David Cameron calls poor families "neighbours from hell"

[Himalaya]

Sorry this isn't quite 'in the news' as it is a couple of weeks old. Apologies if it has already been done.

Last year David Cameroon gave a speech on "troubled families".

"That?s why today, I want to talk about troubled families.Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ?families with multiple disadvantages?. Some in the press might call them ?neighbours from hell?. Whatever you call them, we?ve 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 the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families?"

As this blog points out DC was very explicit in saying that these 120,000 families cause "disruption and irresponsibility" and "a large proportion of the problems in society".

So who are these families? It turns out that they are identified in the official statistics as families that satisfy 5 of the following 7 criteria:

a) no parent in work
b) poor quality housing,
c) no parent with qualifications,
d) mother with mental health problems
e) one parent with longstanding disability/illness
f) family has low income,
g) Family cannot afford some food/clothing items

Nothing to do with disruption, irresponsibility, crime, drug addiction or alcohol abuse there at all. Plenty of people who are just poor, or fallen on hard times.

WTF?

There are plenty of threads on MN complaining about families like this. The ones with drug/alcohol/crime problems.

So you don't want to live next door to one yourself, but when DC brings up "troubled families" he doesn't have a clue what he is talking about ?

You can be poor without being antisocial scum.

Porto - but you can't make good policy to help families and neighbourhoods dealing with alcohol, drugs and crime if you think you can pinpoint those families and neighbourhoods by using a whole different set of indicators of disability, poverty and need.

A charitable interpretation is that an overenthusiastic speech writer played a bit fast and loose with the statistcs by accident,

A less charitable interpretation is that they are painting families in need as expensive and feckless, in order to withdraw support, services and benefits.

But isn't the point that they have identified where the problem is more likely to lie, so they can target measures? Surely the problem IS more likely to be in poor areas where there are people in poor health/not working?

And I speak as someone, who in 43 years of life has lived in /visited a whole spectrum of neighbourhoods. We never had neighbours from hell on my council estate as a child - mostly because most people kept their alcoholism/domestic violence a bit quiet due to the SHAME . My nan, as a trained nurse, often used to pop out of an evening to "help" some poor sod.

"Starting now and right across the next Parliament every one of the 50,000 most chaotic families will be part of a family intervention project ? with clear rules, and clear punishments if they don?t stick to them".

That was Gordon Brown to the Labour Party conference in 2009. Using the same official criteria for "chaotic".

I hope their is greater opprobrium for him and the Labour party for creating this initiative, than there is for those who ape them.

Mm. A few years ago a close relative of mine told me of an experience he'd had where a senior police officer told him that he could, there and then, drive him around the local area and personally point out which houses were 'breeding' the next generation of criminals. These were households well known to the police who were constantly attending 'incidents' at these houses and arresting, charging, seeing convicted, released and 'back at it' the people from these families. He reckoned that something like 25,000 families in the country were responsible for 50% of the crime.

I imagine these are Cameron's 'neighbours from hell'. I'd imagine the a-g criteria would apply to them, but that's not to say everyone who fits 5 of a to g is going to be a neighbour from hell, it's just that those who are tend to exhibit these characteristics.

In the same way it has been demonstrated that boys from single parent families are disproportionately represented in prison. That doesn't mean that all boys in such families are crims, does it? But it remains statistically a marker.

Edith- there's be FAR more than 50,000 families fitting those criteria, wouldn't there? So maybe they are using albeit sloppy 'shorthand' to mean 'chaotically lawless'. Maybe those 'neighbours from hell'?

No link between the fact that disability CAUSES several factors on the list

e.g Have disability so get crap education, so have no qualifications, so can't get work, so fall into poverty, so housing options are shite, so eventually wind up clinically depressed.

Well, with Labour initiating both the action and the surrounding language we've been stuck with this for several years already. And with no sign of the coalition reversing this, then it will probably continue.

It is interesting to see how, on MN recently, there have been a series of posts repudiating the implications of so many Labour policies.

It is however, becoming clearer why it is so difficult for the Opposition to oppose, as so much is their direct legacy.

I thought, though, that attention to the most chaotic would be a good thing; both for them and for wider society (irrespective of the criteria the Labour party used to define them for this continuing initiative).

He hasn't got a clue...

Looking at the criteria, wondering if it ever occurred to him that helping mothers get access to great mental health care, and doing something about the poor quality of the housing might have positive results? For someone concerned allegedly with the bottom line, DC seems not to have much of a clue when it comes to analysing problems from a cost/benefit pov.

I get the impression he longs for a return of the day when people with problems could be shipped off to Van Diemens Land. Maybe that is why the Tories are so keen on keeping the Falklands British.

mathanxiety: snag is, it's not Cameron's analysis. It's Brown's.

What do you think both parties should be doing instead?

