Professor Ruth Levitas
speaker
50 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard Aug 2014
Professor Ruth Levitas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The family has a low income, below 60% of median income, and the family cannot afford a number of food and clothing items, which is a measure of material deprivation.
So what we have is a study in which 2% of those families surveyed had five or more of those seven characteristics and were therefore severely, multiply disadvantaged.
Normally speaking, you would say if this is a random sample, which is a kind of technical term referring to the way the sample is drawn, you would expect to say it's 2% plus or minus 3%.
So that's the first problem.
There's a range.
and the 120,000 is the midpoint of that range.
So there's a pretty big problem with the estimate.
The other thing you have to take into account is that in a sample of that kind...
It never is completely random because we know that the poorest and the richest sections are less likely to respond.
And this is a longitudinal survey which tracks people over time.
The poorest people are also more likely to drop out.
And so it probably underestimates the number of multiply disadvantaged families.
Well, absolutely not.
I mean, Ian Duncan Smith in the Social Justice Strategy says that the government has identified a group of 120,000 troubled families whose lives are so chaotic that they cost the government some £9 billion in the last year alone.
Well, we have no evidence to suppose that these people's lives are chaotic.
They're certainly deprived.
And Cameron, in talking about them, says, 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 abuse, alcohol abuse, crime, a culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations.
I mean, there is no evidence that the group of families that I identified in the Family and Children's Survey
are actually troublemaking families.
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