Dave’s ‘troubleshooters’ policy is right — but it needs working on

David Cameron has finally announced the way forward on his pledge to ‘turn round the lives of 120,000 of Britain’s troubled families’ — and it is good news. These families combine behaviour that is harmful or disruptive to the rest of society with reliance on benefits, social housing and other services, reinforcing the sense that they are taking a lot from their fellow citizens while giving nothing positive back. And although dealing with their problems is expensive, they already cost government and society a lot of money, as the Prime Minister is rightly emphasising today. 

He actually made this pledge a year ago, ‘based on the broken society’ agenda he brought in from opposition, but has admitted that he was distracted by other priorities and allowed the initiative to get bogged down in bureaucracy — until the riots, that is, when he said it was ‘back at the top of my political agenda’.