demand for apprenticeships where it is greatest - especially in Northern cities - or to lead to more genuine training opportunities for young peoples across the country are yet to materialise, but will be something that businesses and government will need to keep a careful eye on in the next parliament.

Reforms to the business rates system

Over the last two years cities have continued to see their budgets decline. The overall local government budget declined by nearly 5 per cent between 2015-16 and 2016-17 while the Revenue Support Grant, which is the main non ring-fenced grant for local authorities from central Government, decreased by 24.5 per cent in the same period. Alongside devolution deals, the Cameron administration also proposed significant reforms to the way local government is funded. In the future local authorities will have to adapt to a funding environment in which their budgets will be much more dependent on locally generated growth-based revenues - council tax and business rates - and much less reliant on central government needs-based grants.

The Government announced in the 2015 Spending Review that 100% of business rates would be devolved to local government by 2020. Following extensive discussions with the sector primary legislation was introduced in January 2017. While there has been broad support for more devolution of the business rates system, there have also been concerns raised about the complexity of the system, and particularly how the desire to strengthen the growth incentive within the system would be balanced with a redistribution mechanism. These concerns were amplified by the media reaction to the 'winners and losers' of the latest rateable value revaluation which came into being on 1 st April 2017. Interestingly, the legislation to enable the devolution of business rates was lost because of the general election and it will be interesting to see if, and in what form, the new government reintroduces it.

It's clear, then, that the past two years have brought significant developments in the cities agenda. The challenge for the next government will be to build on that progress, and to make the most of the opportunities it presents. That means, for example, extending more powers (including greater fiscal control) to cities across the country, and making the most of the newly elected metro mayors. It also means ensuring that place-based approaches, that reflect the diverse strengths and weakness of different parts of the country, are at the heart of economic policy in the coming years. Watch this space in the coming weeks for more analysis of the big issues in the 2017 general election, and how they play out in cities across the UK.

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5 big changes to cities policy since the 2015 general election - Centre for Cities

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Two years ago, as the UK prepared for the 2015 general election, it seemed that the political and economic centralisation that had set the UK apart from the majority of its western peers was about to change.

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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/24/conservative-manifesto-the-key-points-policies-boris-johnson

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The Conservative manifesto states:‘Raising a family should be the most fulfilling experience of your life. But for too many parents, the costs of childcare are a heavy burden. We want to give parents the freedom, support and choice to look after their children in the way that works best for them. We will establish a new £1 billion fund to help create more high quality, affordable childcare, including before and after school and during the school holidays.’

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https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7403/

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A Conservative government would ‘want to look at more radical ways to support working families in the UK’. The manifesto notes that ‘our lifestyles have been transformed over the last four decades’, with many families today having two working parents who are juggling work and other responsibilities. Particular concern is expressed about the way that caring responsibilities can have a big impact on the careers of women and limit their participation in the workplace.

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The Conservative party says mortgages, schools, hospitals, and pensions are things that depend on a strong economy. Pledges on the economy include:

Running a surplus by 2018 so that the UK “starts to pay off its debts”
No rise in VAT, national insurance contributions or income tax.
A crack down on tax evasion and the “aggressive” avoidance of tax.
Creating a “Northern powerhouse” through investment.
Spending £100bn on infrastructure in the next parliament.

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https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/14/conservatives-election-manifesto-2015-the-key-points

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Show caption
A copy of the Conservative party election manifesto for 2015. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The prime minister, David Cameron, has launched the Tory party's manifesto at an event in Swindon, Wiltshire. Following are the key points:

Nick Watt's analysis: With the NHS regularly listed as the main concern among voters the Tories know they must close the gap, or at least neutralise, Labour's lead by offering a major funding pledge

Lift the cap on university places.

Freeze the amount of government spending per school pupil.

Turn every failing and "coasting" secondary school into an academy and create free schools for parents who want them.

Make children resit SATs upon arrival at secondary school if they have not reached the required standards.

Require secondary school pupils to take GCSEs in English, maths, science, a language and history or geography, with Ofsted unable to award its highest ratings to schools that refuse to teach these core subjects.

Introduce a national postgraduate loan system for taught masters and PhD courses.

NW: Amid polling evidence that the Tories are seen as the party of the rich, No 10 decided it needed a clear policy to illustrate its claim that the Conservatives are in fact 'the workers' party'.

Extend the right-to-buy scheme to housing association tenants.

Build 200,000 starter homes for first-time buyers under the age of 40, to be sold at 20% below the market rate.

Extend Help to Buy to cover another 120,000 homes.

Introduce a new Help to Buy ISA to help young people save a deposit for their first home.

NW: As a student of the Thatcher era, the prime minister hopes to revive, and even go further than her famous championing of a property-owning democracy with her right-to-buy council homes scheme.

Provide 30 hours of free childcare to working parents of three- and four-year-olds.

NW: Polling has told the Tories and Labour over recent years that childcare is one of the most pressing issues: this pledge is designed to be a clear, voter-friendly offer in this area.

NW: The Tories believe this policy shows they are championing ordinary homeowners who have spent decades paying off a mortgage, only to find their children's inheritance is limited. The Tories regard this as a magic bullet: Gordon Brown abandoned plans for an early election in 2007 when George Osborne unveiled a similar pledge in 2007.

Continue to increase the state pension by at least 2.5%.

Keep an ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.

Negotiate new rules with the EU so that people will have to be earning income in the UK for a number of years before they can claim benefits, including the tax credits that top up low wages.

Conduct a comprehensive review of the BBC royal charter and freeze the licence fee pending charter renewal.

Consult on the introduction of a business-rate relief for local newspapers in England.

Conservatives

A summary of the main highlights of the Conservative party's pledges should it win the general election on 7 May

European Union National security

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Conservatives election manifesto 2015 - the key points

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The prime minister, David Cameron, has launched the Tory party's manifesto at an event in Swindon, Wiltshire. Following are the key points: Nick Watt's analysis: With the NHS regularly listed as the main concern among voters the Tories know they must close the gap, or at least neutralise, Labour's lead by offering a major funding pledge Lift the cap on university places.

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In order to help those looking after family members, ‘especially women’, a Conservative administration would ‘support the main carer in any household receiving the Universal Credit payment’. Elsewhere in the manifesto the party explains that its support for the main carer receiving Universal Credit ‘will help give greater independence to individuals, most often women, trapped with coercive partners’.

There is also a commitment to continuing to use the tax and benefits system to reduce poverty, including child poverty. The manifesto asserts:

‘Children should grow up in an environment with no limits to their potential – which is one of the reasons we are making it a priority to put more money in the pockets of low-paid workers and maintaining our commitment to free school meals.’

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Government reform In June 2021, the Government published a consultation on proposed legislative changes to the current child maintenance system (the 2012 system). The consultation sought views on proposals such as: Including unearned income (that HMRC has information on) alongside paying parents earned income in CMS calculationsWriting off small volumes of debt under £7 “where the maintenance calculation has ended but there remains an outstanding debt and the value of the debt is substantially less than the cost of collecting it.”Communicating CMS notifications digitally if requested as a preference by the customerThe Government published its response to the consultation in March 2022. National Audit Office report. In March 2022, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report on child maintenance. The report said parents are now relying less on the state to help them make maintenance arrangements, which was an aim of the Government’s 2012 reforms. While the number of people making a family-based arrangement has increased as intended, there has also been an increase in those with no maintenance arrangement. As a result, the report said, there has “been no clear change” in the number of families with effective child maintenance arrangements (including arrangements not through the CMS) since the Government had reformed the system in 2012. It estimated 1 in 3 separated families in Great Britain had a child maintenance arrangement where the agreed maintenance was paid in full.The report added the aim of increasing the number of effective maintenance arrangements overall was based on a wider cross-government set of policy agendas on separated families. However, this “broader set of cross-government actions had yet to emerge in the way envisioned.”

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https://www.conservatives.com/our-plan

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Getting Brexit done. Investing in our public services and infrastructure. Supporting workers and families. Strengthening the Union. Unleashing Britain's potential.

The Conservatives offer a future in which we get Brexit done, and then move on to focus on our priorities - which are also your priorities.

Because more important than any one commitment in this manifesto is the spirit in which we make them. Our job is to serve you, the people. To deliver on the instruction you gave us in 2016 - to get Brexit done. But then to move on to making the UK an even better country - to investing in the NHS, our schools, our people and our towns.

We will build a Britain in which everyone has the opportunity to make the most of their talents. We will ensure that work will always pay. We will create a fair society, in which everyone always contributes their fair share.

So that together, led by Boris Johnson, we can get Brexit done, and move on to unleash the full potential of this great country.

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This is our plan for a stronger Britain.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50524262

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The Conservative Party has launched its 2019 election manifesto, with the slogan Get Brexit Done, Unleash Britain's Potential. It sets out the policies the party aims to introduce should it win the election.

The full document runs to 59 pages. But what are the promises that will grab the public's attention, and potentially win over voters on polling day, 12 December?

1. Increase the number of nurses by 50,000
Reintroduce maintenance grants for nursing students.
At present, there are just under 300,000 full-time equivalent posts. The party hopes to train more nurses by reintroducing maintenance grants of between £5,000 and £8,000 a year for students. The scrapping of these grants in 2017 was controversial and was followed by a fall in applicants. So, it is something of a U-turn.

However, the policy will not involve a return to the pre-2017 policy of free tuition for nursing students. The 50,000 figure is reached by including foreign recruitment and policies for better retention of nurses. Labour promised to recruit 24,000 nurses - based on higher numbers in training - and introduce free tuition fees and maintenance grants.
Healthcare is devolved so these policies would apply to England only, but Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales would benefit from the funding.
2. Leave the EU in January
Get Brexit "done" early in 2020.
In the least surprising promise in this manifesto, Boris Johnson makes a personal guarantee that he will get Brexit "done" in January if he wins a majority. He says that will end the political divisions in the country, but that seems unlikely.

The Conservatives also promise to negotiate a trade deal with the EU next year, and confirm that they will not extend the post-Brexit transition period beyond December 2020. That is an incredibly short amount of time to finalise a trade deal of any significant ambition, and it means the EU knows in advance what the UK's negotiating deadlines are.

The Conservatives say the UK will be outside the EU single market, and any form of customs union. But until we know the terms of a new relationship with the EU, it will be hard to argue that Brexit has really been done.
This policy would apply to the whole of the UK.
3. No income tax, VAT or National Insurance rises
A little bit more spending - and a bit more tax.
There were no rabbits out of the hat, no huge tax cuts, or rises, and no big ticket new spending item. By design, the tax and spend numbers are smaller than those of the Liberal Democrats and, especially, Labour. They have space to do a lot more within the new borrowing rules.

But Chancellor Sajid Javid and Prime Minister Boris Johnson want to keep a tight ship. There will be a little bit more spending and a bit more tax too. But it amounts to less than 1% of the size of the economy. The big picture is several billion a year of extra spending, but not several tens of billions.

4. Pensions will rise by at least 2.5% per year
Keep the so-called triple lock on the state pension.
Keeping the popular "triple lock" means the state pension will be increased by CPI measure of inflation, wage growth or 2.5% each year - whichever is the highest. Critics say that keeping it in place is unaffordable and that it doesn't help the poorest and oldest pensioners who are on the old state pension.

But tampering with it would have been politically radical - all of the major parties have committed to it in this election. The Conservatives have learned from past mistakes. Theresa May pledged to scrap the 2.5% guarantee in the 2017 election, and was forced to abandon the pledge to win support from the DUP.
This policy would apply to the whole of the UK.
5. No-one will sell their home to pay for care
A cross-party consensus on care will be built.
Boris Johnson promised to fix the crisis in adult social care, but the manifesto contains little more than the guiding principle that no-one will have to sell their home to pay for care. As things stand, few would call these details an ambitious plan, but the Conservative's pledge to urgently build a cross-party consensus on future care will be welcomed.

The system is already at breaking point, and experts warn the extra £1bn a year promised for the next five years won't be enough to prop it up. Not least, because the money will be shared with equally overstretched children's services. The Tory calculation appears to be that it is best to say as little as possible, rather than risk being tripped up by an issue that cost them dearly at the last election.
Social care is devolved so this will only apply in England.
6. Reach net zero by 2050
Meet the pledge to cut emissions to virtually zero.
Conservative climate policies will attract scrutiny. In June, they set a world-leading goal of cutting emissions to virtually zero by 2050. And they've created a boom in cheap offshore wind energy. But interim emissions targets are already slipping away. What's more, some scientists are warning that the climate needs even more urgent repair.

That led the Lib Dems and SNP to propose an earlier clean-up date of 2045. Labour says it should be by the 2030s. The Greens want 2030 - which would mean practically all petrol and diesel vehicles banned, all homes insulated and all central heating boilers changed within a decade. So, it's not just a question of the date - it's whether the policy can be delivered.
Energy policy applies to the whole of the UK, as does policy relating to exports.
7. Spend £6.3bn on 2.2 million disadvantaged homes
Improve the energy efficiency of social housing.
The UK's homes are so poorly insulated that to meet the country's 2050 climate commitments we need a nationwide programme to upgrade them. This pledge to spend £2,860 per household on improving the energy efficiency of social housing would affect 2.2m homes. But there's no mention of what would be done for those who own their own home.

The claim that households could save up to £750 a year on their energy bills sounds optimistic and could only apply to homes with terrible energy efficiency. The typical saving after such work on housing, experts say, tends to be more like £50. The policy is dwarfed by Labour's promises of spending £9,300 per home on almost all of the 27 million homes in the UK, at a cost of £250bn.
Housing is devolved so this will only apply to England.
8. Introduce a points-based immigration system
Fewer lower-skilled migrants will be allowed into the UK.
The last Conservative manifesto reiterated the leadership's intention to reduce net migration to less than 100,000. It became an albatross - a much-criticised target that was never achieved. Boris Johnson had already jettisoned it in favour of an Australian style points-based system, attracting "the brightest and the best".

The focus on control means that fewer lower skilled migrants will be allowed into the UK. But while the Conservatives can argue this will mean less pressure on public services, it is these services which often rely on migrant labour.
This policy applies to the whole of the UK.
9. Continue the roll out of universal credit
Reduce poverty through changes to tax and benefits.
The Conservatives confirm they will continue the roll out of universal credit, despite the controversy that has dogged the new benefits system. As has already been announced they are ending the freeze on benefits, which will mean a 1.7% increase in the money people get next April.

They also pledge to reduce the number of reassessments that people with disabilities face for their benefits, with a national strategy for disabled people promised by the end of 2020. There is a commitment to reduce poverty, including child poverty, through changes to tax and benefits. But there is little detail on how ongoing complaints about the failings of universal credit will be addressed.
This policy applies to the whole of the UK.
10. Create 250,000 extra childcare places
Help parents by making childcare available in the holidays.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats are offering multi-billion pound, universal childcare policies for pre-school children. But the Tories this is a much more strategic offer - aiming to create 250,000 extra childcare places during the holidays for primary school-age children - about 5% of that age group. It would cost £250m per year for three years, with £250m for one-off costs such as buildings.

