Nearly 60% of the chaotic households earmarked for help under the coalition's flagship troubled families programme have been helped by local authorities to successfully turn their lives around, ministers announced today.

Latest figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government on Wednesday showed that by this August, 69,508 of the 117,910 families identified as having complex multi-generational problems – representing 59% of the cohort – have received successful intervention from upper-tier local authorities in England.