Troubled families?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading More or Less from BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which eagerly climbs a mountain of dodgy numbers for the reward of breathtaking views of statistical beauty. This week, further adventures in the audio presentation of data. We'll also be covering chief executive pay, the body count in Gaza, marriage and divorce. But first, this headline from the Sunday Times.
Revealed. Half a million problem families.
This takes me back to 2012. The government had decided to establish the Troubled Families programme in response to the riots that plagued English cities in 2011. David Cameron had declared that 120,000 problem families needed attention from their local authorities.
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, I think we've all known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of problems in our society.
Now, the way the Prime Minister puts it, these really aren't the sort of people you'd want moving in next door. But we pulled this number apart two years ago with a little help from Professor Ruth Levitas from Bristol University, who was working on a study of poverty and exclusion in the UK. She'd been looking at who these 120,000 families actually were.
The 120,000 actually comes from a piece of secondary analysis of the 2004 Families and Children's Study. And in that study, they found that 2% of the families had five of a list of seven characteristics. No parent in the family is in work. the family lives in overcrowded housing, no parent has any qualifications, the mother has mental health problems, at least one parent has long-standing limiting illness, disability or infirmity, 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.
In other words, not one of the seven criteria is about crime or antisocial behaviour. All of them are about deprivation. So is it reasonable, I asked Professor Levitas, to read off that list of seven deprivations and conclude that these are families that cause trouble?
Absolutely not. There is no evidence that the group of families that I identified in the Family and Children's Survey... are actually troublemaking families. But the whole discourse that is being created around this is making a slippage from families that undoubtedly have troubles to being troublemakers.
Professor Ruth Levitas telling me this number was nonsense in 2012. Well, we'll come to the half a million problem families soon.
How did the Troubled Families programme originate and what was the 120,000 claim based on?
But first, the 120,000 figure has stayed firmly at the heart of government policy. So how's it all working out? I asked Newsnight's public policy editor, Chris Cook. Well, there's good news, according to the government, that they managed to have turned around about 53,000 of them, they say. No one could think that's bad. Turned around? What do they mean? So the government says that there have been about 53,000 families who have been turned around. Of these, only about 4,500 have been turned around because those families have had an adult who's got full-time work. The remainder have been... So if an adult finds full-time work, then they've been turned around? They're turned around. No matter what other problems there are in the household, a parent has found work, the family has been turned around.
Exactly. That's comforting. But that's only 4,500 as well. The remaining 48,000 are families where they have achieved improvement on... met certain criteria on the family's behaviour. So each child in the family has had fewer than three suspensions. They've got a truancy rate of less than 15%. There's been a 60% reduction in antisocial behaviour across the family in the last six months.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:43
2
How did the Troubled Families programme originate and what was the 120,000 claim based on?
3:43–8:51
3
What criticisms did Professor Ruth Levitas make about labeling 'problem families'?
8:51–21:32
4
How does the government define a family as 'turned around' under the programme?
21:32–25:56
5
Why might reported improvements in troubled families be misleading (regression to the mean and counting rules)?
25:56–28:00