This recalls the era of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, with its pre-austerity expansion of breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and holiday clubs. Much of this will be delivered through schools, so it will depend on them being able to make their premises available over the summer holidays.
Childcare is devolved so will only apply to England.
11. Student finances
Freeze of tuition fees at £9,250 likely to continue.
For most degree students and their universities there is little in this manifesto. Simply a promise to look carefully at the "thoughtful" suggestions in the review into student finance and university and college funding, led by Philip Augar. In the short term, this suggests the current freeze of tuition fees in England at their current level of £9,250 will continue.

That could eventually have the same effect as the cut proposed by the Augar panel because of inflation. Interest rates on student loans are to be reviewed again. On lifelong learning, the offer is more modest than both the Lib Dems training wallet and Labour's promise of six years of free adult learning. Instead the manifesto says the Conservatives would work towards a right to retrain.
Tuition fees and education are devolved, so any policy changes will apply to England only.
12. A new Manchester to Leeds rail line
And there's £2bn to fill potholes.
It's telling that top of the Tories' transport list is a promise to build a new rail line linking Manchester and Leeds. It's a long-held and well-founded grievance in the north of England that transport infrastructure is substandard compared with the south. But the project isn't expected to be complete before 2040.

The more immediate infrastructure conundrum is High Speed 2 which is already under way. Given how much that project polarises opinion it wasn't a surprise when a Conservative government said it would make a decision after the election.

And by singling-out funding of £2bn for potholes and a further £29bn for roads, the Conservatives are more at ease than the other main parties in reaffirming their commitment to the car as a predominant mode of transport. In truth, on transport there are no huge policy surprises.

13. Launch a democracy commission
It will look into the constitutional power balance.
The Supreme Court's ruling in September - that Boris Johnson's advice to the Queen to prorogue (suspend) Parliament was unlawful - was the latest and most dramatic example of judicial review. There is now almost no area of government decision-making that cannot be subject to scrutiny by judges.

Some feel it has pulled the judiciary too far into areas of political decision-making. The Conservatives' proposed "constitution, democracy and rights" commission is intended to look afresh at the constitutional power balance between the three great institutions of state, the executive (government and crown), Parliament and the judiciary.

What do the other parties offer?

What are the parties promising you?

Here's a concise guide to where the parties stand on key issues like Brexit, education and the NHS.

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The 13 key policies in the Conservative manifesto

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The Conservative Party has launched its 2019 election manifesto, with the slogan Get Brexit Done, Unleash Britain's Potential. It sets out the policies the party aims to introduce should it win the election. The full document runs to 59 pages.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/09/how-right-to-buy-work-why-boris-johnson-planning-extend-it

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Even though it is more than 40 years old, the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy can still be felt in Britain today. It established the story the Conservative party continues to tell about itself, of being crusaders for opportunity for all; it transformed the way people thought about what it meant to own or rent their homes; and it shifted almost 2m social housing dwellings into private hands. It became the emblematic policy idea of a prime minister who was pretty unpopular at the time, only to rule for another decade. No wonder Boris Johnson wants a piece of it.

No wonder, either, that he is not the first Conservative leader to propose extending right to buy to housing associations. But there are very good reasons it has not happened before.
This explainer originally appeared in the Guardian's First Edition newsletter. Sign up here.
What is the government expected to propose today?

In his speech to backbenchers ahead of the no-confidence vote, Boris Johnson promised that if he won, he and the housing secretary, Michael Gove, would "be setting out plans to kindle that dream of home ownership in the hearts of millions who currently believe it is beyond their means."

The proposed mechanism is to extend the right to buy to people living in properties owned by housing associations - not-for-profit bodies that rent low-cost homes to about 2.5 million people.

Crucially, housing associations are not state-owned. At the moment, people living in council properties can get a discount of up to 70% of the market value of their home, up to a maximum of £87,000, or £116,200 in London. There is a scheme in place for housing associations but it limits the discount to a maximum of £16,000.

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What did Margaret Thatcher's model look like?

In his 2015 book Promised You a Miracle: UK80-82, the Guardian columnist Andy Beckett writes that the 1980 Housing Act "envisaged a revolution in how a large minority of Britons lived". It seemed possible, in part, because there was an abundance of social housing: 5.5m homes were provided by local authorities and housing associations in England, or 31% of the total stock.

Now anybody who had lived in council housing for more than three years would be entitled to own it. Tenants were given a 33% discount on market value at the three-year point, rising to 50% after 20, up to a ceiling of £50,000. And they were guaranteed 100% mortgages by the local authority. Against average property prices in 1980 of £23,500, it was an extraordinarily good deal for those able to take advantage of it.

How did it play out in practice?

Right to buy was a hugely powerful - even life-changing - policy for exactly the aspirational working-class voters who Thatcher was trying to woo. By the end of 1982, more than 240,000 homes had been sold to their tenants in England alone. But within a few years a significant gap was visible between tenants who were buying and those who were not.

A government study published in 1986 found buyers were "disproportionately drawn from the middle-aged and the better-off". Their incomes were more than double those of people who remained tenants. Meanwhile, rents for the worse-off council tenants who remained rocketed - going up 55% relative to earnings in a decade.

What does the landscape look like today?

In the 22 years since the scheme was introduced, 1,992,799 sales to tenants have been completed, the government says. Fewer than 5% of the homes sold off have been replaced, according to the charity Shelter, and the available stock has dropped from that 5.5m figure to 4.2m by 2020.

Meanwhile, a large proportion of right-to-buy homes are now in the hands of private landlords: in 2017, Inside Housing magazine reported that 40% of them were being rented out, and their tenants were paying more than twice the rent charged by local authorities. Average property prices in Britain have gone from that 1980 figure of £23,500 to £278,436 as of March.

In other words, the 1980s right-to-buy generation received a huge financial windfall from the government, which accrued as the property market rocketed - and their successors are paying exorbitant private rents, up 15% in two years, because there is no council housing to put them in. Scotland and Wales abandoned the policy several years ago.

Where does the idea of extending the scheme to housing associations come from?

It has been around from the beginning. In 1982, the Guardian reported on proposals to make much the same change Johnson is proposing today - news which led the director of the National Federation of Housing Associations (now the National Housing Federation) to complain: "Charities have a duty that lasts in perpetuity ... it is vital to keep these homes for the old, the disadvantaged and the young in the future."

The change never happened - but a version of the idea popped up in David Cameron's 2015 manifesto, only to be junked after an unsuccessful pilot in the West Midlands, which found that nothing like enough of the properties being sold off were being replaced with new stock - a red line for housing associations that were participating. (We might think of Nick Clegg's claim that either Cameron or George Osborne once told him: "I don't understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing - it just creates Labour voters.")

Could Johnson succeed where others failed?

Experts are sceptical. Gavin Smart, the chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, says the scheme is "not the answer" and would "be at the expense of the poorest households", arguing that the estimated £70,000 subsidy a household would be better spent on addressing the housing stock crisis. Theresa May's former housing adviser Toby Lloyd points out that offering affordable housing tenants sale discounts could create tension with private renters.

Others point to the fact that ... not many people living in housing associations seem to want this right very much. A report on the West Midlands pilot found just 1.2% of households would be expected to buy under the scheme. Experts also note the fundamental problem - which is that the housing associations that own the homes have historically never welcomed the idea, and it would be extremely expensive to win them over.

In other words, the best hope for opponents of the policy is that it will never happen in the first place. And indeed, one report this morning suggests internal estimates have priced a national version of the scheme at about £3bn a year, far in excess of an intended budget of £500m. That probably means any changes will be limited to more pilot programmes. Another Boris Johnson magic trick: a rabbit pulled out of a hat, which immediately disappears.

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How does right to buy work and why is Boris Johnson planning to extend it?

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Even though it is more than 40 years old, the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy can still be felt in Britain today. It established the story the Conservative party continues to tell about itself, of being crusaders for opportunity for all; it transformed the way people thought about what it meant to own or rent their homes; and it shifted almost 2m social housing dwellings into private hands.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-2021-to-2022-and-beyond/supporting-families-2021-22-and-beyond

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Ministerial foreword

Supporting Families has been on a journey with families, local authorities and their partners since it began in 2012. It has delivered for families under three different government administrations, while wider society and the way in which local services are delivered look very different today.

The programme has already helped families make extraordinary improvements in their lives with more than 400,000 positive outcomes achieved since 2015. We also know that the reach of this approach has been much broader, with more than 870,000 families worked with in a whole family way between 2015 and 2021.That is why now is the right time to rename the programme, to reflect what it does in principle, and in practice.

It started out as the Troubled Families Programme almost a decade ago and since then, has grown in scope and ambition, evolving through three distinct phases. I am pleased that up to £165m of additional funding for the programme was announced at the 2020 Spending Review. Our 2019 manifesto committed to improving the programme and we are looking to what has changed, what works and how best to deliver outcomes into the next year and beyond.

Now is the time to be even more ambitious in helping families to thrive. Our vision is to ensure that those families who need support so get it at the right point, in the right way, as early as possible. Great things happen when families build on their strengths, call on their support networks and tackle their problems head on and early on. Children, parents and carers are most able to build resilience with services at their side who know them well and can offer trusted guidance. At its heart, the national programme then and now, is about locally delivered early help for families, led by the keyworkers and local partners who know their areas and families best.

As we look towards the future, to national recovery from the global COVID-19 pandemic and to building back better, we are taking stock. While the programme continues to support families experiencing acute problems, the work to connect local systems together is reaching many more. More than ever before, services are working together in schools, children's centres, family hubs and in local communities, to deal with emerging concerns through early help that takes a whole family approach.

Over time, this model has been proven to work, through robust national evaluation examining data sets from across government and the local sector. We know that the programme prevents children in families from entering the care system, reduces the likelihood of involvement in crime and helps families into work.

COVID-19 saw local areas drawing on service level transformations achieved since 2012 to ramp up multi-agency collaboration, data sharing and governance in response to the global pandemic. I am proud that the innovation and agility seen in local areas, who are tackling COVID-19's impact on families, has often been underpinned and accelerated by the programme's work. The programme will continue to support recovery by helping children back to school, helping those who have lost their jobs get back to work, by helping young people avoid crime, protecting mental health and by tackling domestic abuse.

We have shown that we can work together across organisations, professional cultures and silos to support those in need of early help. There is much more to do now, to embed the transformation of services into local systems, to ensure that what has so far been new and innovative becomes 'business as usual' across all local areas delivering the programme.

I look forward to working with Supporting Families services, as we set our sights on the next set of challenges and opportunities in the year ahead and beyond.

Eddie Hughes MP,
Minister for Supporting Families
Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government

Summary

1. Since its launch in 2011, up to £1.533 billion of funding through the Troubled Families Programme has helped families and local areas to achieve a huge amount. The programme supported over 400,000 families to achieve positive outcomes between 2015-2021. Each one of these outcomes means a family's life changed for the better, whether it has meant improving a child's school attendance, so they get the best start in life, supporting a parent to overcome their substance misuse and keep their family together, or supporting victims of domestic abuse so they can build a more positive future for themselves and their family.

2. The programme has also benefitted many more by driving widespread transformation in how family services are delivered in local areas, making them more coordinated, family-centred and data driven. The programme has championed whole family and multi-agency working to support vulnerable families, that is those experiencing multiple disadvantages such as worklessness, domestic abuse, and poor mental health. It proved through a robust impact study, that this approach prevents children in vulnerable families from ending up in the care system, reduces the likelihood of involvement in crime and supports families back towards work and more fulfilling lives.

3. However, there is still more to do, the numbers of children in care continues to rise and there have been worrying increases in some types of youth crime. We also know that the programme cannot resolve every problem, and that there are some families that local partners need to work harder to support. Locally, spending continues to be geared towards acute services to cope with demand for statutory interventions, with less investment going into both universal and targeted preventative approaches. Although the programme has driven service transformation, fully embedding this across local systems takes time and local areas are at different stages along this journey. The challenge of COVID-19 makes it even more important to help families early on, so they can get back on track before issues escalate.

4. Strong multi-agency partnerships locally, underpinned by robust data sharing, is the key to unlocking many of these improvements to local services. We know that services work best together when relationships are strong and intelligence is shared to fully understand the drivers of local trends, identify families that might need support and target their services accordingly. Live data sharing on school attendance between schools and family services, for example, is only happening in 47% of areas. Re-engaging pupils and driving up school attendance post-pandemic is a key priority for government. Further multi-agency collaboration in this area will enable services to identify families needing support early on and work together to ensure children and young people are back in school and supported to get the best start in life.

5. In 2021-22, we want to take the Troubled Families Programme into a new phase, with a refreshed vision, strengthened objectives and an even stronger momentum to tackle barriers and create lasting change. We are launching the next phase of the programme - Supporting Families - which will focus on building the resilience of vulnerable families, and on enabling system change locally and nationally. This means ensuring that every area has joined up, efficient local services, able to identify families in need and provide the right support at the right time.

6. As we do this, we are conscious that local authorities have had to respond to the additional needs created by the pandemic, while at the same time coping with the effect of COVID-19 on their own staff and services. It is therefore important to provide as much stability as possible throughout 2021-22. We are also clear that we want to do with, not to, local areas, families and communities. We will therefore use 2021-22 as a transition year to co-design, test, and iterate future improvements to the programme.

7. Our ambition for vulnerable families remains front and centre of our vision. We want every family not just to avoid poor outcomes, but to thrive. We want to help them to build their resilience and community connections and empower them to find their own solutions to problems. This will involve intensive whole family support from a lead professional where families are experiencing multiple complex problems, but also earlier support from the appropriate local service when a problem is first emerging. All services that support families have a role to play and we want to see the practice of whole family keyworking spread across agencies. This includes forming strong partnerships with specialist services, more involvement from voluntary and community sector organisations, and communities themselves.

8. Ultimately, the aim is for strong multi-agency local partnerships in every area, and mature local and national data systems, which enable partners to identify families in need of extra help, target services more effectively and track family level outcomes over the long term. This will support all local areas to fully embed preventative approaches into their support systems for families, creating more resilient communities for the long term.

9. We are committed to improving the programme to achieve this. Supporting Families will:

Raise the ambition for vulnerable families, driving local services to work better together to build their resilience and help them to thrive.

Drive improvements to local partnership working and data use so that vulnerable families receive the right support, at the right time. This means investing more in good practice, overcoming barriers to data-sharing and involving the voice of families in service design and commissioning.

Update our eligibility and outcomes framework to ensure it continues to reflect the needs of families and provides flexibility for authorities to respond.

Help local areas to work towards stronger multi-agency, data-driven local partnerships by co-designing a road map to achieving a mature local system of family support services and considering new incentives to help drive progress.

Using our national voice, alongside local and national networks to champion the case for early help, ensuring families get the support they need as early as possible before their problems escalate into crises and they need statutory support. Because we know that this is the key to making services more sustainable for the future.

Chapter 1: the Troubled Families Programme 2011-21

What the programme has achieved

10. The programme was launched 10 years ago with a simple, but clear principle - effective support for vulnerable families cannot be provided in an uncoordinated, transactional way, which sees only problems rather than people and fails to comprehend the entirety of a family's life. The result is escalating problems, poor outcomes often perpetuated across generations, and unmanageable flows into reactive, statutory systems, which is overwhelming for public services and costly for society as a whole.

