Hell families can cost taxpayers up to £250,000 a year. A hard core of 140,000 poor households are responsible for huge amounts of crime and antisocial behaviour, a damning government report discloses today.

New Government data released today reveals the true picture about socially excluded families. It shows that over 140,000 families are at risk, suffering five or more indicators of social exclusion and need more family-tailored support packages at ‘critical moments’.

Campaigners urged Gordon Brown today to use his 11th and last budget to put the government back on track to meet its target of halving child poverty by 2010. In a letter to the chancellor, the Child Poverty Action Group said it was time for a “different and more radical approach”, after the government missed its interim target of reducing the number of children in poverty by 1 million by 2005.

{mosimage}Tomorrow’s budget comes in the wake of a report by the United Nations’ organisation for children, Unicef, which placed Britain bottom in a league table of the wellbeing of children in 21 rich-world countries. And it comes after the Freud Review recommended new measures to encourage single parents to work, including requiring them to look for jobs when their youngest child reached 12, rather than 16 as at present. In her letter to the chancellor, the CPAG chief executive, Kate Green, dismissed the Freud Report as “an ill thought-out response to complex problems”.

She urged Mr Brown to “prioritise strategies that support and do not penalise parents, protect families who are unable to access employment and ensure that people who move into work access sustainable, well-remunerated jobs that lift them from poverty”.

Figures released last year suggested that 3.4 million children are living in households below the official poverty line of 60% of Britain’s median (average) level of household income, when housing costs are taken into account.

One in six councils is failing to protect vulnerable adults in their care, the BBC has discovered. Even some councils which received the highest government rating for their social services have fallen short in their protection of vulnerable adults.

{mosimage}The government’s director of inspection Mike Rourke told BBC File On 4 these adults need similar legal safeguards to child protection law. Minister Ivan Lewis said he is looking to strengthen adult protection.

File On 4 requested a detailed assessment of adult protection from the Commission for Social Care Inspection and found that a sixth of all 150 councils in England were failing. Confirming the BBC’s analysis as a “serious” problem, Mr Rourke, the CSCI’s Director of Inspection, said:

“Our message is that councils have not got systems as tight as they should be and therefore cannot be sure they are responding adequately to referrals – that’s our challenge to them.” He said there were various reasons for the failure. “For some it’s financial priorities, others it is competing priorities and for some it’s a lack of management grip,” he said.

Disability campaign group Voice UK said the figures prove that “No Secrets”, a government policy set out in 2000 to stop the abuse and neglect of elderly or disabled people, has been poorly implemented. Kathryn Stone, Voice UK chief executive, “It might be argued it is not effective because there is no law to support it – we have campaigned for adult protection legislation to raise it to the same status as child protection.”

A young girl (called ‘Natasha’ in the report) was deprived of four years of family life by the failures of Birmingham City Council finds Local Government Ombudsman, Anne Seex.

Schools will be able to ban pupils from wearing full-face veils on security, safety or learning grounds under new uniforms guidance set to be issued. In February, a 12-year-old girl failed in her High Court attempt to overturn her Buckinghamshire school’s niqab ban.

A foster mother who punished three children in her care by ramming sticks down their throats has been convicted of abuse spanning 20 years. Eunice Spry, 62, from Tewkesbury in

The government has been accused of “rail-roading” through gay equality laws that, Catholic adoption agencies argue, will force them to close. Some Tory MPs criticised the “unseemly haste” with which ministers sought to pass regulations through Parliament.