www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/listeningtroubledfamilies
This is a link to the actual report.
The report describes the 16 families. These families are very dysfunctional.
The most striking common theme that families described was the history of sexual and physical abuse, often going back generations; the involvement of the care system in the lives of both parents and their children, parents having children very young, those parents being involved in violent relationships, and the children going on to have behavioural problems, leading to exclusion from school, anti-social behaviour and crime.
At the end she observes that a common feature of the families is large numbers of children. However, I don't think you could conclude from the report that cutting benefits would motivate these families not to have more children. Many of the families interviewed seem to have older children (i.e. not babies) in care anyway.
One mother, observed at family court proceedings during the writing of this report, had twelve children and said she kept getting pregnant to ?get over losing the previous one to care?. She had not been able to keep any of her children due to her drug addiction.
All of the people she interviewed seem to have been in and out care.
There is national research which shows how damaging this cycle of moving in and out of care can be. For example, around half of children who entered care as a result of abuse or neglect suffer further harm if they return home. What also became clear was that there did not seem to be any intervention or help given to the parents after the child had been taken into care, to look at causes. So when left with the next child on its way, or step children entering the household, or grandchildren left with them by their own daughters, nothing in their behaviour or ability to parent had changed.
The report doesn't make any concrete recommendations
It has not been the intention of this report to provide a detailed range of conclusions or recommendations about how services should deal with difficult and troubled families.
She's still talking about the 120,000 - doesn't anybody in the government listen to More or Less?
This new programme of work with 120,000 troubled families is an opportunity to not repeat the failed attempts of the past, but to get underneath the skin of the families, and of the services that are now going to be working with them to find some lasting ways to make changes.
But seems to recommend a stronger approach from Social Services.
the traditional approach of services reaching individual family members, at crisis point or after, and trying to fix single issues such as 'drug use', 'non-attendance at school' or 'domestic violence' in these families is most often destined to fail. Their behaviours and problems can be properly understood only by looking at the full cycle - and the full family. This requires services who work with families to take the long view;
I imagine most social workers would agree with this.
So basically, the report doesn't really say anything new, doesn't explain how dysfunctional people might be encouraged not to have children they can't cope with; and the right wing media has picked up on the idea that society's ills could be solved if poor women would keeping their legs crossed. Plus ca change.