The National Specialist Family Service provides substance abuse treatment to parents who want to keep their children. It has an 80% graduation rate for parents becoming clean and families staying together, and a 70% success rate after 4 years. While the program costs over £2 million for 40 families over 5 years, it saves over £8 million over the same period due to preventing costs of family breakdown. The program is effective but underutilized due to safety concerns of social workers and legal barriers that previously did not allow enough time for rehabilitation attempts before removing children from parents. However, the program helped change legislation to require rehabilitation be attempted before court proceedings.

18. NSFS – National Specialist Family Service
• The National Specialist Family Service takes in parents who are
addicted to substances, who want to keep their children. When you
are addicted, by definition, you need help to kick your addiction. You
need a strong motivation to go through any substance misuse
programme, and keeping your children is one of the biggest
motivations out there. So: an excellent programme, with 80%
graduation rate (parents clean, families together at the end of the
programme) and 70% still successful after 4 years (79% of children).

19. Financial Case for the service
• Over 5 years, around 40 families attending cost over £2million
(£2,044,586). This includes how much the local authority spends, and
a nominal figure for the commitment from people in the programme.
The Local Authority bit is around £20,000 per adult and £20,000 per
child.
• Over 5 years, it saved over £8 million (£8,676,093). Ratio 3.95 after
allowing for 3.5% nominal inflation.
• Case proven?

20. Safety & Social Case
• So why aren’t local authorities and social workers referring in?
• They need to know it’s safe – it’s off the normal route (because
£40,000 and agreement between adult services and children’s
services is rare), and they don’t want their careers ruined by the Daily
Mail if anything goes wrong.
• So I managed to get figures for its long term success, and also to
publicise it. Great – more people coming in, but there’s still a
problem.

21. Legal Case
• The problem, it turns out, is that in 2011/12 the law was changing; no case
involving a child should take longer than 6 months. Instead of the usual start a
court case: try some form of rehab, after 6 weeks ask “is it working?” and try
something else because it hadn’t had time to work, courts simply took the child
away and were done with it.
• I had to use this deep and involved study of the benefits to go back to the
Ministry of Justice and review a Bill on its way through parliament, which became
the Children and Families Act 2012.
• We changed the Bill. It said that court cases shouldn’t start until rehabilitation
had been attempted. At this rate, 4/5 cases didn’t need to go to court because
the parents were rehabilitated and keeping their children; and of the 1/5 that did
go to court, they already knew that the child had to go into care so it took no
time.
• We changed what “rehabilitation” meant. Instead of a Family Assessment Unit
(12 weeks with a video camera, not much help), it says a Specialist Centre (6
months’ rehab and support).

22. Benefits apply to many things
• Benefits apply to many things.
• These soft benefits (rehabilitation from substance addiction; keeping
families together), and the hard numbers that back them up (cash
savings), make a real difference to individuals on a grand scale, and
can change the law.