The government has announced a new £450m payment-by-results scheme to help councils deal with problem families.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles told the Today programme that the substantive point of the scheme is that local authorities are "baring down and identifying" problem families and moving beyond the "silly academic point" of the exact number of families involved.

He explains that the money spent on the scheme is about "bringing a proper coordination for agencies to work on this problem".

"Not only are these families destroying their own life chances but they're destroying the lives of their children," he said.

"There's a kind of acceptance that we tend to throw money at these folks for them to go away", he told Justin Webb. "We now have a chance to break that cycle of deprivation".

"We're not going to abandon these families", he told the programme.

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