£50,000 cost of one troubled family

Oldham’s most troubled families cost the council up to £50,000 each a year, council chiefs have revealed.

In one year, one “moderately troubled” family saw 25 different services make a total of 410 interventions at a cost of £47,235 — recording 18 “missed opportunities to achieve change” in the process.

Oldham Council told the Government the family wasn’t one of its most challenging cases: a second family caused 94 police call-outs, 34 of them for domestic violence, six overdoses, nine incidents of self-harm — six involved the children — and three suicide attempts.

The average spending on a family with relatively low needs is 1,500 per year, rising to £50,000 for serious cases.

The costs were revealed in submissions to the Troubled Families Unit at the Department for Communities and local Government.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the report was evidence that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money could be saved if problem families were dealt with. One family in the South-West cost a council £400,000, with one member of the family responsible for £290,000 of that.

Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families — including 680 in Oldham — allocating £448 million over three years.