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Cameron pours £400m into troubleshooting plan for troubled families

Prime Minister David Cameron will put £400m of funding into a scheme which aims to end the ‘the responsibility deficit’ as part of the government's response to the summer riots.

The money willl fund a national network of family caseworkers whose task will be to identify and help around 120,000 troubled families by 2015.

The move follows a recent conference which was held to reflect on the Guardian/London School of Economics (LSE) “Reading The Riots” study. At the same event, home secretary Theresa May also announced a national review on how police use stop and search powers, a factor identified by the research as a source of public tension.

After the riots, Cameron appointed Tony Blair’s former “respect czar” as the person in charge of overseeing the government's response and developing the family intervention projects which she helped to introduce when Labour was in power.

Under the scheme, local authority troubleshooters will be charged with placing family caseworkers in some of Britain's most chaotic households. The caseworkers, one per household, will then report on their progress to Casey's Troubled Families Unit at the Department for Communities and Local Government. Cameron believes that placing a single keyworker with each family will help to avoid the problems that can be caused by dealing with a multitude of various agencies.

The Prime Minister said: ‘For many of the most troubled families, there will be a family worker – a single point of contact for the first time for particular families, working out what the family needs, where the waste is, and lining up the right services at the right time. When the front door opens and the worker goes in, they will see the family as a whole and get a plan of action together, agreed with the family.

‘These things don't always cost a lot but they make all the difference. And they will get on top of the services, sorting out, and sometimes fending off, the 28 or more different state services that come calling at the door. Not a string of well-meaning, disconnected, officials who end up treating the symptoms and not the causes, but a clear hard-headed recognition of how the family is going wrong, and what the family members themselves can do to take responsibility.’

Casey pointed out that low-quality parenting in Britain needed to be addressed, saying that polls showed that 86% of the population saw poor parenting as a cause of the riots. Speaking at the conference, Casey also said that ‘big and bold solutions’ were needed to respond to ‘the shock of discovering the lack of connection so many people felt about their communities, their environment and their families’.

ESF is helping troubled families and households by funding projects that help to tackle barriers to participation in this group, including intergenerational worklessness, a lack of childcare, and a lack of appropriate employability skills.