Nearly nine-out-of ten of the 117,910 chaotic households in England targeted for intervention under the Government's troubled families programme have been helped, communities secretary Eric Pickles has announced this afternoon.

Mr Pickles told MPs today that as of February 105,672 families with complex needs had been helped by local authority teams tasked with turning around the lives of households whose multi-faceted social problems cost the public purse an estimated £9bn a year.

Troubled families are defined as those with multi-generational problems, which cost the public sector up to £75,000 a year or more to deal with, whose issues typically involved youth crime or anti-social behaviour, children excluded from school or regularly truanting and where an adult is also in receipt of out-of-work benefits.