CUTS to the budget allocated to turn around the lives of Bradford's troubled families means the scheme will have to try and intervene before their problems become "too complex."

Families First involves the government providing local councils with money to intervene in the lives of some of the most troubled families.

In phase one, which helped 1,632 local families, Bradford Council was given £4,000 a family to tackle families associated with crime, anti-social behaviour, poor school attendance or long term unemployment.

However in phase two, which started in March and aims to help turn around 5,990 families over the next five years, the council will only be allocated £1,800 per family.

The council only gets the full amount of funding when it meets certain targets, such as improved school attendance or a significant drop in the amount of anti social behaviour the family has been reported for.

Its Children's Services Scrutiny Committee heard an update on the scheme at a meeting last night, and was told that with reduced budgets its success would rely on identifying and helping families before their lives spiralled too far out of control.

The meeting heard details of one family helped by the scheme. A woman with mental health issues had all but one of her five children removed from her care, and her remaining daughter effectively acted as her carer, and was not attending school.

The family was also homeless. After the Families First team got involved the family found a tenancy, the daughter now has a 100 per cent school attendance rate and the mother is receiving help from a mental health team.

Councillor Mike Pollard (Con, Baildon) said: "Phase two has a 50 per cent reduction in funding. Can you do this with half the money?"

Paul O’Hara, Families First Manager, said: "We will be looking to reach out earlier to families and try to help them before the problems around them get too complex.

"We will have to cut our cloth accordingly, we need to use the resources we can and deliver a whole family approach, we need to get that early help in place.

"The new programme is challenging but if we deliver what is proposed in this report it will not only help the lives of the families that have been allocated, it will help the wider community."

Councillor Jeanette Sunderland (Lib Dem, Idle and Thackley) said the council should try to tackle the attitudes of young men before they grew up to become the troubled people the scheme targets.

She added: "We live in a city of young men who get away with everything, especially on our roads and their behaviour towards women, which is obnoxious.

"There is a particular issue with white working class boys, who are often at the bottom of the education tables but get ignored in schemes like this. We need to look at these in phase two."