Troubled families and unneutered cats. (R4)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is More or Less, your statistical guides to life, the universe and everything. The programme now airs year-round on the BBC World Service, but this is a full-length episode from Radio 4. Hello and welcome to More or Less, current affairs by numbers. This week, hard done by nurses and the mathematical consequences of hard partying cats.
Meow.
But first, an important message from the Prime Minister. I want to talk specifically about troubled families. And so do we. The government says it has identified 120,000 troubled families who are responsible for a disproportionate share of society's ills.
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. drug addiction, alcohol abuse, crime, a culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. Now we've always known that these families can cost a huge amount of money, but today we're actually coming up and announcing the figures. Last year, the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families. That is around £75,000 per year per family.
Let's put the money to one side for a moment and think about who these 120,000 families actually are. The government is pretty sure they exist. There is now a troubled families team within the Department for Communities and Local Government set up to deal with them. The Department for Work and Pensions singled out the same 120,000 families in its social justice policy, saying they cause serious problems and antisocial behaviour. Professor Ruth Levitas from Bristol University is working on a study of poverty and exclusion in the UK. She's been looking at this 120,000 figure.
The 120,000 is a rounding up of 117,000. It actually comes from a piece of secondary analysis of the 2004 Families and Children's Study.
OK, so it's eight years out of date.
So it's eight years out of date. And in that study, they found that 2% of the families had five of a list of seven characteristics.
What is the government's claim about '120,000 troubled families' and its cost to the state?
And it's very important to know what those seven characteristics are. 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.
The 2% figure, how accurately was that pinned down? I mean, of course, whenever we hear a number like 120,000, we sort of mentally assume that Ian Duncan Smith has a list of them somewhere. We know exactly who they are. But, of course, it's never quite like that. So, I mean, is it 2% plus or minus 0.1% or...? That's a very good question.
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.
And that range is over 300,000 wide, so there's a pretty big problem with the estimate anyway.
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.
OK, so we've got this number, 120,000, and we don't really have much confidence that the number itself is accurate.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:39
2
What is the government's claim about '120,000 troubled families' and its cost to the state?
2:39–11:27
3
How was the 120,000 figure derived from the Families and Children Study?
11:27–19:37
4
How reliable is the 2% estimate of multiply disadvantaged families and what are its statistical limits?
19:37–27:56