11. In 2011, the programme was designed as an innovation to tackle this systemic problem. It committed to ensuring that vulnerable families had a single point of contact, a person who would build a relationship with them, understand the root causes of their problems, and support each member of the family to make positive changes. For families, this has meant someone was there for them at the most challenging point in their lives, helping them make sense of problems, navigate specialist support, and ultimately take action to build a more positive future. This approach is known as "whole family" working and builds on pre-existing successful models of family support.

12. Keyworkers provide a range of practical and emotional support to families. Our most recent survey showed that they provide weekly support with parenting (including for those with pre-school children) and mental health difficulties, getting children to school, managing money, debt and housing needs, managing the impact of domestic abuse and keeping children living in the family home. As well as this direct support, which is often provided in the home, keyworkers help join up specialist support around the family as needed and connect them to a range of local facilities and services. This gives them confidence to navigate those services and helps build their resilience and ability to find solutions to problems themselves in the longer-term.

13. Since then, the programme has gone a long way towards making this innovative approach the established practice in local areas. Between April 2015 and January 2021 over 400,000 families achieved positive outcomes as a result of direct support funded through the programme. Each one of these outcomes means a family's life changed for the better, whether it has meant improving a child's school attendance, so they get the best start in life, supporting a parent to overcome their substance misuse and keep their family together, or supporting victims of domestic abuse so they can build a more positive future for themselves and their family. In the programme's second phase (2015-2021) many more families also benefitted from the programme's wider investment in service transformation, with over 870,000 supported in a whole family way between April 2015 and January 2021.

14. An impact study which tracked the outcomes achieved by families supported by the programme between 2015 and 2018 highlighted its role in preventing high-cost statutory interventions. Compared to families with similar characteristics who had not been on the programme, the study found 19-24 months after starting to receive support the proportion of:

Children in care was found to have reduced from 2.5% to 1.7%; a 32% decrease;

Adults receiving custodial sentences fell from 1.6% to 1.2% (25% decrease);

Juveniles receiving custodial sentences fell from 0.8% to 0.5% (38% decrease);

Adults claiming Jobseeker's Allowance fell by 11%;

A cost benefit analysis showed the programme provides £2.28 of savings for every pound invested.

Staff surveys, family surveys and case study research showed high levels of support from local staff and positive experiences of families. It also sets out detail about how the programme has driven service transformation.

15. To achieve this change in families' experience and have this preventative impact on statutory systems, public services supporting families have changed significantly. There has been major improvement in multi-agency working, and how information is used and shared in local areas, with services pooling data across adult and children's services, education, jobcentres, youth offending teams and police to build a holistic picture of the needs of vulnerable families locally. That information is now used by multi-agency partnerships to systematically identify families showing signs of struggling, and work strategically to ensure they get the right support, at the right time.

16. Local areas have also transformed the way they address the needs of vulnerable families, working together to achieve shared outcomes across services and using data and evidence to track whether that is being achieved with each family. This strategic approach has enabled services to support families earlier, when it can make the most difference to their lives, and at the same time reduce the pressure on costly, reactive systems. This has had significant fiscal and economic benefits, illustrating the strength of the approach not just to change individual lives, but to make a difference to society as a whole.

Case study: A family's journey

Maya and her two children, Mia 9 and Avery 8 had moved home after leaving Maya's controlling partner, who then cut off all contact with his children. Teachers were worried about Mia, who had become aggressive towards her peers in class, and Avery, who was often tearful at school. Maya reported that her ex used to be abusive towards her in front of the children, and that since leaving, Mia and Avery had become more difficult to cope with.

The family were referred by their school to the local authority's Early Help team based at the nearby Children's Centre, where Alex, a family support worker, carried out an assessment of their needs. Alex found that the emotional effects of having witnessed abuse were emerging in the children's behaviour. This was affecting their schooling, development, and life chances and Maya needed help to regain confidence in her parenting.

Alex arranged for a specialist domestic abuse worker to visit, who worked with the family on the effects of violence and discussed with Maya that children may have started to 'act out' negative feelings because it had become safe to do so. Maya agreed to meet with a local Freedom Programme domestic abuse support group, for regular sessions on feelings and on how to respond to her children's needs. Strategies for stronger behavioural boundaries and predictable routines were put in place at home by Maya, with support from Martha.

Alex worked with the local Educational Psychology service to source Avery with an Emotional Literacy Support Teaching Assistant at school. Avery addressed his emotions by making more sense of his life story and learning positive self-esteem techniques. Mia was helped by the local Behaviour Support team, part of the Psychology, Wellbeing and School Support Service. The team helped Mia deal with her angry feelings so that she stopped hitting out and was no longer at risk of being excluded.

The support offered to the children at school has worked well. Mia and Avery now share their feelings instead of showing them through challenging behaviours. Teachers have reported no serious concerns about the children for six months. Maya and the children also report that they are much more settled and calmer in their new home.

Maya also reported feeling good about the support from her group, and that she now feels confident in listening to the children and responding to worries about their father. Maya has gone from being quiet and shy, to running a volunteer-led group at the Children's Centre. Maya now works to support other families within her local community, signposting them to agencies and encouraging them to seek advice.

How the programme achieved it

17. The service transformation brought about in the last decade has relied first and foremost on the leadership and dedication of local authorities and of all the agencies involved, to engage in a new way of working. Where the programme has been most successful, local authorities and their partners have led the way, convening partnerships, breaking down barriers, innovating, and working seamlessly with government to make the most of the strategic investment and central support provided.

18. A total of up to £1.533 billion in government funding from 2012-2022 has enabled local authorities to invest strategically in early help, transforming how they support families. The programme tracks outcomes and emphasises key principles, rather than prescribing specific models, so local authorities and agencies have had flexibility to invest according to local need. The funding was never intended to cover the full cost of providing local services to families, but to act as a strategic investment, enabling local systems to operate in a different way and in doing so, maximise the value of local family services.

19. There is no single model for transforming local services and local areas operate within a range of different local structures, including combined, two tier and single tier authorities. Flexibility has allowed authorities to adapt to local needs, and use the funding in a range of different ways including:

bolstering, and investing in the training and development of their family support workforce, particularly skilled keyworkers.

creating or expanding early help "front doors" to enable multi-agency assessments and holistic, coordinated support for families. In some areas, this has included the use of family hub models both to co-locate services and provide a single access point for families.

re-inventing data systems to enable multi-agency pooling and sharing of information.

investing in "link workers" to proactively connect different services, for example Job Centre Plus employment and welfare services and local authority family support.

creating support teams around key services such as schools, encouraging them to adopt a whole family approach.

where needed, providing additional funding to specialist services to work alongside family support services, for example domestic abuse experts and specialist substance misuse and mental health workers.

20. The programme was specifically designed to provide a mix of upfront funding for investment in services and payment by results when family outcomes are achieved. This approach has enabled local authorities to invest as they saw fit, while creating a robust tool for evidencing and tracking outcomes for families. While payment by results required resource to implement, it created an unrelenting focus on long term outcomes, created a lever for partnership working and has proved a crucial driver to transform data systems as it attached a financial reward to good data systems.

21. In some areas, this has spurred multi-agency partnerships to develop more sophisticated shared case management and data systems, pulling together data from multiple sources, including from health partners, children's services, the police, probation providers, youth offending teams, schools, pupil referral units, Education Welfare Officers, Community Mental Health Services, local GPs, midwives, health visitors, children's centres and family hubs. This means they are not only able to identify families and track outcomes, but predict risk and need, getting ahead of problems as they emerge.

22. Another strength of the programme has been its national team presence providing support and challenge to all local authorities delivering the programme. This has included publishing best practice models such as our recent Early Help System Guide which describes the key features of a mature early help system. These models are not prescriptive, but rather support local multi-agency partnerships to self-assess against key elements of service transformation. Our data maturity model provides a blueprint to help areas progress their local data partnerships. Throughout, the national team worked with local authorities to give feedback and support, acting as partner and critical friend.

23. Nationally, the programme has championed early help and the importance of transforming local family support services. An annual progress report has been laid in Parliament, and there has been a comprehensive impact and process evaluation, including one of the most advanced data linking exercises in government. The national team has worked with local areas to identify and address policy and delivery issues, and to influence the design and delivery of new policies and programmes that affect families.

24. Throughout, the programme has funded innovation at both local and national level. We partnered with DWP to roll out the effective Troubled Families Employment Advisors model. This links job centre staff to children's services in every authority to join up employment support for families. The TFEAs help families with job searches, interview and CV skills, money management and work experience, contributing to a 11% reduction in JSA claims for adults supported by the programme. We worked with authorities to trial innovative practice through the Earned Autonomy model which increases local flexibility by providing all funding upfront. We supported local authorities to develop whole family approaches to tackling youth crime through the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund. The lessons learnt have also galvanised multi-agency, whole person working for other vulnerable groups, including adults facing multiple disadvantages, who are the focus of our new programme Changing Futures.

25. The support families receive now is fundamentally different to 2011 and the programme has played a key role in the achievements of local areas. However, gaps remain, and we are now facing the new, unprecedented challenge of COVID-19. The next two chapters describe these challenges and the role that the next phase of troubled families - Supporting Families - will play in meeting them and in shaping services for families into the future.

Case study: Sheffield: school inclusion

In Sheffield, national programme funding is channelled into the Building Successful Families (BSF) team, which is designed to support education. This funding is received up-front and has helped Sheffield to accelerate multi-agency working across the city. One aim of the BSF team is to empower children and families to engage with the early years and education system, and this has led to local sector leaders coming together to develop the support offered to schools.

The BSF team use data to identify schools which have the highest number of children at risk of exclusion. Sheffield's local leads then build a 'team around the school' which caters for pupils and their families. These teams include family support workers and specialists in autism and children's mental health, who work with teachers, children and parents or carers.

'Teams around the school' look to work with the causes of behaviours linked to exclusion, which may originate from bullying, problems at home or past trauma. This approach aims to reduce schools resorting to crisis measures, such as excluding children to pupil referral units or escalating cases to children's social care.

Professionals across Education, Health and Care come together through BSF's school inclusion meetings, to map the reasons for non-engagement and using their multidisciplinary experience, help schools with higher numbers of vulnerable learners move towards the right evidence-based interventions and teaching support. The BSF team also ensure that there is a multi-agency network around the localities of schools, with specialist officers on hand to help advise on attendance, inclusion, educational access and exclusions.

Sheffield's approach goes beyond the school gates to include parenting and family support at home. Over 400 families are currently supported through 'transition pathways' that ensure whole families are working together to support a child's move from one education setting to another. Routines, boundaries, and sleep support are offered directly to parents with follow on parenting courses, sessions and seminars to strengthen parenting capacity. Adult mental health, and emotional health and wellbeing of children is also supported through commissioned links with adult and children's mental health services.

The teams reach into the classroom and the home of vulnerable learners to offer holistic support, often dealing with whole family issues, such as access to employment, public health and community resources, grants and benefits and housing support.

Through this approach, Sheffield's collaborative power is focused on raising attendance, reducing exclusions, and increasing both access to education and engagement in learning. As a result, more young people are receiving the support they require to be safe, settled, and ready to learn.

Chapter 2: the road ahead

The impact of COVID-19 and the role of early help

26. We know that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the lives of vulnerable families, exacerbating existing problems for those who were already struggling and creating a new set of issues for others. Many of the issues which have emerged over the last year are ones that will be familiar to local partners. Improving family relationships and tackling domestic abuse, keeping children, families and young people healthy and safe, re-engaging pupils in school and driving up school attendance, supporting parents towards employment and helping families access mental health support will be key as we move towards recovery.

27. Local authorities and partner agencies have already faced multiple challenges in responding. This has not just included adapting to home-working or virtual delivery but needing to rapidly understand the evolving need and being able to identify who now needs support, for what and when. Local areas have generally responded with agility and innovation, particularly where they have been able to make best use of the resources and structures developed through the Troubled Families Programme, but there remains a shared concern about responding to growing need in future.

28. This is an unprecedented situation and it is still too early to assess the full impact of the pandemic on families' needs and circumstances. However, early help and whole family working will be more important within this context than it has ever been. As argued by the Early Intervention Foundation, it is likely local areas will need to support new families with a range of challenges, while also addressing the needs of those whose problems may have escalated during this year. For many families, reactive statutory systems will not provide the most appropriate response to their challenges.

29. We know that preventative early help approaches can deliver better outcomes for families. They can also create the space for services to work together proactively, identifying and solving problems rather than reacting to crises. The investment provided over the last 10 years in these approaches has already played a crucial role in the response to COVID-19. The programme has acted as a catalyst for bringing together both universal and targeted support services to deliver a coordinated early help approach in local areas, which has proved hugely valuable during this time.

30. Throughout the pandemic, early help teams have used data and information-sharing to quickly assess emerging need, including in families that were unlikely to know where to access support or feel comfortable reaching out. Local areas continued face to face visits to families struggling the most and used virtual engagement methods to help those less at risk. They also delivered physical support packages to the doorstep to help with issues from remote education to food access. Local early help teams led campaigns and established helplines, drawing in voluntary and community organisations and working in a multi-agency way to ensure the right service provided support at the right time. However, there is a risk that families are only supported when they are at crisis point and services struggle to keep up with the rising flows into statutory services such as children's social care and the criminal justice system. This could delay the recovery in the long run, impacting on our ability to build back better after the pandemic, and resulting in poorer outcomes for families and for society as a whole.

31. The next section sets out our vision for the recovery and beyond, and the commitment we make to local areas, through our Supporting Families vision, to champion this across government.

Case study: Liverpool - COVID-19 data

As the global COVID-19 pandemic began to emerge in early 2020, Liverpool City Council and local NHS organisations quickly realised that an identification system might be needed to detect people and families with health, financial and social vulnerabilities, who may be at risk of tipping into crisis.

This system would need to work under statutory COVID-19 data provisions issued by the Department for Health and Social Care for the purpose of identifying people who may be rendered extremely clinically vulnerable by the pandemic. It would need to go further still, to link relevant health care, economic and domestic abuse data on an individual and family basis. Any system would need to highlight multiple disadvantages and to identify where families were already known to be in need across services.

Liverpool rose to this challenge by using their existing data system, already developed through national programme funding. They built a bespoke COVID-19 data linkage module into it, working at pace to establish the system change ahead of the anticipated peak of the pandemic in May 2020.

Before the height of the pandemic was reached, Liverpool was able to create an essential 'vulnerability index' of individuals and families, to prioritise food, prescription deliveries and care packages. Families in the programme's existing cohort were mapped and keyworkers used both virtual and face-to-face visits and assessments to ensure those already facing multiple disadvantages were supported early on. Liverpool also mapped children and young people who were shielding and overlaid the programme data, to identify and support cohorts of children with significant health conditions who were living in families in need of help.

The combined data was also used strategically by adult mental health services and to deliver targeted health and community provision services such as mobile COVID testing in 'hotspot' areas. The data helped with planning co-ordinated visits, providing additional information for food hubs and identifying those people required to isolate after being identified by Test and Trace services.

Liverpool City Council is considering using these data to identify people most at risk if there is any future pandemic. The data may also be used to develop early intervention and mitigation strategies as local areas up and down the country plan for a potential rise in demand for community, place based and mental health services following the easing of national restrictions.

