[DanaC]

Some more snippets:

The comfortable story of poverty allows the
majority of people to live in comfort and security,
largely unaware of the diffi culties that many
others face. It neutralises our response to people
who struggle - not with criminality and anti-social
behaviour, but to cover the essentials of feeding
a family, clothing growing children and heating
homes. The comfortable myths about poverty
allow us to believe that people in poverty are
deserving of their poverty, and that it is neither
our fault nor our problem.

The conversation about poverty has concentrated
on fraud, addiction and a culture of entitlement.
The implication is that if you tackle these faults,
then you tackle poverty. It also suggests that
poverty can be confronted without impacting on
the lives of anyone else – except perhaps reducing
the tax we pay. Politicians and parts of the media
have reinforced this belief and told us what we
want to hear. These myths have been a distraction
from the reality of spending cuts that will
continue to have, a dramatic effect on the living
standards of the most vulnerable in our country.

The case study:

The ‘Troubled Families’ programme was set up in 2011 to help some of the
most disadvantaged families in England. The aims of targeted intervention,
better coordination of public services, and marshalling resources to help the
disadvantaged will hopefully have a beneficial effect. However the
announcement and media coverage is a case study in the misrepresentation of the
poorest. The evidence used to support the assertions about the families was distorted to fit preconceived ideas and grossly stigmatised them in the process.

Speaking in November 20112 Prime Minister David
Cameron said:

... today, I want to talk about troubled families.
Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase.
Offi cialdom might call them ‘families with
multiple disadvantages.’ Some in the press might
call them ‘neighbours from hell’. Whatever you
call them, I think we have all known for years
that a relatively small number of families are the
source of a large proportion of the problems in
society.....
... Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture
of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades
through generations. We’ve always known that
these families cost an extraordinary amount of
money but now we’ve come up with the actual
fi gures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9
billion on just 120,000 families. That is around
£75,000 per year per family.

Now there are some who say ‘yes, this is terrible,
but this ‘Shameless’ culture is now a fact of
modern British life, and there’s nothing we can
do’. They’re the same people who believe that
poverty and failure, like death and taxes, will
always be with us I don’t think people are preprogrammed
to fail because of where they come
from...

The Prime Minister’s speech, and many other government announcements since, have linked these families to crime, drug abuse, irresponsibility and anti-social behaviour. They have been called “neighbours from hell” and blamed for a “Shameless culture”. Yet to be counted in the 120,000, a family had to exhibit 5 of the following 7 characteristics:

no parent in the family is in work
• family lives in overcrowded housing
• no parent has any qualifi cations
• mother has mental health problems
• at least one parent has a long-standing
limiting illness, disability or infi rmity
• family has low income (below 60% of median income)
• family cannot afford a number of food and clothing items.


Despite the Prime Minister’s claims of “disruption and irresponsibility” in his speech, there is no measure of criminality included in these categories. In fact at least 90% of the children in this group had no reported involvement in criminal or anti-social behaviour3. Neither is there a measure for drug abuse, or for whether they were the “source of a large proportion of the problems in society”. The largest shared characteristic of the families identifi ed was that the mother had mental health problems. By his own
measures, David Cameron’s “troubled families” are not “neighbours from hell” that he describes, but instead ’neighbours in need‘.


There are not 120,000
‘Troubled Families’
In fact we do not know how many such families there now are. The figure
of 120,000 originally comes from a secondary analysis of data collected
in 2004, and first published in 2007 by the Cabinet Office. The margin of
error of this study is large - around plus or minus 200,000. This means that
the Prime Minister could be speaking about any number of ‘troubled
families’ between very few families and over 300,000. The later reporting
of the policy in terms of 120,000 actual families is statistically flawed and
highly misleading.


These families do not cost
£9 billion
Not only is the number of families not known, but the financial estimate is
based on a Department for Education study of a different set of 46,000
families identified by different criteria to the Prime Minister’s 120,000
families. The £9 billion number also includes the health, education and
welfare costs that any ’untroubled‘ family would normally accrue.