My dad has neighbours from hell... They (the neighbours) drive maserati's and certainly are not poor but as they are probably friends of DC ( they don't like paying tax in UK either as it would diminish their bonus') they probably don't qualify under his radar.
Unpleasant people occur in all walks of life (Inc. being say .... Prime Minister) and some people will come across them. Treat them as individual problems and treat the rest of society with more respect and then we may have less issues overall. Ghettoise whole communities and brand them as problems and as proved time & time again this will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Tabloid politics is a favourite of our current politicians (all parties) and until somebody grows up and realises this is a ridiculous way to govern we will see more and more damaging notification and policies

*pontification not notification ... Sorry will stop pontificating now

But where as the Labour party invested in services and added welfare benefits for the disabled, families, low income etc, the Tory party are removing them, so what is he proposing, exactly?

Labours analysis had a point, they targeted action towards identified groups, even Surestart was a part of this, what is DC suggesting?

We meet four of those criteria atm.
When the WRB kicks in we will probably add another.
So we will be a problem family then?

Until I finish my OU degree and then we will 'decent and hard working' again?
Unless something goes wrong with our house and we wont be able to afford to sort and back to 'problem family we go'.

So why does my OH's MS make us a family from hell?
Why the hell does our low income make us undesirable to live next to?

Cameron is a cunt.

Sue me you cunt.

DC is also targeting intervention at these families. I assumed OP and others would have read at least a synopsis of the policy before bashing it.

What Birdsgottofly said.

There isn't any propossed interventions, all of the interventions are being removed via budget cuts.

His proposals are causing families to tick off the boxes on the list, via capping and the removal of benefits/closures.

Unless you count speeded up adoption as an itervention.

Really long chunk of the blog from the OP:

'So I did a bit more digging. The Department for Communities and Local Government had, in fact, published an "explanatory note" to the figures. And, looking at footnote 2, we can finally establish what the definition of a "troubled family", on which the Prime Minister's numbers were based, actually is. It is a family which satisfies at least 5 of the following 7 criteria:

a) no parent in work
b) poor quality housing,
c) no parent with qualifications,
d) mother with mental health problems
e) one parent with longstanding disability/illness
f) family has low income,
g) Family cannot afford some food/clothing items

What instantly leaps out from this list? It is that none of these criteria, in themselves, have anything at all to do with disruption, irresponsibility, or crime. Drug addiction and alcohol abuse are also absent. A family which meets 5 of these criteria is certainly disadvantaged. Almost certainly poor. But a source of wider social problems? Maybe, but maybe not - and certainly not as a direct consequence. In other words, the "troubled families" in the Prime Minister's speech are not necessarily "neighbours from hell" at all. They are poor.

It is particularly ironic that this direct equation between disadvantage and criminality is precisely the one the Prime Minister criticised last August, when, discussing the summer riots, he said:

these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.

So, on the one hand, the Prime Minister says that it is wrong to claim that the riots were in any way related to poverty; but on the other hand, simply being poor, or suffering the disadvantages of poverty, is enough to get a family labelled, in a very detailed and carefully drafted Prime Ministerial speech, as part of a "culture of disruption and irresponsibility."

I cannot believe the Prime Minister himself knew this when he made the speech. To return to where I started - I cannot believe that he meant to say that an unemployed single mother, with moderate depression, who can't afford new shoes for her children, and whose roof is leaking, who can't afford shoes for her children - is, by definition, a "neighbour from hell." Yet that is precisely what his speech said, and it is on the basis of this analysis that the government is planning to formulate policy and allocate resources.'

Politics is an ugly business.

This is what he proposes, why is unclear because all of these problems are dealt with under either a CAF, Child In Need or CP plan. The cuts mean that there are less support workers, so it is still unclear who will be carrying this out. The capping of rent will push disadvantaged families together and his proposals will put immense strain on council funds. Why he thinks that for most troubled families getting the parent into work is the answer, deserves a whole thread on it's own.

".By February we want local authorities to have identified who the troubled families are, where they live and what services they use.

The next step will be to get in there and start working with families.

So today I can announce the financial firepower we're putting behind this task.

We are committing £448 million to turning around the lives of 120,000 troubled families by the end of this Parliament.

This money has got to do its job.

Our offer to councils is that we will fund 40 per cent of the cost if they match this with 60 per cent.

And crucially this payment depends on results.

Simple tests such as...

...are the children going to school?

... how many people have they got back into work?

...have they stopped - and I mean completely stopped - anti-social behaviour?

...how many crimes have been prevented?"

So he has a plan to encourage proper study of the situation, target interventions and encourage local government to do the same, and introduce new money when interventions are identified.

It is a pity that the Labour list of indicators is being recycled and attributed to him, and that the new work he is introducing that goes beyond that list is not welcomed.

What would those who dislike that approach prefer to see in its place?

I work in my LA
I am also a service user in my LA

In the last two years I have seen cuts that have shocked and scared me. Worse than I have ever seen before.
I worked in the NHS in the 80s. Cameron makes Thacher look like a idealistic socialist.

Wondering how they are going to come up with a figure for 'how many crimes have been prevented'?

Councils are to put up 60% first and then they will follow with 40% when all problems have been erased and therefore presumably no more money will be necessary (children in school, people back at work, crime eliminated, and no more anti social behaviour)... . What that sounds like to me is an order to make bricks without straw. Councils are to perform magical tricks for a little over half of what it is expected to cost to get results.