Liverpool continues to work collaboratively with policy and intelligence, the University of Liverpool and organisations in the city region to better understand their data and work on a joint COVID-19 recovery plan.

A whole system approach nationally

32. The Troubled Families Programme is designed to bring together multi-agency partners to deliver joined up support for vulnerable families, rather than to provide a stand-alone specialist service on its own. It provides a framework for working with families in an intensive, whole family way and tracking their outcomes, as well as enabling the long-term service change that we know delivers the most effective support for families. This means it is deeply interlinked with a much wider set of policies and programmes delivering services for families, children and young people.

33. This government has invested considerably in family support, including through the Troubled Families Programme, Violence Reduction Units, the Reducing Parental Conflict Programme, and many others. Policy reviews of the care system and the SEND system are underway, as well as relevant reforms to public health, the NHS long-term plan and Integrated Care Systems. There is also increased focus on championing family hubs as a way of integrating services and improving access for families. These programmes and reviews are part of the same effort to deliver better outcomes for families, recover from COVID-19 and create more sustainable systems for the future. Local partners already have existing governance and accountability infrastructure locally on which they can build, such as Health and Wellbeing Boards and multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

34. We will continue to champion a whole system approach nationally, helping remove barriers and supporting local areas to join up locally. We will also champion whole family working and early help as the model of effective local delivery, and a relentless focus on achieving positive outcomes for families over the long term. We will look for opportunities to join up, influence service changes and advocate for a rebalanced system that is sustainable in the longer-term. We will use the refreshed vision set out in this document to make clear what service transformation should look like and to make that a joint vision across government.

Our vision for change

35. Now is the time to be ambitious for families and for our public services. Our vision for the next phase of the programme, and the wider system it stewards, has two key elements:

We want to see vulnerable families thrive. We will build their resilience by providing effective, whole family support to help prevent escalation into statutory services.

We will drive systems change locally and nationally, creating joined up local services, able to identify families in need, provide the right support at the right time, and track their outcomes in the long term. We want to level up every local area to the standard of the best.

36. The impact will be felt by individual families, across public services and will also have benefits for the rest of society.

Families will be empowered to become resilient over time and build connections to their local community. Avoiding poor outcomes such as homelessness, family breakdown and children entering care, or involvement in crime, families will thrive.

Local services will be joined-up, flexible, responsive to new challenges and sustainable for the long term. Strong multi-agency partnerships will work together to understand local trends, predict emerging need in their local area, identify and respond to those needing extra help.

The benefits of this approach will be felt across society. The pressure on expensive reactive statutory services will reduce as the system rebalances away from intervening at crisis point. This will help services to become more sustainable and allow them to intervene much earlier in the cycle, delivering better outcomes for families.

37. This vision is already becoming a reality in local areas, but progress varies. For example, while some areas are successfully achieving positive outcomes with all the families they supported in 2020-21, there is still more work to do to achieve this consistently across local areas. We know that strong local partnerships and data systems are the drivers of success. Where outcomes are not being achieved, or cannot be evidenced, areas are often held back by a lack of progress in these areas. For example, our self-assessed local data survey found that only 20% of areas are using and sharing data in the most advanced ways. Furthermore, only half of all areas receive the police crime and offending data they need to target support at families becoming involved in crime.

38. Self-assessments against our Early Help System Guide show some consistency in how services have developed, for example most areas report a high degree of confidence that families know who they keyworker is and that whole family assessments are happening. However, there is still much work to do particularly around engaging different workforces in whole family working and growing community capacity at scale.

39. Nationally, we have had success in facilitating partnership-working and data-sharing on the ground in some areas, for example through the Troubled Families Employment Advisors. However, we are keen to see further progress to join up services and data in key areas such as mental health and housing. Some areas have developed solutions to these barriers locally, but there is more to do at national level to support widespread progress.

40. A clear strength of the programme has been its focus on tracking outcomes for families and allowing local areas the flexibility to innovate and to invest according to local need. However, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the impact of service transformation, and further work is required to test different approaches and translate that research into actionable best practice. This will drive more effective services and better outcomes with families.

41. While the programme evaluation shows that our approach results in very positive experiences for families, the extent to which this is co-designed directly with families and communities varies across local areas. For some, this has been central to their transformation journey, but for others less so. Nationally, there is more to do to champion the voice of families and communities within local service transformation.

42. Equally, there is more to do to support the role of, and work in tandem with, voluntary and community sector organisations. In some areas the voluntary and community sector is a key player. Some local authorities have been working to shift their mindset from the local authority being a provider or purchaser of services to being more of a facilitator working with the community and voluntary sector to jointly meet need earlier and with more creative solutions.

43. Nationally, we also championed the role of the voluntary and community sector in delivering whole family approaches through the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund. The fund encouraged local VCS organisations to play a crucial role in the development of new and innovative approaches to diverting young people from crime. We are keen to see local authorities and partner agencies working closely with VCS organisations to harness their expertise, local knowledge and energy in future.

44. The challenge of COVID-19 has accelerated progress in many of these areas. Throughout the pandemic, local areas have reported that significant progress has been made to overcome barriers to joint working and sharing of information with health services. Equally, the sharing of practice and insights between local areas has accelerated, and the VCS have been invaluable partners, helping to identify hidden and emerging needs and supporting the response. We must quickly learn the lessons from this and ensure that we retain them going forward.

Chapter 3: a renewed approach

The first year of a new phase

45. Local authorities have adapted considerably over the past year to respond to the additional needs created by the pandemic, while at the same time coping with the effect of COVID-19 on their own staff and services. We understand that it is important to provide as much stability as possible throughout 2021-22. We will therefore retain the same funding and delivery structure, and authorities will receive their share of the further £165 million funding on the same basis as in previous years.

46. However, we also keen that the programme continues to evolve so that it can adapt to new challenges. This process of evolution in local areas started a long time before the pandemic, with some progressing faster than others to break the mould of siloed services entirely. We are committed to learning from the achievements of the most ambitious areas. We will drive progress, striving to bring every local area to the standard of the best. We will do this while partnering with the most advanced local areas to continue to drive innovation and to shape local services for families into the future.

2021-22 - Building the foundations for long term improvements

47. As a nation we are starting to look beyond the pandemic to put in place what we need to recover. The programme is well positioned to play a key role in supporting vulnerable families to recover from the pandemic. Now, more than ever, we believe that every vulnerable family deserves to receive the right support at the right time, from services that understand all their needs, and support them in a whole family way.

48. We know that joined up local partnerships with a strong data sharing culture have a head start in understanding and responding to the needs of their local communities. In 2021-22 we will work with these areas to understand how we can drive progress to build the services families need now and in the future. We want to do with, not to, local areas, families and communities. We will use 2021-22 to co-design, test and iterate future improvements. We will:

Look at how we can drive the service and system transformation that we know will be crucial to understanding and responding to local need in future as well as what we could do to incentivise progress.

Co-produce updates to the framework that local areas use to identify families eligible for support and the outcomes we expect them to achieve, in consultation with local partnerships. This will ensure that areas continue to be incentivised to support the right families at the right time and help them deliver the right outcomes to improve their lives.

Update the programme's funding formula to ensure that it continues to reflect the latest data on need in local areas.

A focus on the whole system

49. We know that strong local partnerships deliver better outcomes for families. However, every local area is different. There is no single model for a data driven and joined-up local system that is able to provide the right support at the right time for vulnerable families. There is, however, a significant body of evidence build up over the last 10 years which helps us to understand what is most likely to be effective. Building on this evidence base, we will work with areas to identify the key features that underpin a successful local system and map these into a 'transformation road map' for local areas. We will also explore what we can do to better incentivise progress against these, including the possibility of financial rewards.

50. As part of this work, we will also explore the potential to monitor key indicators in the priority areas of family breakdown and children entering care, involvement in crime and homelessness at the population level to help local areas to gain a better understanding of how their direct work with families is impacting on the local area as a whole. We will co-design this carefully with local areas and align as much as possible with other government departments, to ensure we are not adding further data burdens.

51. We know that investment in research and evaluation is also crucial to ensuring that we learn what works to deliver our vision for families. We already have robust impact study research that has proved the programme's approach works to prevent issues from escalating into statutory systems. In 2021-22 we will reinvigorate our national best practice work, including supporting local authorities to share practice and learn from each other, and promoting evidence-based approaches. We will also invest further in research and evaluation, commissioning research to understand exactly which parts of the approach are most effective, including what works for what families and where less progress has been made in achieving long term positive outcomes, so that local areas can continue to refine services to deliver the best support for families.

52. We will also continue to partner with the Early Intervention Foundation to ensure improvements to the programme are evidence based and local areas can access advice on evidence-based practice and interventions. We will also test innovative approaches to improve data systems through our new £7.9m Data Accelerator Fund.

A fresh approach to family outcomes

53. Families remain front and centre of our new vision for the programme. We believe that better data is the key to delivering services that provide the right support, at the right time for local families. As a government we have a national picture of the families interacting with statutory systems such as children's social care. However, we do not have a comprehensive view of the needs which, if supported earlier, could avoid the need for interaction with those systems, and the progress made at family level to address other areas of concern, such as school attendance, worklessness and mental health.

54. Our current family outcomes framework, designed in 2014, defines which families are eligible for the programme's support because of their problems and the positive long-term outcomes that meet the threshold for "significant and sustained progress". This approach is also the basis for payment by results funding. Local areas have local flexibility to define specific indicators of need and progress in local "Troubled Families Outcomes Plans" and enable authorities to identify the right families to work with and the outcomes they need to thrive. In many areas, it has become an embedded tool, used across family support services to understand family needs, track their outcomes and allow professionals to make informed judgements about whether families are receiving the right support at the right time.

55. It is important that the framework continues to evolve alongside the needs of families and the strategic aims of the programme and local areas. We will use this coming year to co-design a new family outcomes framework with local authorities and other government departments with the intention to implement in any future years. We want to capture the full range of families' issues and ensure that authorities can continue to target intensive support at those who need it most. We want to focus on supporting families where there are multiple risk factors and avoiding some of the poorest outcomes for families - preventing family breakdown and children entering care, involvement in the criminal justice system or preventing homelessness.

56. In 2021-22 we will also work with authorities to develop and test new ways of collecting data on all families receiving family support and early help services. This will be in addition to continuing to track outcomes for families who meet the programme's current eligibility criteria. This data will help local and national partners to understand family's evolving needs and where the gaps are to inform future policy, service design and practice.

Leading the way locally and nationally

57. We want to offer incentives to drive the most developed local areas to innovate, as well as supporting other areas to make progress. Our upfront funding pilot has shown the benefits that more flexible funding can bring for well-developed multi-agency partnerships. Over the next year we will work with areas to develop a renewed upfront funding offer, in return for consistent family outcomes, a strong local voice for families and progress on partnerships and data. We expect these local areas to lead the way in demonstrating what a partnership-based, data driven, coordinated whole system approach to supporting vulnerable families looks like, and how this is reflected in the outcomes they are achieving at both service and system levels. For example, whether the local rate of family breakdown and children being taken into care or young people becoming involved with the criminal justice system is decreasing over time.

58. We will also continue to fund and champion innovation nationally, for example by seeking to accelerate local innovation in the priority areas of housing and youth offending. This could build on the highly successful Troubled Families Employment Advisor model by exploring the benefit of similar link worker roles to tie in other key agencies and workforces to the Supporting Families vision.

59. Finally, we will step up the way we work with departments across government to make Supporting Families the starting point for a shared vision on using preventative early help approaches to provide support for families. We will regularly bring together officials across government, and with local areas, and will support regular, strategic dialogue across departments at ministerial level. This will help us to align messaging and communications to all agencies working locally to support families and breaking down remaining barriers in information and data-sharing between agencies, whilst promoting a smarter, shared use of data to inform government policy.

Case study: Bristol - Reducing criminal exploitation

Bristol has developed Safer Options, their multi-agency partnership response to youth violence, county lines, drug dealing, and children and young people exploited for criminal activities. Safer Options is supported by the national programme, with data sharing accelerated by national funding and a whole family key working approach linked to community safety initiatives in a public health approach to violence prevention.

The Safer Options team identifies children and young people at risk using intelligence from the community, police, statutory partners and predictive risk analysis of known vulnerabilities. Safer Options leads in ensuring joined up working across the city's services, including early help teams, children's social care, and youth offending teams. Families with multiple needs in the Bristol are allocated a keyworker who takes a whole family approach.

Bristol's Insight Analytical Hub coordinates information held by agencies and in November 2019 a new targeted analytical product went live in addition to their existing family database, developed through national programme funding. This product helps to identify those young people in peer groups who are at risk of becoming more involved in harmful activity.

Testing has confirmed high reliability in the data, with the right young people identified early, including those not previously known to services. This data, alongside police and community intelligence, has also highlighted education providers and hotspot areas of Bristol at higher risk. Regular police and floating youth work support is deployed flexibly and proactively in response to the city's needs.

The recruitment of Education Inclusion Managers as part of the city's violence reduction response has boosted collaborative working in and with schools. The Safer Options team now delivers teacher training, with guidance co-developed between the team, policing, and education partners on offensive weapons on school sites.

Parenting workshops have been run across the city to support families and carers, along with educational workshops delivered to whole school year groups. Parents are offered the opportunity to train as community parent practitioners. The Safer Options team also host community meetings, to build trust and to encourage citizens to share concerns.

Keyworkers funded through the national programme are linked into updates on Bristol's communities, to ensure that individual family plans are underpinned by current intelligence about the impact of peers and community challenges on the child and that safety plans are enhanced by contextual interventions in the community.

2019 saw these mechanisms respond rapidly to a sudden rise in the city's serious violent youth crime incidents. The systems in place worked swiftly to identify those involved and implemented preventative, disruptive and diversionary tactics to bring the situation under control. At its heart, Bristol's initiative enables the local system to respond to risks yet goes further. Safer Options principles are intelligence led, evidence based and focused on prevention and whole family working.

Next steps

60. Making the vision set out here a reality is not something that a single government department, local authority or agency can achieve on its own. We look forward to working very closely with other government departments, all local agencies that support families, and with families and communities themselves, to continue to drive improvements, and achieve the outcomes that vulnerable families deserve.

61. A lot has been achieved over the past 10 years, but delivering real change requires a long-term commitment and the support and collaboration of a range of agencies and stakeholders. Through Supporting Families we are committed to bringing together a much broader partnership to help develop and implement these changes. We welcome views from all those working with and for families. We will continue to champion this approach nationally through our various communication platforms, and locally through our network of Supporting Families Coordinators.

62. It has never been more important for us to come together for families and as we look towards recovery from this difficult period, this will be key to building back better and ensuring that all vulnerable families and children and young people have the opportunities they deserve.

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Supporting Families - 2021-22 and beyond

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Supporting Families has been on a journey with families, local authorities and their partners since it began in 2012. It has delivered for families under three different government administrations, while wider society and the way in which local services are delivered look very different today.

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An article exploring the link between the current cost of living crisis and Conservative policies over the last decade.

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istening to the prime minister and his colleagues, you could be forgiven for thinking that the mounting cost of living crisis came out of the blue. As they see it, along came the war in Ukraine and what Boris Johnson has called "the aftershocks of Covid", triggering rocketing inflation. Suddenly, the gap between people's incomes and rising prices turned lives upside down.

