The Government's Troubled Families programme and new technology are helping to break down barriers between local and central government, reflecting similar changes across the world, according to IT experts.

Speaking to The MJ, IBM's global competence leader for social security, Paul Pateman, said public employment agencies around the world are ‘looking to take the role of a broker, bringing together all of the services, from different agencies to fix a problem'.

Mr Pateman said the Dutch equivalent of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been mandated to devolve a lot of service delivery to municipal authorities, although it retains the responsibility for ensuring these services are all delivered within guidelines.

‘We are starting to see this idea of the owner of the case or the system becoming the central agency and parts of the process delivered by local authorities, non-governmental organisations and third sector,' said Mr Pateman.

‘As part of the Troubled Families Programme, DWP has embedded case workers into local authority teams,' said Mr Patemen. ‘The local authority is responsible for social care and housing, and DWP is part of the core team, looking at the work agenda.'

He added that improvements in data analysis will also help agencies with early intervention programmes.

‘The world has now moved on to a sufficient place, where we should be able to move on and start getting to early intervention based on predictive knowledge and increasingly through payment by results and outcomes,' said Mr Pateman.

Chancellor George Osborne announced the Troubled Families unit will be expanded to include an additional 40,000 families in last week's Budget. 

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: ‘Starting the extended programme early is only possible because high-performing local authorities have done well in the current programme and have built up the capacity and skills in their family services to do this now.'

It was also announced this week that Camden LBC has rolled out a new IBM system to help tackle fraud.

‘Information we once considered unobtainable is now within our grasp,' said Hilary Simpson, head of ICT business partnering at Camden LBC.

‘We have identified at least a dozen specific examples where a residents' index, based on IBM big data and analytics technology can help us.'