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- Author or Editor: Stephen Crossley x
The launch of the Troubled Families Programme in the wake of the 2011 riots conflated poor and disadvantaged families with anti-social and criminal families. The programme aimed to ‘turn around’ the lives of the country’s most ‘troubled families’, at a time of austerity and wide-ranging welfare reforms which hit the poorest families hardest.
This detailed, authoritative and critical account reveals the inconsistencies and contradictions within the programme, and issues of deceit and malpractice in its operation. It shows how this core government policy has stigmatised the families it claimed to support.
Paving the way for a government to fulfil its responsibility to families, rather than condemning them, this book will empower local authority workers, policy-makers and researchers, and anyone interested in social justice, to challenge damaging, aggressive neoliberal statecraft.
This article examines the official concept of social justice, as advanced by the Coalition government in the UK between 2010 and 2015. The article begins with a discussion of some traditional comprehensions of social justice and summarises its recent use by political parties prior to 2010. A short section on methodology precedes a sketching out of five interconnected themes of: dehistoricised; localisation and individualisation; residualisation; work; and innovation and commodification. The article concludes with a brief summary of the official understanding of social justice and a look forward to its future use by the government.
This chapter examines the ways in which the Troubled Families Programme has been positioned by central government and by local authorities and practitioners. The reality of the programme is rather different from the runaway success story presented by government, positive outcomes often owing much to local officers’ negotiation and subversion of the programme. Discretion built into the programme has allowed subversion and resistance to occur, these transgressions occur under the radar and do little to trouble the national narrative of an assertive central government policy working successfully with troublesome families. This is significant, as the programme is considered by the Conservatives as a key example of how a smaller, smarter state might function.
This article examines the development of the ‘troubled families’ narrative that emerged following the riots in England in 2011, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant. Their work is briefly discussed before the current concern about ‘troubled families’ is located in its wider historical and political context. The response to the riots and the emergence and development of the official concept of ‘troubled families’ is then examined. It is argued that the establishment and subsequent expansion of the Troubled Families programme was part of a wider process of neoliberal state-crafting that was undertaken by the coalition government, and which is likely to be continued under the new Conservative administration in the United Kingdom (UK). The article pays particular attention to the centrality of ‘the family’ in this neoliberal restructuring and adds to the emerging literature on neoliberal forms of governing families in the UK at the current time.
This introductory chapter provides a background for the establishment of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), a single central government programme that aims to ‘turn around’ the lives of trouble families. The government used existing research carried out on families experiencing multiple structural disadvantages such as poverty, material deprivation, low skills, and poor-quality housing to prove that the troubled families were characterised by crime, antisocial behaviour, truancy, and worklessness. The chapter shows that troubled families were also associated with a much wider range of problems including drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, child abuse and poor physical and mental health, gang membership, radical extremism, and organised crime.
This chapter outlines both the long and problematic history of the underclass thesis, and the shorter history of the concept of ‘troubled families’. The first part of the chapter draws on comprehensive research from social policy academics and social historians that have traced different reconstructions of the underclass thesis from Victorian times. The remainder of the chapter concentrates on the shift from a concern about the underclass in more recent years, from a mid-1970s concerns about a ‘cycle of deprivation’ through Charles Murray’s work on the underclass in the 1980s, to the New Labour concern with problem families in the mid-2000s and the Conservatives’ interest in an allegedly broken society.
This chapter explores the development of the ‘troubled families’ discourse, starting in the early years of the coalition government that was formed in 2010. It details the shift from the localist approach of Whole Place Community Budgets and the Big Society Working Families Everywhere project to the local authority-led Troubled Families Programme. The role of the 2011 riots in England in shifting the government discourse and opening a policy window for a more robust interventionist approach is fully explored, with ‘compassionate Conservatism’ giving way to a more muscular policy programme following the disturbances. The chapter also analyses the establishment of the TFP in its first phase along with the role of Louise Casey, the charismatic senior civil servant in charge of it.
This chapter considers the evolution of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) as it has been implemented. Shifts and developments in the first phase are discussed, including the problems of some local authorities in finding troubled families and the subsequent relaxation of the criteria for what constituted a ‘troubled family’ at that stage of the programme. The chapter discusses the changes that happened as a result of the massive expansion of the programme into its second phase, working with 400,000 more families, including new entry criteria for families, new measures of success, and a new Payment by Results (PbR) framework. It also explores the next phase of the programme, announced in April 2017 and with a stronger focus on supporting workless families into employment.
This chapter analyses Prime Minister David Cameron’s claim, when he launched the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), that his mission in politics was fixing the responsibility deficit. Turning this mission on its head, the chapter focuses on the ways in which the coalition and Conservative governments have abdicated their responsibilities to poor, disadvantaged, and marginalised families. The chapter locates TFP as a central plank of attempts to craft a neoliberal state in the UK. Drawing on the work of Loïc Wacquant and his call for neoliberalism to be understood sociologically rather than economically, the chapter shows how the TFP has been expanded at the same time that traditional welfare services have been rolled back.
This chapter discusses how the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) is predicated on the family intervention model, which relies on a key worker gaining the trust of a family, building a relationship with them and then working intensively with them in a holistic manner. It considers both the domestic and international history of such approaches, including the 1940s Family Service Unit approach. The chapter also examines the shorter history of the family intervention model, as well as the journey from a single Scottish voluntary sector project to a nationwide government programme in England. This includes the discursive shift from support to intervention; the introduction of the threat of sanctions; the types of families targeted across all projects; and changes to the level of resources allegedly required for effective family intervention.
