Wanted: a Department for Banging Heads Together

Today Tony Blair launches his Social Exclusion Unit from a school in the heart of Lambeth. Expect an inspirational speech pledging himself again to the cause of the poor. Again he will ask his government to be judged by its success in bringing them back into the mainstream.

There's been a fair amount of cynicism about this enterprise. Is it just another talking shop, more policy wonkery? Just another fizzing initiative, that fizzles out before long? Yet another layer of bureaucracy? Where, muttered one Labour MP, does cutting the work incentives for very poor new single parents fit this grand scenario?

However, this is the key Big Idea. It is the rock on which all the other fine schemes and good intentions will stand or founder. Welfare to Work, New Deal, all of it depends for long-term success on this unit - because this is the Department for Banging Heads Together. Many have tried it, many have failed. (Some may remember something called Jasp - the Joint Approach to Social Policy?) But that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying again and again.

Headed by the Prime Minister, run from Downing Street under his authority, it brings together eight senior ministers. Its committee includes six senior civil servants and six experts from probation, social services, charities, church and police. Their role is to co-ordinate across the nightmarish boundaries that divide departmental budgets at the top and often destroy the good that happens on the ground.

The unit has no budget, deliberately. They considered whether to bid for funds and decided against it, fearing all their energy would be spent on setting up projects instead of making the nation's administration work - far more difficult, far less fun, but far more important. The problem is not a shortage of wonderful schemes on the ground. There are plenty of social entrepreneurs and local authority-run schemes that work very well. The unit's task is to co-ordinate all that, replicate the best, ensure the money flows into what works and, most important of all, to make all these organisations work in long-term partnerships.

This is dull administrative stuff, not headline-grabbing new wheezes. But consider what is happening on the ground right now, and you will have some idea of the problems they have to solve. Take just one problem which warring parts of the state are tackling in different ways - dysfunctional families with young children where everything goes wrong.

Jack Straw at the Home Office has his own Parenting Initiative. The NHS funds projects for mothers and children, being legally responsible for child protection and health visitors. The Education Department is struggling with impossible young children who arrive at school unfit to learn, and the rising tide of school exclusions. Police, courts and probation try to deal with very young criminals, catching a very few at huge expense, doing nothing about prevention. The Environment Department oversees local authorities and social services, responsible for rescuing families from the brink and for children in care. Meanwhile charities who run some of the best family projects dissipate their energy struggling to put together money from all these sources.

All these agencies approach the same family from a very different point of view, using different budgets with different objectives. It will be the Social Exclusion Unit's task to make them all work together - very difficult indeed. Partnership is the key word - making it happen is something else.

What's actually happening? Disaster and chaos all over the place. Under the shadow of The Independent's offices in Canary Wharf, Tower Hamlets council, one of the basket-case local authorities, is slashing its budgets. Many others around the country are doing likewise. In a very harsh year for local authorities, social services almost everywhere are squeezed to the bone. Looking just at family projects, many are closing, others are being cut right back. Often the first to go are the best, run by charities.

Newpin, in Bethnal Green, is just one example. Although it has recently had a glowing evaluation report, exceeding its targets by 20 per cent this year, it is to close. Each year it takes in some 80 profoundly depressed mothers who are not coping with their children, gives them a befriender and offers intensive support. They teach mothers who have never been mothered themselves how to play and talk to their children, visiting them at home, bringing in the isolated and getting them on their feet. Most of the co- ordinators are mothers who have been through the programme and turn into befrienders of others, passive victims becoming active supporters.

However, suddenly, with no notice, the East London Health Authority, also in deep financial trouble, has withdrawn its pounds 30,000 funding. As a result, Tower Hamlets council, looking for pounds 6m cuts, is seizing the opportunity to withdraw its half of the money. No one wants to make the cuts - but it's not a statutory service so it's the first to go. Newpin in Sheffield and Newham are under threat for the same reasons. Other children's charities running family centres dealing with the same problems are also closing. NCH Action for Children has lost its funding from Hammersmith and Fulham for its Askham Family Centre, and three others in Oxfordshire. I could list plenty more. Save the Children is now withdrawing its family centres, partly because local authorities were withdrawing money. Like all charities, it isn't willing to fund what local authorities themselves should do: its role is to offer added value. Partnerships everywhere are breaking down.

What can the Social Exclusion Unit do? Knock heads together. All these government departments have a strong interest in helping calamitous families at the earliest stage. If they don't, these families will cost social services, schools, police, prisons and the NHS a vast fortune in future years. How do you get money out of what isn't working, into what does? The trouble is, the Treasury can't count the future money saved. That's why it will take prime ministerial muscle to decree, say, that family centres that are proven to work will be funded jointly out of all those budgets, by hook or by crook.

And family centres are just one example. In every other field it's the same story. The unit is starting work on school exclusions, street homelessness and the worst council estates. But whatever it labels the problem, it's always inextricably linked with everything else. Pull one thread and it all unravels.

The question is whether, for the first time ever, they can knit it all together? Has the Prime Minister the time to give it? Only his power can force it to work. Dare he take money from the police, courts and prisons - which don't work - to fund prevention where the future outcomes will never be easily quantifiable? Can it be done without bridging money? How do you seize control back from useless local authorities who deliver most of these services, while still talking devolution? Some sceptical old heads give it a slim chance, because clever people of left and right have identified this problem time and again, and failed to solve it. But that is why you need a new government and new clever people, to see if they can do any better this time.