In fact, for millions of people in Britain, 2022's growing sense of disaster is another chapter in a story that goes back at least 10 years - to rules and regulations that turned the welfare state into a mess of trapdoors and tripwires, to the hacking back of benefits, to the dire treatment of disabled people and to a new world of work where chronic insecurity and flatlining pay are an everyday reality.

How did we get here? During the New Labour years, between 1997 and 2010, there was an emphasis on clamping down on "benefit cheats" and making Britain's social security system more stringent. But the Blair and Brown governments also vowed to cut child poverty by at least 1 million by using such measures as tax credits. Despite an upward blip around the time of the crash of 2007-08, they succeeded.

The government of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne was rather different. The tone and the language leading politicians used to talk about benefits, poverty and work became even more toxic, opening the way for drastic changes to what was now being called "welfare".

Now, the prejudices and resentments of people outside the benefits system seemed to matter more than the people who needed help to try to stay afloat. "Fairness isn't just about who gets help from the state," said Cameron in October 2010, five months after becoming prime minister. "The other part of the equation is who gives that help, through their taxes. Taking more money from the man who goes out to work long hours each single day so the family next door can go on living a life on benefits without working - is that fair? ... If you can work, but refuse to work, we will not let you live off the hard work of others."

Welfare policy was driven by austerity, which was so drastic that an estimated £37bn was cut from benefits spending between 2010 and 2021. Right at the start, the new coalition government announced £11bn of "welfare reform savings". Benefits were linked to the consumer prices index, a measure of inflation that tended to be lower than the previous measure. Housing benefit was cut. Meanwhile, the rise of insecure work continued apace - and plans were hatched for even more drastic changes.

Some of us have followed what has unfolded since, tracking the relevant facts and figures, as well as people's experiences - of hunger, hardship and fear. Finally, at the end of May, the government bowed to months of pressure and announced a sizeable package of help, much aimed at the people struggling the most. But the measures are temporary and big questions remain.

Meanwhile, at the last count, in January, the number of people who had their benefits stopped or cut - usually for missing a meeting at the jobcentre - was close to 40,000. The people in power remain largely reluctant to intervene in the most insecure, exploitative corners of the economy, so the crisis grinds on. It is not something that arrived in a flash, but another episode in a very long saga.

An array of changes to the UK's benefits system was implemented by the Welfare Reform Act 2012. The biggest change was the introduction of universal credit, a catch-all monthly payment designed to replace six working-age benefits. "It is time to bring welfare into the 21st century," said its champion, the work and pensions secretary - and former Tory leader - Iain Duncan Smith. "We want a system which isn't seen as a doorway to hopelessness and despair, but instead as a doorway to real aspiration and achievement."

Its introduction was much delayed and is still not fully complete. But there was anxiety from the off about the switch from a mixture of benefits paid monthly, weekly and fortnightly to a once-a-month payment that in many cases made budgeting more difficult for recipients.

There was also dismay about child allowances being included in a single payment paid to households, rather than being paid to mothers, which effectively transferred millions of payments to men. "That comes up a lot in domestic violence cases, where those issues become suddenly very stark," says Alison Garnham, the chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). "But we're worried in general about what's happened to child benefit. It's lost nearly a quarter of its value in 10 years. What used to be our exemplary universal benefit is now in trouble and it desperately needs to be rescued."

There are also major problems with the in-built delay - of five weeks or longer - between applying for universal credit and receiving any money, leading people into impossible levels of debt. Small wonder that the food bank charity the Trussell Trust said in 2017 that demand for its parcels had gone up by 30% in areas where the introduction of universal credit was at its most advanced.

Perhaps the most glaring aspect of 10 years of cuts and so-called welfare reform concerns the awful treatment of disabled people. Conveniently enough for the government, it is a story about a complicated mess of changes. It is now a rule of thumb that when the benefits system is "reformed", disabled people bear the brunt - something seen in everything from the toughening of so-called work capability assessments in 2011 to the replacement of disability living allowance with the personal independence payment in 2013. What is clear is that 30% of the 13 million people with disabilities in the UK - 3.8 million adults and 300,000 children - live in poverty.

There is no end of stark facts underlying those figures. As part of the introduction of universal credit, the government got rid of the severe disability premium, depriving disabled adults who live on their own - or with only a young carer - of about £58 a week. Since 2017, employment and support allowance - a benefit paid to people who have a disability or health condition that affects how much they can work - has been reduced by about £30 a week for many new claimants.

So-called sanctions, whereby people's benefits are stopped, often for minor alleged breaches of the rules, have disproportionately affected disabled people. In 2018, one study found that unemployed disabled people were up to 53% more likely to have their payments docked than non-disabled people.

Worse still, since the money that used to go from Westminster and Whitehall to councils has been cut repeatedly, many local authorities have introduced or increased charges for disabled people's social care. "They all started bringing in similar new policies that increased the amount they could charge people," says Ellen Clifford, a disability-rights activist and the author of The War on Disabled People. "That means a lot of disabled people are having to pay much more for their social care, which leaves them very little to live on. The benefits they receive go straight out again."

This was the epitome of the coalition's approach to welfare: an absolute limit on benefit payments, pegged to average individual earnings from work. It was a blatantly political move, aimed at voters who believed the stories that there were people living lives of luxury at the state's expense. Osborne, the chancellor at the time, summarised it bluntly as "money to families who need it - but not more money than families who go out to work. That is what the British people mean by fair - and we will be the first government in history to bring it about."

The cap was introduced in 2013 and set at £500 a week (£26,000 a year). For single people, it was £350 a week. Three years later, the cap came down to £23,000 a year for families in Greater London and £15,410 for single people in the capital. Elsewhere in the country, the figures were £20,000 and £13,400. Duncan Smith said the changes would "re-emphasise the message that it's not fair for someone on benefits to be receiving more than someone in work".

I'm in a huge amount of debt. I'm caught in this cycle. It's never-ending

Because having small children often makes working impossible (chiefly because of childcare costs), parents endure the worst of the cap's effects. Indeed, 85% of capped families have kids, while 65% of all capped households are single parents - people who tend to need benefits in the absence of a working partner. If they live in a high-cost housing area such as London, being capped is often inevitable - annual rent in the capital can easily top £20,000, which leaves a pittance to cover everything else.

Aurora is one of the many people whose lives have been ruined by the cap. A widow and single mother of two from outer London, she wants to work, but has found that childcare issues make this impossible ("I had to give up my last job a month ago, because my youngest is still in primary school and I wouldn't have been able to pick him up on time"). She and her kids live in a privately rented home, for which she pays £1,800 a month. The cap means they are left with about £1,400 a year to live on. The extra money Rishi Sunak recently granted to the poorest households - a £650 one-off payment, as well as a £400 discount on energy bills given to all households and a £150 council tax rebate - will not change her basic predicament.

"I'm in a huge amount of debt," she says. "A huge amount. I've been struggling with that and looking for work. I'm basically caught in this cycle. It's never-ending. And now the costs of everything else are rising and I don't know what's going to happen. We're going to be made homeless, which will cost the government more."

This was perhaps the most notorious element of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. The coalition called it the "underoccupancy charge" or "spare room subsidy", but almost straight away the name that stuck was the bedroom tax. People living in council housing or homes they rented from housing associations would have their housing benefit reduced by 14% if they had a spare bedroom, or 25% if they had two or more. Supposedly, it would encourage a more efficient use of housing space.

A year afterwards, research by the BBC suggested that only about 6% of people affected had moved home. For the rest, the change simply meant less money and impossible budgeting decisions. One family of six I met in Hartlepool - who needed their "spare" room as a sensory space for an autistic child - saw their weekly housing benefit fall by £28 a week, which immediately pushed them further into food poverty.

Between March and November 2020, as the number of people who needed universal credit shot up thanks to the pandemic, the number of people affected by the bedroom tax rose by 40%, to 238,748. It is barely talked about any more, but it remains a big factor in many people's inability to meet their most basic living costs.

Ten years ago, jobs in which employees had no idea how many hours they would be working - and thus how much they would be earning - from one week to the next felt like a relative novelty. But, in 2014, a change in how official figures were calculated revealed the true extent of the problem. About half a million people were on zero-hours contracts. By 2020, that figure had doubled, which is one of the reasons why about 15% of the people who regularly use food banks are thought to be in work.

Conservative politicians have consistently refused to do anything meaningful about the zero-hours issue, which is strongly linked to the way the benefits system works, summed up by the term "conditionality". Put simply, for around a decade, the state has pushed people into taking any work available under pain of having their benefits stopped, so people can do precious little to contest insecure conditions and poor wages. "It was all intended to force people into low-paid work," says the CPAG's Garnham. "What it hasn't done is lift them out of poverty. We've done welfare to work. What we've not done is poverty to out-of-poverty."

In 2014, Osborne announced his plan for a two-year benefits freeze, if the Conservatives were returned to power, to save another £3bn. In the summer of 2015, he confirmed the duration of the freeze would be doubled. It finally ended in April 2020, just after the start of the pandemic. It had affected just under 30 million people, cut the real-terms value of benefits by 6% since 2015, left the average poor couple with children £580 a year worse off and pushed 400,000 people into poverty.

This was designed, according to Duncan Smith, to " teach parents that children cost money ". It was central to the welfare reform bill that Labour MPs were instructed to abstain on - a notorious episode that was one of the key factors in propelling Jeremy Corbyn to the party leadership. The two-child limit - a crude restriction on child tax credits and universal credit payments to families, with the caveat that twins and triplets were not penalised - was introduced in 2017.

In April, research funded by the Nuffield Foundation found that the numbers of third and subsequent children born to poorer families had barely fallen. But the two-child limit had become the biggest single driver of child poverty, depriving three-child families of £250 a month, or £3,000 a year.

Sayeeda is a single mother who lives in South Yorkshire. I was put in touch with her by the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project, which tracks the impact of the two-child limit and the benefit cap. Sayeeda receives about £1,600 a month in benefits, including just over £500 for two of her three kids (aged 13, 11 and two). Once her bills and rent are paid, the family has about £20 a day to live on.

"Every month is a battle," she says. "I'm always in some form of debt, just to tide me over." She is in debt to her gas and electricity suppliers. When we speak, she has just been hit with a £300 fine for driving a borrowed car while uninsured: "We probably wouldn't eat for the next month if I paid that all in one go."

If she got another £250 for her third child, she says, things might be manageable. "It would take a lot of stress off my head. I wouldn't constantly be worrying about feeding my kids. I could just buy a few more things without thinking about the cost all the time. I have to make sure that every penny is accounted for."

After the crash of 2008, the UK became a byword for stagnant pay. Why this happened is unclear, but low productivity is part of the explanation, along with employees' weak bargaining power and the growth of insecure, low-paid work. But the facts are stark: between 1992 and 2008, real wages went up by 36%; for 2008 to 2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects a rise of just 2.4%.

As far as the 5.7 million people in the public sector are concerned, the fact that wages have failed to keep pace with prices has been a deliberate policy. In 2009, Labour capped public-sector pay rises at 1% for two years from 2011; a year later, Osborne froze public-sector salaries for two years, then capped any rises at 1% or an average of 1%, a policy that came to an end only in 2017. Sunak introduced another year-long freeze in November 2020, for public sector workers outside the NHS. All this fed into a growing issue for teachers, police, firefighters, jobcentre staff and the rest. Recent figures show that the median public sector pay award was a mere 1.4% in the year to March 2022 (in the private sector, the figure was 2.2%).

On 20 March 2020, Rishi Sunak announced that the government was raising universal credit's "standard allowance" by £1,000 a year, which meant a £20-a-week increase. "When people started to receive it, they said how much of a difference it made," says CPAG's Garnham. "On that level of income, small amounts of money make a massive difference." This increase was not granted to the 1.4 million people estimated to be on the "legacy" benefits that universal credit is replacing, about 75% of whom are disabled.

Ending the uplift was like giving someone something to eat, and then snatching half of it away

In October, despite a huge campaign, the "uplift" was brought to an end, a move that the thinktank the Legatum Institute said would push another 840,000 people into poverty, 290,000 of whom were children. Lils, a mum of two whom I met recently in Plymouth, told me that it had a dire effect. "It was like giving someone something to eat and then snatching half of it away," she said. "To me, that money was an extra £20 on the electric." The government's new help for poor households may be a big move, but it simply puts people like Lils back to where they were before the "uplift" was ended.

In April, year-on-year inflation hit 9%. That month, benefits were "uprated" by only 3.1%, a figure based on the inflation rate in the year to September 2021. Next year, benefits will rise by a much larger figure, but that is cold comfort for millions of people as they struggle to make it through another 12 months. Note that nothing the government has announced gets near the uplift that families who need benefits would experience if their payments were increased in line with price rises.

"Basically, what we've gone through is a massive squeeze on low-income families, followed by a cost of living hike," says Garnham. "You can't understand the impact of one without the other." Those two stories have had a huge impact on the lives of millions of people, but what of the politicians whose ideas and policies defined so much of what happened after 2010?

Cameron was last in the headlines for hustling for government contracts on behalf of a now defunct finance company reckoned to have paid him about £7m. Clegg has his very lucrative gig at Meta, the company that used to be called Facebook; his annual salary has been put at about £2.7m, while his recent promotion brought him a stock package reckoned to be worth £9.4m. Osborne, meanwhile, has a full-time job at a "boutique investment bank" in Mayfair called Robey Warshaw, where, in 2021, the highest-earning "partner" was paid the best part of £20m.

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The decade that broke Britain: the disastrous decisions that left millions in a cost of living crisis

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The government is keen to blame growing levels of poverty on Covid and the Ukraine war. But policies from the benefits cap to the bedroom tax have left households on the brink amid the cost of living crisis. Here are 10 of the worst

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-2021-to-2022-and-beyond/supporting-families-2021-22-and-beyond

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Ministerial foreword

Supporting Families has been on a journey with families, local authorities and their partners since it began in 2012. It has delivered for families under three different government administrations, while wider society and the way in which local services are delivered look very different today.

The programme has already helped families make extraordinary improvements in their lives with more than 400,000 positive outcomes achieved since 2015. We also know that the reach of this approach has been much broader, with more than 870,000 families worked with in a whole family way between 2015 and 2021.That is why now is the right time to rename the programme, to reflect what it does in principle, and in practice.

It started out as the Troubled Families Programme almost a decade ago and since then, has grown in scope and ambition, evolving through three distinct phases. I am pleased that up to £165m of additional funding for the programme was announced at the 2020 Spending Review. Our 2019 manifesto committed to improving the programme and we are looking to what has changed, what works and how best to deliver outcomes into the next year and beyond.

Now is the time to be even more ambitious in helping families to thrive. Our vision is to ensure that those families who need support so get it at the right point, in the right way, as early as possible. Great things happen when families build on their strengths, call on their support networks and tackle their problems head on and early on. Children, parents and carers are most able to build resilience with services at their side who know them well and can offer trusted guidance. At its heart, the national programme then and now, is about locally delivered early help for families, led by the keyworkers and local partners who know their areas and families best.

