Those 120,000 families

Emma Harrison reached the height of her influence with her "family champions" idea.  The government reckoned that there were 120,000 "troubled families" responsible for most of what was wrong in the country, and Harrison persuaded ministers that she had the solution.  There were many people at the time who criticised both the analysis and the proposed remedy.  One established charity, Family Action was particularly concerned about the damage which Harrison's approach could do.  Now a report has been published which shows the flaws in the original thinking.  It has been written by Professor Ruth Levitas for the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK Project, and can be accessed through the Indus Delta site.  

Levitas shows how the original figure of 120,000 families was based on a misuse of statistics, and how "troubled families" were redefined as "troublesome families" by government rhetoric.  She quotes a Cameron speech: "That’s why today, I want to talk about troubled families. 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, 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 addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money…but now we’ve come up the actual figures. Last year the state spent an estimated £9 billion on just 120,000 families…that is around £75,000 per family."   The government has conflated families which have disadvantages which are not self-inflicted with those who cause expensive trouble.  Levitas goes on to show how this rhetoric has fed a vindictive attitude towards the poor.  It's an excellent report and well worth reading.

Emma Harrison was not, of course, responsible for this.  It would be truer to say that she jumped on the bandwagon.  She proposed a simplistic solution; volunteers could work with these families to get them into work.  "Working Families Everywhere", a pilot scheme, was born, and we had the toe-curling suggestion that these volunteers be known as "Emmas".  But Harrison had, possibly unwittingly, ruled A4e out of bidding for the contracts for European Social Fund money to pay private companies to do the work with local authorities in a professional way.  A new "tsar" was appointed, Louise Casey, a woman with very different experience from Harrison's.  And when the torrent of bad publicity for A4e was unleashed, Harrison stepped down from the ongoing WFE scheme.

I am tempted to draw lessons from this story, but readers can do that themselves.  Perhaps the lesson for Harrison is that hubris results in nemesis. 

Puzzles

I am genuinely puzzled. Emma Harrison's stunt over Working Families Everywhere and family champions completely obscured the fact that contracts are coming out to provide such people with ESF money. And now Kent County Council are advertising for them in what they're calling a pilot until March 2013. The advert uses Harrison's slogans. But it also says that "there may be scope for an extension (after March 2013) depending on new funding becoming available". So when and where do these new DWP contracts apply? Since these people are currently employed by the councils, and would be TUPE'd over to the private contractors, there would seem to be nothing in it for Harrison except publicity; unless the volunteers she's trying to recruit are under her control, and that seems unlikely.

The website Children and Young People Now has tried to get some clarity from Harrison, but without much success. However, the piece does solve the puzzle of why Kent is joining in. Baroness Debbie Stedman-Scott is chief executive of charity Tomorrow's People and member of the Working Families Everywhere advisory board, and her group works in Maidstone, Kent. Helen Dent, chief executive of charity Family Action, repeats her scepticism about the whole scheme.

It would be useful if the journalists who are paid to research these things would sort it out. And pigs might fly.

There are times, just briefly, when I wonder whether I'm being unfair. Perhaps the bosses of A4e are genuinely more interested in helping people than in making money. Mark Lovell tweets: "Don't like profit motive - set up a social business and grow it globally. Compete, impact and force corporates and governments to change". And he's about to start an "Improving People's Lives" Fund. All very worthy. And unrecognisable to many of A4e's staff and clients. Another of his tweets is really interesting: "3,800 staff in our business - 63% female:male staffing ratio, higher outside UK. My 'boss' Emma and I have worked together for 20 yrs". Note the quotes around "boss". It has long been difficult to work out Harrison's real role in the company. There is a board of directors and a chief executive, so how much power does she have? Perhaps it's just useful to have her out there getting the publicity and cosying up to politicians while others get on with running the company.

Contact - and quiet

I had a comment yesterday from someone claiming to be a journalist and wanting to make contact with me. That person can send me a comment (obviously not for publication) with his or her email address and I will get in touch.

There's nothing much to report at the moment. Emma Harrison hasn't given an interview for over a week. Perhaps her PR people have advised a period of quiet, or perhaps she's on holiday. There was, however, a piece in the Guardian last week by Rhian Beynon, who is head of policy and campaigns at Family Action. This is the charity, you remember, which is not best pleased at Emma's latest project, the Family Champions, or Working Families Everywhere, because they've been doing this work without fanfare for years. Beynon is particularly concerned in the article with the mental health strategy, or lack of it, to support children. And she is very sceptical about Harrison's capacity in this area.

Emma Harrison on Woman's Hour - again

Woman's Hour (Radio 4) today carried a discussion between Emma Harrison of A4e and Helen Dent of Family Action about the Family Champions project, with the excellent Jenni Murray as the questioner. Now, Family Action has been going since 1869, and Dent, like Harrison, has a CBE, so they were well matched.

Harrison, asked to explain what family champions were all about, started by saying that she had been asked to speak to "No. 10" about families who have never worked. (She later got in another plug for the closeness of her relationship with the PM.) Yes, lots of things were being done by various agencies, but it didn't add up to working with whole families.

Dent said that FA specialise in dealing with families where there are multiple and complex needs, and the priority for society was for those families to resolve their difficulties, not working. This set the tone for the differences between the tow women; both scrupulously polite, Harrison faintly praising FA once or twice, but clearly disagreeing.

Harrison asserted that families had to have a sense of purpose, and their ambition should be to be working families. Dent talked about "deeply challenging" family situations and gave an example of a family with huge problems, where it was necessary to start with small steps.

Murray put the point to Harrison - is getting a job suitable for everybody? Harrison said she didn't accept Dent's statement that working is not a goal, and gave her own example of a family she's working with where everybody else had failed but she got them volunteering in a charity shop. Murray asked what it will cost, since people will have to be employed on this. Harrison wasn't sure; she talked about using local authorities' community budgets, about £120m to start with, and this was good news for families.

Dent, asked if this was a sensible use of resources, said that the government was "muddling up" types of families; the need is to invest in intensive work to start with, and Harrison is wrong about this immediate goal of work.

So Emma Harrison is getting oodles of publicity for supposedly persuading government to fork out for a new scheme, when groups like Family Action have been doing it for years without any fanfare. I wish that this short but revealing item could be the basis of a much longer exploration of the subject.