Families

by Nick Bailey

In July this year, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) published the Listening to Troubled Families report with a great fanfare. Its stated aim was ‘to inform [government] thinking and policy development’. At its launch, Secretary of State Eric Pickles hailed the report as providing ‘real insights into these families’ lives’ and as offering a ‘true understanding of the challenges local authorities face’. The government had set aside £448 million to tackle the problems identified. In short, the report was portrayed as a solid piece of research driving an ‘evidence-based’ approach to policy making. 

by Ruth Levitas

On 18 July, Louise Casey, head of the Troubled Families Programme, published a report called Listening to Troubled Families. It presents sixteen case studies of families participating in Family Intervention Projects, claiming that this is ‘a good starting place to inform our thinking and policy development’. Well, no it isn’t. This is policy-making by anecdote, more akin to tabloid journalism than serious research. Casey’s group is not representative of those targeted by the TFP, and it is certainly not representative of the multiply deprived families who make up the so-called 120,000 troubled families. This pseudo-research serves only to present the poor as dysfunctional, both as individuals and as families.

How poverty and/or low income are mediated and affected by family considerations are considered. These could be through practices, exigencies or condition, resources, processes and relations. Five main sets of ideas or concepts are considered as ways of framing key aspects of the approach: family practices and the way that family members organise their lives; capital (social and cultural) and how it is utilised through connections and networks; culture, including values, meaning, rules and the like; capacities in the sense of the resources and dispositions available to people to take action; and family solidarity looking at practices of reciprocity and mutual assistance among family members over and above personal interest.

Improved parenting is currently often advocated as the best route to improve outcomes for children and, explicitly, as a better alternative than reducing poverty. Past academic research has found strong links between poverty and children’s achievement and, operating both separately and relatedly, links between parenting and outcomes. By including elements of parenting and family relationships in the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, the PSE: UK team aims to provide evidence about the relationship between poverty and aspects of parenting that have received significant recent political attention but which, as yet, have been the subject of limited empirical research.