As we look towards the future, to national recovery from the global COVID-19 pandemic and to building back better, we are taking stock. While the programme continues to support families experiencing acute problems, the work to connect local systems together is reaching many more. More than ever before, services are working together in schools, children's centres, family hubs and in local communities, to deal with emerging concerns through early help that takes a whole family approach.

Over time, this model has been proven to work, through robust national evaluation examining data sets from across government and the local sector. We know that the programme prevents children in families from entering the care system, reduces the likelihood of involvement in crime and helps families into work.

COVID-19 saw local areas drawing on service level transformations achieved since 2012 to ramp up multi-agency collaboration, data sharing and governance in response to the global pandemic. I am proud that the innovation and agility seen in local areas, who are tackling COVID-19's impact on families, has often been underpinned and accelerated by the programme's work. The programme will continue to support recovery by helping children back to school, helping those who have lost their jobs get back to work, by helping young people avoid crime, protecting mental health and by tackling domestic abuse.

We have shown that we can work together across organisations, professional cultures and silos to support those in need of early help. There is much more to do now, to embed the transformation of services into local systems, to ensure that what has so far been new and innovative becomes 'business as usual' across all local areas delivering the programme.

I look forward to working with Supporting Families services, as we set our sights on the next set of challenges and opportunities in the year ahead and beyond.

Eddie Hughes MP,
Minister for Supporting Families
Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government

Summary

1. Since its launch in 2011, up to £1.533 billion of funding through the Troubled Families Programme has helped families and local areas to achieve a huge amount. The programme supported over 400,000 families to achieve positive outcomes between 2015-2021. Each one of these outcomes means a family's life changed for the better, whether it has meant improving a child's school attendance, so they get the best start in life, supporting a parent to overcome their substance misuse and keep their family together, or supporting victims of domestic abuse so they can build a more positive future for themselves and their family.

2. The programme has also benefitted many more by driving widespread transformation in how family services are delivered in local areas, making them more coordinated, family-centred and data driven. The programme has championed whole family and multi-agency working to support vulnerable families, that is those experiencing multiple disadvantages such as worklessness, domestic abuse, and poor mental health. It proved through a robust impact study, that this approach prevents children in vulnerable families from ending up in the care system, reduces the likelihood of involvement in crime and supports families back towards work and more fulfilling lives.

3. However, there is still more to do, the numbers of children in care continues to rise and there have been worrying increases in some types of youth crime. We also know that the programme cannot resolve every problem, and that there are some families that local partners need to work harder to support. Locally, spending continues to be geared towards acute services to cope with demand for statutory interventions, with less investment going into both universal and targeted preventative approaches. Although the programme has driven service transformation, fully embedding this across local systems takes time and local areas are at different stages along this journey. The challenge of COVID-19 makes it even more important to help families early on, so they can get back on track before issues escalate.

4. Strong multi-agency partnerships locally, underpinned by robust data sharing, is the key to unlocking many of these improvements to local services. We know that services work best together when relationships are strong and intelligence is shared to fully understand the drivers of local trends, identify families that might need support and target their services accordingly. Live data sharing on school attendance between schools and family services, for example, is only happening in 47% of areas. Re-engaging pupils and driving up school attendance post-pandemic is a key priority for government. Further multi-agency collaboration in this area will enable services to identify families needing support early on and work together to ensure children and young people are back in school and supported to get the best start in life.

5. In 2021-22, we want to take the Troubled Families Programme into a new phase, with a refreshed vision, strengthened objectives and an even stronger momentum to tackle barriers and create lasting change. We are launching the next phase of the programme - Supporting Families - which will focus on building the resilience of vulnerable families, and on enabling system change locally and nationally. This means ensuring that every area has joined up, efficient local services, able to identify families in need and provide the right support at the right time.

6. As we do this, we are conscious that local authorities have had to respond to the additional needs created by the pandemic, while at the same time coping with the effect of COVID-19 on their own staff and services. It is therefore important to provide as much stability as possible throughout 2021-22. We are also clear that we want to do with, not to, local areas, families and communities. We will therefore use 2021-22 as a transition year to co-design, test, and iterate future improvements to the programme.

7. Our ambition for vulnerable families remains front and centre of our vision. We want every family not just to avoid poor outcomes, but to thrive. We want to help them to build their resilience and community connections and empower them to find their own solutions to problems. This will involve intensive whole family support from a lead professional where families are experiencing multiple complex problems, but also earlier support from the appropriate local service when a problem is first emerging. All services that support families have a role to play and we want to see the practice of whole family keyworking spread across agencies. This includes forming strong partnerships with specialist services, more involvement from voluntary and community sector organisations, and communities themselves.

8. Ultimately, the aim is for strong multi-agency local partnerships in every area, and mature local and national data systems, which enable partners to identify families in need of extra help, target services more effectively and track family level outcomes over the long term. This will support all local areas to fully embed preventative approaches into their support systems for families, creating more resilient communities for the long term.

9. We are committed to improving the programme to achieve this. Supporting Families will:

Raise the ambition for vulnerable families, driving local services to work better together to build their resilience and help them to thrive.

Drive improvements to local partnership working and data use so that vulnerable families receive the right support, at the right time. This means investing more in good practice, overcoming barriers to data-sharing and involving the voice of families in service design and commissioning.

Update our eligibility and outcomes framework to ensure it continues to reflect the needs of families and provides flexibility for authorities to respond.

Help local areas to work towards stronger multi-agency, data-driven local partnerships by co-designing a road map to achieving a mature local system of family support services and considering new incentives to help drive progress.

Using our national voice, alongside local and national networks to champion the case for early help, ensuring families get the support they need as early as possible before their problems escalate into crises and they need statutory support. Because we know that this is the key to making services more sustainable for the future.

Chapter 1: the Troubled Families Programme 2011-21

What the programme has achieved

10. The programme was launched 10 years ago with a simple, but clear principle - effective support for vulnerable families cannot be provided in an uncoordinated, transactional way, which sees only problems rather than people and fails to comprehend the entirety of a family's life. The result is escalating problems, poor outcomes often perpetuated across generations, and unmanageable flows into reactive, statutory systems, which is overwhelming for public services and costly for society as a whole.

11. In 2011, the programme was designed as an innovation to tackle this systemic problem. It committed to ensuring that vulnerable families had a single point of contact, a person who would build a relationship with them, understand the root causes of their problems, and support each member of the family to make positive changes. For families, this has meant someone was there for them at the most challenging point in their lives, helping them make sense of problems, navigate specialist support, and ultimately take action to build a more positive future. This approach is known as "whole family" working and builds on pre-existing successful models of family support.

12. Keyworkers provide a range of practical and emotional support to families. Our most recent survey showed that they provide weekly support with parenting (including for those with pre-school children) and mental health difficulties, getting children to school, managing money, debt and housing needs, managing the impact of domestic abuse and keeping children living in the family home. As well as this direct support, which is often provided in the home, keyworkers help join up specialist support around the family as needed and connect them to a range of local facilities and services. This gives them confidence to navigate those services and helps build their resilience and ability to find solutions to problems themselves in the longer-term.

13. Since then, the programme has gone a long way towards making this innovative approach the established practice in local areas. Between April 2015 and January 2021 over 400,000 families achieved positive outcomes as a result of direct support funded through the programme. Each one of these outcomes means a family's life changed for the better, whether it has meant improving a child's school attendance, so they get the best start in life, supporting a parent to overcome their substance misuse and keep their family together, or supporting victims of domestic abuse so they can build a more positive future for themselves and their family. In the programme's second phase (2015-2021) many more families also benefitted from the programme's wider investment in service transformation, with over 870,000 supported in a whole family way between April 2015 and January 2021.

14. An impact study which tracked the outcomes achieved by families supported by the programme between 2015 and 2018 highlighted its role in preventing high-cost statutory interventions. Compared to families with similar characteristics who had not been on the programme, the study found 19-24 months after starting to receive support the proportion of:

Children in care was found to have reduced from 2.5% to 1.7%; a 32% decrease;

Adults receiving custodial sentences fell from 1.6% to 1.2% (25% decrease);

Juveniles receiving custodial sentences fell from 0.8% to 0.5% (38% decrease);

Adults claiming Jobseeker's Allowance fell by 11%;

A cost benefit analysis showed the programme provides £2.28 of savings for every pound invested.

Staff surveys, family surveys and case study research showed high levels of support from local staff and positive experiences of families. It also sets out detail about how the programme has driven service transformation.

15. To achieve this change in families' experience and have this preventative impact on statutory systems, public services supporting families have changed significantly. There has been major improvement in multi-agency working, and how information is used and shared in local areas, with services pooling data across adult and children's services, education, jobcentres, youth offending teams and police to build a holistic picture of the needs of vulnerable families locally. That information is now used by multi-agency partnerships to systematically identify families showing signs of struggling, and work strategically to ensure they get the right support, at the right time.

16. Local areas have also transformed the way they address the needs of vulnerable families, working together to achieve shared outcomes across services and using data and evidence to track whether that is being achieved with each family. This strategic approach has enabled services to support families earlier, when it can make the most difference to their lives, and at the same time reduce the pressure on costly, reactive systems. This has had significant fiscal and economic benefits, illustrating the strength of the approach not just to change individual lives, but to make a difference to society as a whole.

Case study: A family's journey

Maya and her two children, Mia 9 and Avery 8 had moved home after leaving Maya's controlling partner, who then cut off all contact with his children. Teachers were worried about Mia, who had become aggressive towards her peers in class, and Avery, who was often tearful at school. Maya reported that her ex used to be abusive towards her in front of the children, and that since leaving, Mia and Avery had become more difficult to cope with.

The family were referred by their school to the local authority's Early Help team based at the nearby Children's Centre, where Alex, a family support worker, carried out an assessment of their needs. Alex found that the emotional effects of having witnessed abuse were emerging in the children's behaviour. This was affecting their schooling, development, and life chances and Maya needed help to regain confidence in her parenting.

Alex arranged for a specialist domestic abuse worker to visit, who worked with the family on the effects of violence and discussed with Maya that children may have started to 'act out' negative feelings because it had become safe to do so. Maya agreed to meet with a local Freedom Programme domestic abuse support group, for regular sessions on feelings and on how to respond to her children's needs. Strategies for stronger behavioural boundaries and predictable routines were put in place at home by Maya, with support from Martha.

Alex worked with the local Educational Psychology service to source Avery with an Emotional Literacy Support Teaching Assistant at school. Avery addressed his emotions by making more sense of his life story and learning positive self-esteem techniques. Mia was helped by the local Behaviour Support team, part of the Psychology, Wellbeing and School Support Service. The team helped Mia deal with her angry feelings so that she stopped hitting out and was no longer at risk of being excluded.

The support offered to the children at school has worked well. Mia and Avery now share their feelings instead of showing them through challenging behaviours. Teachers have reported no serious concerns about the children for six months. Maya and the children also report that they are much more settled and calmer in their new home.

Maya also reported feeling good about the support from her group, and that she now feels confident in listening to the children and responding to worries about their father. Maya has gone from being quiet and shy, to running a volunteer-led group at the Children's Centre. Maya now works to support other families within her local community, signposting them to agencies and encouraging them to seek advice.

How the programme achieved it

17. The service transformation brought about in the last decade has relied first and foremost on the leadership and dedication of local authorities and of all the agencies involved, to engage in a new way of working. Where the programme has been most successful, local authorities and their partners have led the way, convening partnerships, breaking down barriers, innovating, and working seamlessly with government to make the most of the strategic investment and central support provided.

18. A total of up to £1.533 billion in government funding from 2012-2022 has enabled local authorities to invest strategically in early help, transforming how they support families. The programme tracks outcomes and emphasises key principles, rather than prescribing specific models, so local authorities and agencies have had flexibility to invest according to local need. The funding was never intended to cover the full cost of providing local services to families, but to act as a strategic investment, enabling local systems to operate in a different way and in doing so, maximise the value of local family services.

19. There is no single model for transforming local services and local areas operate within a range of different local structures, including combined, two tier and single tier authorities. Flexibility has allowed authorities to adapt to local needs, and use the funding in a range of different ways including:

bolstering, and investing in the training and development of their family support workforce, particularly skilled keyworkers.

creating or expanding early help "front doors" to enable multi-agency assessments and holistic, coordinated support for families. In some areas, this has included the use of family hub models both to co-locate services and provide a single access point for families.

re-inventing data systems to enable multi-agency pooling and sharing of information.

investing in "link workers" to proactively connect different services, for example Job Centre Plus employment and welfare services and local authority family support.

creating support teams around key services such as schools, encouraging them to adopt a whole family approach.

where needed, providing additional funding to specialist services to work alongside family support services, for example domestic abuse experts and specialist substance misuse and mental health workers.

20. The programme was specifically designed to provide a mix of upfront funding for investment in services and payment by results when family outcomes are achieved. This approach has enabled local authorities to invest as they saw fit, while creating a robust tool for evidencing and tracking outcomes for families. While payment by results required resource to implement, it created an unrelenting focus on long term outcomes, created a lever for partnership working and has proved a crucial driver to transform data systems as it attached a financial reward to good data systems.

21. In some areas, this has spurred multi-agency partnerships to develop more sophisticated shared case management and data systems, pulling together data from multiple sources, including from health partners, children's services, the police, probation providers, youth offending teams, schools, pupil referral units, Education Welfare Officers, Community Mental Health Services, local GPs, midwives, health visitors, children's centres and family hubs. This means they are not only able to identify families and track outcomes, but predict risk and need, getting ahead of problems as they emerge.

22. Another strength of the programme has been its national team presence providing support and challenge to all local authorities delivering the programme. This has included publishing best practice models such as our recent Early Help System Guide which describes the key features of a mature early help system. These models are not prescriptive, but rather support local multi-agency partnerships to self-assess against key elements of service transformation. Our data maturity model provides a blueprint to help areas progress their local data partnerships. Throughout, the national team worked with local authorities to give feedback and support, acting as partner and critical friend.

23. Nationally, the programme has championed early help and the importance of transforming local family support services. An annual progress report has been laid in Parliament, and there has been a comprehensive impact and process evaluation, including one of the most advanced data linking exercises in government. The national team has worked with local areas to identify and address policy and delivery issues, and to influence the design and delivery of new policies and programmes that affect families.

24. Throughout, the programme has funded innovation at both local and national level. We partnered with DWP to roll out the effective Troubled Families Employment Advisors model. This links job centre staff to children's services in every authority to join up employment support for families. The TFEAs help families with job searches, interview and CV skills, money management and work experience, contributing to a 11% reduction in JSA claims for adults supported by the programme. We worked with authorities to trial innovative practice through the Earned Autonomy model which increases local flexibility by providing all funding upfront. We supported local authorities to develop whole family approaches to tackling youth crime through the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund. The lessons learnt have also galvanised multi-agency, whole person working for other vulnerable groups, including adults facing multiple disadvantages, who are the focus of our new programme Changing Futures.

25. The support families receive now is fundamentally different to 2011 and the programme has played a key role in the achievements of local areas. However, gaps remain, and we are now facing the new, unprecedented challenge of COVID-19. The next two chapters describe these challenges and the role that the next phase of troubled families - Supporting Families - will play in meeting them and in shaping services for families into the future.

