Louise Casey, the government’s ‘troubled families’ tsar, is in loud voice in this morning’s Telegraph. The government, she says, must ‘get stuck in’ and intervene in these lives for the better by getting women to take ‘responsibility’ for themselves and their children. ‘It’s not toughness for toughness sake,’ she says. ‘It’s toughness so we sure their kids get to school so they don’t end up as criminals.’
Casey’s words are underpinned by the view that the state’s approach thus far has been wrong-headed. ‘I also don’t think we should soft-touch those families. We are not running some cuddly social workers’ programme to wrap everybody in cotton wool.’ There are, she says, officials overseeing all aspects of a family’s life without ‘getting stuck into the actual family’. This seems to be a critique of the incentive-led initiatives announced by the government last month.
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