lier which somehow enabled them to esti-
mate that there were 120,000 families across
England and Wales with ‘severe and com-
plex needs’. They then specified exactly how
many such families were to be found in each
area: 2,385 in Manchester, 1,010 in Newcas-
tle, etc. Local councils were told to identify
these families and apply the Dundee meth-
od to them. For doing this they would be
paid £4,000 a family, part of it ‘on results’,
i.e. when the family reduced its unemploy-
ment, truancy, crime etc.
The flaws in the programme should have
been obvious. Chris Cook, the BBC News-night journalist whose ferreting exposed
them back in August, puts it this way: ‘Blunt-
ly, local authorities could sign up families,
wait for time to heal a problem or two and
then claim the cash.’
Ultimately, the troubled families pro-
gramme consisted of a sort of statistical syl-
logism. The government ended up paying for
the data it said was there. Jonathan Portes, a
researcher who was among the first to sug-
gest the emperor had no clothes, identified
the problem: ‘[Officials] told Manchester
that it had precisely 2,385 troubled families,
and that it was expected to find them and
“turn them around”; in return, it would bepaid £4,000 per family for doing so. Amaz-
ingly, Manchester did precisely that. Ditto
Leeds. And Liverpool. And so on.’
And that, children, is how the troubled
families programme achieved a 98.9 per cent
success rate, an unprecedented achievement
in the history of social policy. It is why David
Cameron could fight the last election claim-
ing to have ‘turned around’ almost 120,000
families. It is the classic case of ‘evidence-
led policy-making’ becoming ‘policy-led
evidence-making’.
For sure, the families made some pro-
gress. The problem is attributing this pro-
gress to the troubled families programme. In
the absence of a counterfactual — a way of
knowing what would have happened with-
out it — we can’t be sure. The evaluation
published last week stated: ‘We were unable
to find consistent evidence that the troubled
families programme had any significant or
systematic impact.’ Which is not the same as
saying there wasn’t any impact.
So we don’t know if it ‘worked’ because
we can’t know. To blame the programme for
not proving its impact is to make the same
mistake as the programme’s designers.
This was the post-war idea, of which trou-
bled families was the last gasp — indeed, the
final fulfilment: the idea that a prime min-
ister has it in his or her power to bind up a
broken society, to heal families, to stop riots;
and all in time for the next election.
The irony is that Mr Cameron was sup-
posed to know better. More than any PM
before him, he championed an alternative
approach, based on self-helping commu-
nities, stronger families and a plurality of
human-sized public services accountable to
the people they serve. The Big Society was
the real right answer to the riots. Uniformly
implementing a single national programme
across the country — and paying for data to
prove it worked — wasn’t.
Theresa May has launched an industri-
al strategy to revive the economies of poor
communities. We need a social strategy, too,
to revive the communities themselves. But
please, no more prime ministerial declara-
tions of war on abstract social problems. No
more national programmes to tackle com-
plex issues, underpinned by bean-counting
exercises which tell us nothing.
Instead, let’s build up the natural capac-
ity of society — the families and religious
groups, the local professionals and public
services — to devolve power and responsi-
bility directly to communities. Britain should
have a system as various and responsive as
the society it serves, where the power to fix
a family in crisis rests with its neighbours,
local professionals, and the family itself, not
an office in Whitehall.
It’s a messier, longer, harder plan. It
won’t yield a clear result — a ‘mission
accomplished’ moment — for a politician to
brandish as his or her personal achievement.
But it’s the only plan that can work.‘B
ad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on
the key outcomes it was supposed to
improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresen-
tation of the data... a funding model that
could have been designed to waste money’.
‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’.
The media’s treatment of the troubled
families programme, whose evaluation has
recently been made public, cannot have
cheered David Cameron in his last week as
an MP. History does not look likely to be
kind to his great social policy. We should,
however, be grateful to the former prime
minister for his quixotic attempt to do the
right thing on a massive scale. Because in
doing so he exposed the fallacy which has
dominated social policy since 1945: the idea
that the government is infinitely capable of
solving social problems.
Our politicians seem to be finally realis-
ing that it can’t. As Meg Hillier, the Labour
MP who chairs the Commons Public
Accounts Committee, put it last week, when
she asked Dame Louise Casey, the civil serv-
ant in charge of the troubled families pro-
gramme, ‘Don’t you think this is too big a
challenge for government to get a grip on?’
Dame Louise is the doyenne of big chal-
lenges that central government has tried to
get a grip on. Formerly the ‘Respect tsar’
tasked by Tony Blair to solve homelessness
and crack down on yobbery, she was David
Cameron’s favourite civil servant, too. You
can see why. Sweary, informal and appar-
ently irreverent of the niceties, her actual
mission is to make everyone respectable,
middle class and patriotic.
When riots engulfed English cities in the
summer of 2011 and Mr Cameron decided
to stop this happening again, Dame Louise
Casey had a solution ready. In her Respect
years she had overseen the extension of a
small project founded in Dundee called
Action for Children. The unique selling
point of this project was that it carried sticks
as well as carrots. A key worker, represent-
ing all parts of the public sector, would mus-
cle into the home of a dysfunctional family
and offer a choice: take my help or we’ll
cut your benefits. In the wake of the riots,
Mr Cameron authorised Dame Louise to
extend this programme nationwide.
The first job was to assess the problem:
how many families are we talking about?
Officials found data from five years ear-Too big not to fail
David Cameron’s troubled families programme
should be final proof that government does not know bestDA NNY K RUGERCameron exposed the fallacy that
th e gover nm ent is infi nitely
capable of solving social problems