Case study: Sheffield: school inclusion

In Sheffield, national programme funding is channelled into the Building Successful Families (BSF) team, which is designed to support education. This funding is received up-front and has helped Sheffield to accelerate multi-agency working across the city. One aim of the BSF team is to empower children and families to engage with the early years and education system, and this has led to local sector leaders coming together to develop the support offered to schools.

The BSF team use data to identify schools which have the highest number of children at risk of exclusion. Sheffield's local leads then build a 'team around the school' which caters for pupils and their families. These teams include family support workers and specialists in autism and children's mental health, who work with teachers, children and parents or carers.

'Teams around the school' look to work with the causes of behaviours linked to exclusion, which may originate from bullying, problems at home or past trauma. This approach aims to reduce schools resorting to crisis measures, such as excluding children to pupil referral units or escalating cases to children's social care.

Professionals across Education, Health and Care come together through BSF's school inclusion meetings, to map the reasons for non-engagement and using their multidisciplinary experience, help schools with higher numbers of vulnerable learners move towards the right evidence-based interventions and teaching support. The BSF team also ensure that there is a multi-agency network around the localities of schools, with specialist officers on hand to help advise on attendance, inclusion, educational access and exclusions.

Sheffield's approach goes beyond the school gates to include parenting and family support at home. Over 400 families are currently supported through 'transition pathways' that ensure whole families are working together to support a child's move from one education setting to another. Routines, boundaries, and sleep support are offered directly to parents with follow on parenting courses, sessions and seminars to strengthen parenting capacity. Adult mental health, and emotional health and wellbeing of children is also supported through commissioned links with adult and children's mental health services.

The teams reach into the classroom and the home of vulnerable learners to offer holistic support, often dealing with whole family issues, such as access to employment, public health and community resources, grants and benefits and housing support.

Through this approach, Sheffield's collaborative power is focused on raising attendance, reducing exclusions, and increasing both access to education and engagement in learning. As a result, more young people are receiving the support they require to be safe, settled, and ready to learn.

Chapter 2: the road ahead

The impact of COVID-19 and the role of early help

26. We know that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the lives of vulnerable families, exacerbating existing problems for those who were already struggling and creating a new set of issues for others. Many of the issues which have emerged over the last year are ones that will be familiar to local partners. Improving family relationships and tackling domestic abuse, keeping children, families and young people healthy and safe, re-engaging pupils in school and driving up school attendance, supporting parents towards employment and helping families access mental health support will be key as we move towards recovery.

27. Local authorities and partner agencies have already faced multiple challenges in responding. This has not just included adapting to home-working or virtual delivery but needing to rapidly understand the evolving need and being able to identify who now needs support, for what and when. Local areas have generally responded with agility and innovation, particularly where they have been able to make best use of the resources and structures developed through the Troubled Families Programme, but there remains a shared concern about responding to growing need in future.

28. This is an unprecedented situation and it is still too early to assess the full impact of the pandemic on families' needs and circumstances. However, early help and whole family working will be more important within this context than it has ever been. As argued by the Early Intervention Foundation, it is likely local areas will need to support new families with a range of challenges, while also addressing the needs of those whose problems may have escalated during this year. For many families, reactive statutory systems will not provide the most appropriate response to their challenges.

29. We know that preventative early help approaches can deliver better outcomes for families. They can also create the space for services to work together proactively, identifying and solving problems rather than reacting to crises. The investment provided over the last 10 years in these approaches has already played a crucial role in the response to COVID-19. The programme has acted as a catalyst for bringing together both universal and targeted support services to deliver a coordinated early help approach in local areas, which has proved hugely valuable during this time.

30. Throughout the pandemic, early help teams have used data and information-sharing to quickly assess emerging need, including in families that were unlikely to know where to access support or feel comfortable reaching out. Local areas continued face to face visits to families struggling the most and used virtual engagement methods to help those less at risk. They also delivered physical support packages to the doorstep to help with issues from remote education to food access. Local early help teams led campaigns and established helplines, drawing in voluntary and community organisations and working in a multi-agency way to ensure the right service provided support at the right time. However, there is a risk that families are only supported when they are at crisis point and services struggle to keep up with the rising flows into statutory services such as children's social care and the criminal justice system. This could delay the recovery in the long run, impacting on our ability to build back better after the pandemic, and resulting in poorer outcomes for families and for society as a whole.

31. The next section sets out our vision for the recovery and beyond, and the commitment we make to local areas, through our Supporting Families vision, to champion this across government.

Case study: Liverpool - COVID-19 data

As the global COVID-19 pandemic began to emerge in early 2020, Liverpool City Council and local NHS organisations quickly realised that an identification system might be needed to detect people and families with health, financial and social vulnerabilities, who may be at risk of tipping into crisis.

This system would need to work under statutory COVID-19 data provisions issued by the Department for Health and Social Care for the purpose of identifying people who may be rendered extremely clinically vulnerable by the pandemic. It would need to go further still, to link relevant health care, economic and domestic abuse data on an individual and family basis. Any system would need to highlight multiple disadvantages and to identify where families were already known to be in need across services.

Liverpool rose to this challenge by using their existing data system, already developed through national programme funding. They built a bespoke COVID-19 data linkage module into it, working at pace to establish the system change ahead of the anticipated peak of the pandemic in May 2020.

Before the height of the pandemic was reached, Liverpool was able to create an essential 'vulnerability index' of individuals and families, to prioritise food, prescription deliveries and care packages. Families in the programme's existing cohort were mapped and keyworkers used both virtual and face-to-face visits and assessments to ensure those already facing multiple disadvantages were supported early on. Liverpool also mapped children and young people who were shielding and overlaid the programme data, to identify and support cohorts of children with significant health conditions who were living in families in need of help.

The combined data was also used strategically by adult mental health services and to deliver targeted health and community provision services such as mobile COVID testing in 'hotspot' areas. The data helped with planning co-ordinated visits, providing additional information for food hubs and identifying those people required to isolate after being identified by Test and Trace services.

Liverpool City Council is considering using these data to identify people most at risk if there is any future pandemic. The data may also be used to develop early intervention and mitigation strategies as local areas up and down the country plan for a potential rise in demand for community, place based and mental health services following the easing of national restrictions.

Liverpool continues to work collaboratively with policy and intelligence, the University of Liverpool and organisations in the city region to better understand their data and work on a joint COVID-19 recovery plan.

A whole system approach nationally

32. The Troubled Families Programme is designed to bring together multi-agency partners to deliver joined up support for vulnerable families, rather than to provide a stand-alone specialist service on its own. It provides a framework for working with families in an intensive, whole family way and tracking their outcomes, as well as enabling the long-term service change that we know delivers the most effective support for families. This means it is deeply interlinked with a much wider set of policies and programmes delivering services for families, children and young people.

33. This government has invested considerably in family support, including through the Troubled Families Programme, Violence Reduction Units, the Reducing Parental Conflict Programme, and many others. Policy reviews of the care system and the SEND system are underway, as well as relevant reforms to public health, the NHS long-term plan and Integrated Care Systems. There is also increased focus on championing family hubs as a way of integrating services and improving access for families. These programmes and reviews are part of the same effort to deliver better outcomes for families, recover from COVID-19 and create more sustainable systems for the future. Local partners already have existing governance and accountability infrastructure locally on which they can build, such as Health and Wellbeing Boards and multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

34. We will continue to champion a whole system approach nationally, helping remove barriers and supporting local areas to join up locally. We will also champion whole family working and early help as the model of effective local delivery, and a relentless focus on achieving positive outcomes for families over the long term. We will look for opportunities to join up, influence service changes and advocate for a rebalanced system that is sustainable in the longer-term. We will use the refreshed vision set out in this document to make clear what service transformation should look like and to make that a joint vision across government.

Our vision for change

35. Now is the time to be ambitious for families and for our public services. Our vision for the next phase of the programme, and the wider system it stewards, has two key elements:

We want to see vulnerable families thrive. We will build their resilience by providing effective, whole family support to help prevent escalation into statutory services.

We will drive systems change locally and nationally, creating joined up local services, able to identify families in need, provide the right support at the right time, and track their outcomes in the long term. We want to level up every local area to the standard of the best.

36. The impact will be felt by individual families, across public services and will also have benefits for the rest of society.

Families will be empowered to become resilient over time and build connections to their local community. Avoiding poor outcomes such as homelessness, family breakdown and children entering care, or involvement in crime, families will thrive.

Local services will be joined-up, flexible, responsive to new challenges and sustainable for the long term. Strong multi-agency partnerships will work together to understand local trends, predict emerging need in their local area, identify and respond to those needing extra help.

The benefits of this approach will be felt across society. The pressure on expensive reactive statutory services will reduce as the system rebalances away from intervening at crisis point. This will help services to become more sustainable and allow them to intervene much earlier in the cycle, delivering better outcomes for families.

37. This vision is already becoming a reality in local areas, but progress varies. For example, while some areas are successfully achieving positive outcomes with all the families they supported in 2020-21, there is still more work to do to achieve this consistently across local areas. We know that strong local partnerships and data systems are the drivers of success. Where outcomes are not being achieved, or cannot be evidenced, areas are often held back by a lack of progress in these areas. For example, our self-assessed local data survey found that only 20% of areas are using and sharing data in the most advanced ways. Furthermore, only half of all areas receive the police crime and offending data they need to target support at families becoming involved in crime.

38. Self-assessments against our Early Help System Guide show some consistency in how services have developed, for example most areas report a high degree of confidence that families know who they keyworker is and that whole family assessments are happening. However, there is still much work to do particularly around engaging different workforces in whole family working and growing community capacity at scale.

39. Nationally, we have had success in facilitating partnership-working and data-sharing on the ground in some areas, for example through the Troubled Families Employment Advisors. However, we are keen to see further progress to join up services and data in key areas such as mental health and housing. Some areas have developed solutions to these barriers locally, but there is more to do at national level to support widespread progress.

40. A clear strength of the programme has been its focus on tracking outcomes for families and allowing local areas the flexibility to innovate and to invest according to local need. However, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the impact of service transformation, and further work is required to test different approaches and translate that research into actionable best practice. This will drive more effective services and better outcomes with families.

41. While the programme evaluation shows that our approach results in very positive experiences for families, the extent to which this is co-designed directly with families and communities varies across local areas. For some, this has been central to their transformation journey, but for others less so. Nationally, there is more to do to champion the voice of families and communities within local service transformation.

42. Equally, there is more to do to support the role of, and work in tandem with, voluntary and community sector organisations. In some areas the voluntary and community sector is a key player. Some local authorities have been working to shift their mindset from the local authority being a provider or purchaser of services to being more of a facilitator working with the community and voluntary sector to jointly meet need earlier and with more creative solutions.

43. Nationally, we also championed the role of the voluntary and community sector in delivering whole family approaches through the Supporting Families Against Youth Crime Fund. The fund encouraged local VCS organisations to play a crucial role in the development of new and innovative approaches to diverting young people from crime. We are keen to see local authorities and partner agencies working closely with VCS organisations to harness their expertise, local knowledge and energy in future.

44. The challenge of COVID-19 has accelerated progress in many of these areas. Throughout the pandemic, local areas have reported that significant progress has been made to overcome barriers to joint working and sharing of information with health services. Equally, the sharing of practice and insights between local areas has accelerated, and the VCS have been invaluable partners, helping to identify hidden and emerging needs and supporting the response. We must quickly learn the lessons from this and ensure that we retain them going forward.

Chapter 3: a renewed approach

The first year of a new phase

45. Local authorities have adapted considerably over the past year to respond to the additional needs created by the pandemic, while at the same time coping with the effect of COVID-19 on their own staff and services. We understand that it is important to provide as much stability as possible throughout 2021-22. We will therefore retain the same funding and delivery structure, and authorities will receive their share of the further £165 million funding on the same basis as in previous years.

46. However, we also keen that the programme continues to evolve so that it can adapt to new challenges. This process of evolution in local areas started a long time before the pandemic, with some progressing faster than others to break the mould of siloed services entirely. We are committed to learning from the achievements of the most ambitious areas. We will drive progress, striving to bring every local area to the standard of the best. We will do this while partnering with the most advanced local areas to continue to drive innovation and to shape local services for families into the future.

2021-22 - Building the foundations for long term improvements

47. As a nation we are starting to look beyond the pandemic to put in place what we need to recover. The programme is well positioned to play a key role in supporting vulnerable families to recover from the pandemic. Now, more than ever, we believe that every vulnerable family deserves to receive the right support at the right time, from services that understand all their needs, and support them in a whole family way.

48. We know that joined up local partnerships with a strong data sharing culture have a head start in understanding and responding to the needs of their local communities. In 2021-22 we will work with these areas to understand how we can drive progress to build the services families need now and in the future. We want to do with, not to, local areas, families and communities. We will use 2021-22 to co-design, test and iterate future improvements. We will:

Look at how we can drive the service and system transformation that we know will be crucial to understanding and responding to local need in future as well as what we could do to incentivise progress.

Co-produce updates to the framework that local areas use to identify families eligible for support and the outcomes we expect them to achieve, in consultation with local partnerships. This will ensure that areas continue to be incentivised to support the right families at the right time and help them deliver the right outcomes to improve their lives.

Update the programme's funding formula to ensure that it continues to reflect the latest data on need in local areas.

A focus on the whole system

49. We know that strong local partnerships deliver better outcomes for families. However, every local area is different. There is no single model for a data driven and joined-up local system that is able to provide the right support at the right time for vulnerable families. There is, however, a significant body of evidence build up over the last 10 years which helps us to understand what is most likely to be effective. Building on this evidence base, we will work with areas to identify the key features that underpin a successful local system and map these into a 'transformation road map' for local areas. We will also explore what we can do to better incentivise progress against these, including the possibility of financial rewards.

50. As part of this work, we will also explore the potential to monitor key indicators in the priority areas of family breakdown and children entering care, involvement in crime and homelessness at the population level to help local areas to gain a better understanding of how their direct work with families is impacting on the local area as a whole. We will co-design this carefully with local areas and align as much as possible with other government departments, to ensure we are not adding further data burdens.

51. We know that investment in research and evaluation is also crucial to ensuring that we learn what works to deliver our vision for families. We already have robust impact study research that has proved the programme's approach works to prevent issues from escalating into statutory systems. In 2021-22 we will reinvigorate our national best practice work, including supporting local authorities to share practice and learn from each other, and promoting evidence-based approaches. We will also invest further in research and evaluation, commissioning research to understand exactly which parts of the approach are most effective, including what works for what families and where less progress has been made in achieving long term positive outcomes, so that local areas can continue to refine services to deliver the best support for families.

52. We will also continue to partner with the Early Intervention Foundation to ensure improvements to the programme are evidence based and local areas can access advice on evidence-based practice and interventions. We will also test innovative approaches to improve data systems through our new £7.9m Data Accelerator Fund.

A fresh approach to family outcomes

53. Families remain front and centre of our new vision for the programme. We believe that better data is the key to delivering services that provide the right support, at the right time for local families. As a government we have a national picture of the families interacting with statutory systems such as children's social care. However, we do not have a comprehensive view of the needs which, if supported earlier, could avoid the need for interaction with those systems, and the progress made at family level to address other areas of concern, such as school attendance, worklessness and mental health.

