Feature - Antisocial behaviour: The council threatened to evict us

"There would be fighting and arguing and I'd be screaming like a nutter. I had no windows; they were all boarded up. We were getting complaints left, right and centre and the council were threatening to evict us."

The windows had been smashed by her then eight-year-old son Shane, egged on, she says, by a group of older young people. So the family lived in darkness behind the boarded up panes. The garden was full of rubbish, other residents made 30 complaints about the family to the council, largely about noise and arguments with neighbours - some untrue, says Elaine. Shane was on the verge of getting an antisocial behaviour order for harassing people on the estate. Three of the children were truanting from school and eventually Shane was excluded permanently for fighting, while Amy, now 16, was on the verge of being kicked out too.

Facing eviction

The family looked like they were going to meet the fate of many before them: after being evicted from their home, they would end up somewhere else where the noise, abuse and chaos would put them at war with a new set of neighbours and they would get kicked out again. But Shane's school nurse stopped this cycle of misery by putting them in touch with homelessness charity Shelter's Inclusion Project.

The scheme is designed to help people end their antisocial behaviour and avoid homelessness. Set up in 2002 by Shelter and Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, support and children's workers visit people in their homes. The scheme works with 33 households at a time. Services include parenting advice, activities for children as a reward for good behaviour, practical help in dealing with schools, landlords and debts, referrals for drug and alcohol counselling, tackling domestic violence and advice for the children on school attendance, behaviour, bullying and race relations.

The project is financed by about £300,000 per year. This comes from the council's Supporting People funding, which pays for supported housing, the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which is for regeneration schemes, and, to a lesser extent the Children's Fund. However, the Children's Fund and Neighbourhood Renewal money will become part of the council's pot for its local area agreements after April 2008 and the team hopes the scheme will be funded this way in future.

It costs about £9,000 to put a household through the project, with most participating for 16 months. Weighed against this is the £6,500 to £9,500 cost of evicting a family for antisocial behaviour, as well as the expense of dealing with the crime, stays in children's homes, truanting and illness that could arise if the problems are left unchecked. The scheme was deemed to be "good value for money for the exchequer and for society" in an evaluation by York University in 2005.

The project has managed to bring down evictions and improve behaviour in a large number of the households it works with. In the York University study, 60 per cent of a sample of 45 households who had completed their time on the scheme no longer behaved antisocially while 11 per cent at least behaved better. But behaviour had not improved in seven per cent of cases and the rest had either moved away or the outcome was unclear. There has only been one eviction in the scheme's five-year history, which was for mortgage arrears.

In comparison, 89 per cent of households were at risk of eviction when they joined the scheme and all the households in the study sample were involved in antisocial behaviour, ranging from noise disputes and gardens full of rubbish to criminal activity and vandalism.

As for the children, 19 per cent were excluded from school or truanting when they joined the scheme, but 91 per cent of those given help with school through the scheme improved their attendance.

Whole family involvement

The project's manager Sinead O'Connor says the scheme is successful because it supports the whole family and tackles all parts of the problem at once so it can be solved more quickly.

The scheme has been modified to address cases where it has been less successful. For example, a small number of families who behaved extremely antisocially did not stop doing so while in the Inclusion Project. Half of them have now joined the more intensive Rochdale Borough Families Project, which opened at the end of 2006 and is designed to tackle the toughest cases.

Some parents were also reluctant to go to parenting classes - perhaps because they thought they would be seen as bad parents or could not see the link between their child's behaviour and their own, says O'Connor - so now all the project's workers are trained in parenting techniques so they can deliver the course in families' homes.

When the time came to leave the scheme, some thought they could not cope without help. Now there are support groups for adults, parents and children, which are open to current and ex-project clients. "They can speak to people who know what they are going through," says O'Connor.

Getting such a wide range of agencies to work together can be tough. Social services departments are always overstretched, says O'Connor, and sometimes it is difficult to get mental health and drugs agencies to work together. Some housing associations were also reticent. "They said: 'why let someone stay in the house when they are a problem when we could just evict them?' We had to prove the effectiveness but now they refer."

The majority of cases are now referred from the council's housing management organisation. Housing associations, the police, drugs teams and health visitors make referrals too.

Elaine's house is now more family home than war zone. The change began with her support worker Angie helping to get the council to suspend eviction proceedings. The windows were put back in and Angie helped her to negotiate debt repayments, welfare benefits and, with Shane's school, eventually getting him an assessment for special needs education.

The workers also helped Elaine with parenting tips. "We got into the routine of going to bed and they weren't going at 2am like they were before," she says. And Angie got a bed for one of the children who was sleeping on the sofa.

Support for Elaine's children was central to the scheme. A children's worker, Michelle, took them out climbing, kayaking and rock climbing in reward for good behaviour. Michelle's purchase of a set of fishing rods turned Gareth, who was out fishing when the photo above was taken, into a keen angler. The front room is adorned with pictures of him proudly holding an enormous carp.

When the children were out Elaine had some much-needed respite. "When they were out of the way I could start picking myself up," she says. "I could get to the housework and do the shopping without the stress of the fighting."

Things have improved in the past two years. Complaints stopped after the first two or three months. Amy has left school and is going to a Connexions scheme to put together a CV and look for a job. Matthew, 18, plans to do a football coaching qualification and enthuses about his work with a local boys' team. Gareth, 15, has a place on a local vocational scheme for 14- to 16-year-olds after being recommended by his school mentor.

The family gets on better and the older children are more supportive of their mum - even encouraging her not to give in when Shane badgers her for money - rather than harassing her too.

Shane's behaviour, while much improved, sometimes shows signs of becoming a problem, according to the support workers. But Elaine has signed up for a parenting course to help her steer him through his teenage years and knows she can rejoin the project if things get out of hand. "If I started having problems again they are the first place I would turn to," she says.

POLICY AND PRACTICE

Shelter's Inclusion Project was set up at a time when heavy sanctions against antisocial behaviour - such as fast track evictions - had become central to government policy in the Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003.

Shelter said that evicting the offenders would move the problem to a new neighbourhood and punish the whole family rather than tackle the behaviour. It set up the inclusion scheme to offer another solution.

Since then more preventive, rather than punitive, views have come into policy, with funding for 53 family intervention projects broadly similar to Shelter's Rochdale schemes. In October it was announced that a Youth Taskforce in the Department for Children, Schools and Families will take over from the government's Respect Taskforce, which was set up to combat antisocial behaviour.

Funding for family intervention projects will continue for at least three years.