54. Our current family outcomes framework, designed in 2014, defines which families are eligible for the programme's support because of their problems and the positive long-term outcomes that meet the threshold for "significant and sustained progress". This approach is also the basis for payment by results funding. Local areas have local flexibility to define specific indicators of need and progress in local "Troubled Families Outcomes Plans" and enable authorities to identify the right families to work with and the outcomes they need to thrive. In many areas, it has become an embedded tool, used across family support services to understand family needs, track their outcomes and allow professionals to make informed judgements about whether families are receiving the right support at the right time.

55. It is important that the framework continues to evolve alongside the needs of families and the strategic aims of the programme and local areas. We will use this coming year to co-design a new family outcomes framework with local authorities and other government departments with the intention to implement in any future years. We want to capture the full range of families' issues and ensure that authorities can continue to target intensive support at those who need it most. We want to focus on supporting families where there are multiple risk factors and avoiding some of the poorest outcomes for families - preventing family breakdown and children entering care, involvement in the criminal justice system or preventing homelessness.

56. In 2021-22 we will also work with authorities to develop and test new ways of collecting data on all families receiving family support and early help services. This will be in addition to continuing to track outcomes for families who meet the programme's current eligibility criteria. This data will help local and national partners to understand family's evolving needs and where the gaps are to inform future policy, service design and practice.

Leading the way locally and nationally

57. We want to offer incentives to drive the most developed local areas to innovate, as well as supporting other areas to make progress. Our upfront funding pilot has shown the benefits that more flexible funding can bring for well-developed multi-agency partnerships. Over the next year we will work with areas to develop a renewed upfront funding offer, in return for consistent family outcomes, a strong local voice for families and progress on partnerships and data. We expect these local areas to lead the way in demonstrating what a partnership-based, data driven, coordinated whole system approach to supporting vulnerable families looks like, and how this is reflected in the outcomes they are achieving at both service and system levels. For example, whether the local rate of family breakdown and children being taken into care or young people becoming involved with the criminal justice system is decreasing over time.

58. We will also continue to fund and champion innovation nationally, for example by seeking to accelerate local innovation in the priority areas of housing and youth offending. This could build on the highly successful Troubled Families Employment Advisor model by exploring the benefit of similar link worker roles to tie in other key agencies and workforces to the Supporting Families vision.

59. Finally, we will step up the way we work with departments across government to make Supporting Families the starting point for a shared vision on using preventative early help approaches to provide support for families. We will regularly bring together officials across government, and with local areas, and will support regular, strategic dialogue across departments at ministerial level. This will help us to align messaging and communications to all agencies working locally to support families and breaking down remaining barriers in information and data-sharing between agencies, whilst promoting a smarter, shared use of data to inform government policy.

Case study: Bristol - Reducing criminal exploitation

Bristol has developed Safer Options, their multi-agency partnership response to youth violence, county lines, drug dealing, and children and young people exploited for criminal activities. Safer Options is supported by the national programme, with data sharing accelerated by national funding and a whole family key working approach linked to community safety initiatives in a public health approach to violence prevention.

The Safer Options team identifies children and young people at risk using intelligence from the community, police, statutory partners and predictive risk analysis of known vulnerabilities. Safer Options leads in ensuring joined up working across the city's services, including early help teams, children's social care, and youth offending teams. Families with multiple needs in the Bristol are allocated a keyworker who takes a whole family approach.

Bristol's Insight Analytical Hub coordinates information held by agencies and in November 2019 a new targeted analytical product went live in addition to their existing family database, developed through national programme funding. This product helps to identify those young people in peer groups who are at risk of becoming more involved in harmful activity.

Testing has confirmed high reliability in the data, with the right young people identified early, including those not previously known to services. This data, alongside police and community intelligence, has also highlighted education providers and hotspot areas of Bristol at higher risk. Regular police and floating youth work support is deployed flexibly and proactively in response to the city's needs.

The recruitment of Education Inclusion Managers as part of the city's violence reduction response has boosted collaborative working in and with schools. The Safer Options team now delivers teacher training, with guidance co-developed between the team, policing, and education partners on offensive weapons on school sites.

Parenting workshops have been run across the city to support families and carers, along with educational workshops delivered to whole school year groups. Parents are offered the opportunity to train as community parent practitioners. The Safer Options team also host community meetings, to build trust and to encourage citizens to share concerns.

Keyworkers funded through the national programme are linked into updates on Bristol's communities, to ensure that individual family plans are underpinned by current intelligence about the impact of peers and community challenges on the child and that safety plans are enhanced by contextual interventions in the community.

2019 saw these mechanisms respond rapidly to a sudden rise in the city's serious violent youth crime incidents. The systems in place worked swiftly to identify those involved and implemented preventative, disruptive and diversionary tactics to bring the situation under control. At its heart, Bristol's initiative enables the local system to respond to risks yet goes further. Safer Options principles are intelligence led, evidence based and focused on prevention and whole family working.

Next steps

60. Making the vision set out here a reality is not something that a single government department, local authority or agency can achieve on its own. We look forward to working very closely with other government departments, all local agencies that support families, and with families and communities themselves, to continue to drive improvements, and achieve the outcomes that vulnerable families deserve.

61. A lot has been achieved over the past 10 years, but delivering real change requires a long-term commitment and the support and collaboration of a range of agencies and stakeholders. Through Supporting Families we are committed to bringing together a much broader partnership to help develop and implement these changes. We welcome views from all those working with and for families. We will continue to champion this approach nationally through our various communication platforms, and locally through our network of Supporting Families Coordinators.

62. It has never been more important for us to come together for families and as we look towards recovery from this difficult period, this will be key to building back better and ensuring that all vulnerable families and children and young people have the opportunities they deserve.

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Supporting Families - 2021-22 and beyond

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Supporting Families has been on a journey with families, local authorities and their partners since it began in 2012. It has delivered for families under three different government administrations, while wider society and the way in which local services are delivered look very different today.

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https://www.theweek.co.uk/general-election-2017/84760/conservative-manifesto-2017-theresa-mays-key-policies Theresa May’s Key policies

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The Conservatives have proposed an election manifesto to "see Britain through Brexit and beyond".

Launching her party's policy pledges in Halifax, Theresa May said her government would work for everyone, not just the privileged few.

"Now more than ever, Britain needs a clear plan," she said. "With this plan and with a strong hand through Brexit, we will build a stronger, fairer, more prosperous Britain, for all of us."

Key policies including slashing immigration and boosting funding for schools and the NHS, as well as a radical overhaul of social care funding.

Here's what the Conservatives promise.

Economy

UK deficit will be wiped by 2025. A United Kingdom Prosperity Fund will replace EU economic aid, which will be administered to areas "where it is needed most".

Tax

The personal tax allowance will increase to £12,500 and the higher tax threshold will rise to £50,000 by 2020. Corporation tax will fall to 17 per cent by 2020 and there will be no VAT rise.

Business and employment

The national living wage will rise to 60 per cent of median earnings by 2020 and people working in the so-called "gig economy" will be properly protected. By 2020, tax-free personal allowance will rise to £12,500 and the 40p tax threshold will rise to £50,000. Corporation tax will fall to 17 per cent and the party vows to increase the levy on firms employing migrant workers.

Families

A Conservative government will introduce 30 hours of free childcare for three and four year olds. People will be able to take a year of unpaid sabbatical leave to care for a family member and a new statutory bereavement leave will be offered to parents.

Housing

The party has committed to building 1.5 million extra homes by 2022. It also promises to halve homelessness over the course of the next parliament and eliminate it by 2027.

Healthcare

NHS spending will increase by a minimum of £8bn in real terms over the next five years. The Tories will trial live online A&E waiting time information and a new GP contract will be introduced.

Education

Schools in England will receive an extra £4bn by 2022. This will be partly funded by scrapping free school lunches for infants in England, which will be replaced with breakfast for all primary pupils. The ban on setting up new grammar schools will be abolished and at least 100 new free schools will be built.

Brexit and immigration

The Tories want to leave the European single market and customs union but seek a "deep and special partnership" with the EU, including a trade agreement. A vote will be held in both Houses of Parliament on the final Brexit deal, but the public will not get a say. They will maintain their pledge to cut annual net migration to the tens of thousands. Students will have to leave the country at the end of their course unless they meet "higher" requirements allowing them to stay.

Security and defence

Trident, the UK's nuclear deterrent, will remain. The defence budget will be increased by at least 0.5 per cent above inflation every year. Better compensation will be offered for injured personnel and the families of those killed in combat. Investment of £1bn will create 10,000 more prison places.

Benefits and pensions

People with assets of more than £100,000 will have to pay for their social care but can defer payment until after their death. Means-tested winter fuel payments will be introduced, taking away £300 from wealthier pensioners.The triple lock pension guarantee will be maintained until 2020, after which it will be replaced with a double lock, meaning pensions will rise in line with earnings or inflation, whichever is highest.

Government

The Tories will continue with current electoral boundary reviews and reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. The Fixed Term Parliament Act will be repealed, allowing a prime minister to call an election whenever they like.

Extras

MPs will be given a free vote on repealing the Hunting Act and rail ticketing will be reviewed to remove "complexity and perverse" pricing. Heathrow Airport will expand to a third runway.

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Conservative manifesto 2017: Theresa May's key policies | The Week UK

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The Conservatives have proposed an election manifesto to "see Britain through Brexit and beyond". Launching her party's policy pledges in Halifax, Theresa May said her government would work for everyone, not just the privileged few. "Now more than ever, Britain needs a clear plan," she said.

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The government has passed the Immigration Bill to introduce a points-based immigration system, and passed the relevant immigration rules and statutory instruments to implement the policy by the end of 2020. The new system came into effect on 1 January 2021 and applications were open from 1 December 2020. The government may still choose to pass additional legislation as it updates or amends the policy where necessary.

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Election 2015: Conservative manifesto at-a-glance - BBC News

A useful article which summarises what the Conservatives intended to do when they came to power in 2015. This was before Brexit, the pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine and the cost of living increase!

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The Conservative Party has launched its manifesto ahead of the general election. The full document is available online. Here are the main things you need to know.

Key messages

The front page of the Conservative manifesto gives their three key messages for the election: "strong leadership", a "clear economic plan" and a "brighter, more secure future".

David Cameron adopted an upbeat tone at the launch, saying he wanted to offer people in the UK a "good life". He said he wanted to "finish the job" of economic reform, having "rescued" the economy when he took power in 2010. And he described the Conservatives as "the party of working people".

Key policies

The main pledges in the manifesto combine previous announcements and some new policies, announced at the launch. Here are some of the most important:

Extension of the right-to-buy scheme to housing association tenants in England

Plans to build 200,000 starter homes

Ensuring all people who work 30 hours per week on the minimum wage pay no income tax

Doubling free childcare allowance for three and four-year-olds to 30 hours

Increasing the inheritance tax threshold on family homes to £1m by 2017

No above-inflation rises in rail fares until 2020

An extra £8bn a year for the NHS by 2020

Opening 500 more free schools

An EU referendum by 2017

Economy

The party says mortgages, schools, hospitals and pensions are some of things that depend on a "strong economy". The manifesto says the Conservative Party will continue with its "long-term economic plan". Pledges on the economy include:

Jobs and investment

The document says the Conservative Party is committed to helping people enjoy the "satisfaction and rewards of a decent job". Pledges include:

Achieving full employment by helping businesses create two million extra jobs over the course of the next Parliament

Creating 3 million new apprenticeships

Cutting £10bn of red tape over the next Parliament

Giving businesses "the most competitive taxes of any major economy"

Replacing Jobseeker's Allowance for 18-21 year-olds with a Youth Allowance time-limited to six months. After that, they will have to take an apprenticeship or traineeship or do community work to claim benefits

Requiring 40% of those entitled to take part in strike ballots to vote for a strike before industrial action can be held

Requiring companies with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay gap - the difference between average pay for male and female employees

Increasing the minimum wage to £6.70 by the autumn and to £8 by the end of the decade

Investing £6.9bn in the UK's research infrastructure up to 2021

"Near universal superfast broadband" for rural areas

Taxation and welfare

The manifesto launch paid significant attention to plans to reduce tax for low-paid workers and increase benefits for working parents. Some of the main pledges in this area include:

Taking everyone who earns less than £12,500 out of income tax

Passing a new law that would mean all those working 30 hours a week and earning the minimum wage will not pay income tax on earnings

Raising the threshold for the 40p rate of tax so that nobody under £50,000 pays the rate

A freeze on working age benefits for two years from April 2016 (exemptions for disability and pensioner benefits)

Lowering the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 (with exemptions for those receiving Disability Living Allowance or the Personal Independence Payment)

Giving working parents of three and four-year-olds 30 hours of free childcare a week

Immigration

The party says it still wants to see annual net migration in the tens of thousands. It pledges to reduce the incentive for EU migrants to settle in the UK by:

Negotiating new EU rules so people will have to be earning in the UK for four years before they can claim tax credits and child benefits

Introducing a four-year residency requirement for social housing for EU migrants

Ending the ability of EU jobseekers to claim any job-seeking benefits

Requiring EU jobseekers who have not found a job within six months to leave

The party says it will also:

Insist new EU member states' citizens do not have free movement rights "until their economies have converged much more closely with existing member states"

Cap the level of skilled migration from outside the EU at 20,700

Extend the "deport first, appeal later" principle to cover all immigration appeals and judicial reviews, apart from asylum cases

Education and the NHS

The Tories pledged at the weekend to spend an extra £8bn per year on the NHS. Other manifesto commitments include:

Investing £7bn over the course of the next Parliament to provide "good school places"

Opening at least 500 new free schools and turning failing schools into academies

Protecting the schools budget; increasing the amount spent on schools as the number of pupils increases

Scrapping the cap on higher education student numbers

Providing same-day GP appointments for over 75s

The right to a named GP

Integration of health and social care systems

Heritage, sports and government

Keep major museums and galleries free to enter

Freeze the BBC licence fee

Guarantee those who work for a big company and the public sector entitlement to Volunteering Leave for three days per year

End taxpayer-funded six-figure pay-offs for the best-paid public sector workers

Reduce number of MPs to 600

Introduce English votes for English laws

Give English MPs a veto over matters only affecting England

Implement the recommendations of the Smith Commission, set up to consider new powers for Scotland after the independence referendum

Increase some powers for the Welsh Assembly

Devolve corporation tax powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly

The Conservatives pledge to:

Pensions and inheritance

Foreign affairs and defence

As well as an in/out referendum on EU membership by the end of 2017, the party pledges to:

Others

Giving Parliament a free vote on repeal of the Hunting Act

Ending any new public subsidy for onshore wind farms

The party says it will respond to the Airports Commission's final report - but makes no specific reference to Heathrow expansion

What the other parties say

Other reaction

BBC political editor Nick Robinson: "This week of political cross-dressing goes on. David Cameron tried to re-brand the Conservatives as the party of working people - the day after Ed Miliband claimed that Labour was the party of economic responsibility." Read more from Nick here.

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The Conservative Party has launched its manifesto ahead of the general election. The full document is available online . Here are the main things you need to know. Key messages The front page of the Conservative manifesto gives their three key messages for the election: "strong leadership", a "clear economic plan" and a "brighter, more secure future".