Lifting the misery of troubled families

THE FRIDAY THING: “TROUBLED families” is a tag that includes thousands of homes across the UK and for many draws a picture of people out of work, children who don’t go to school, parents and children who are responsible for crimes and for anti-social behaviour that wrecks neighbourhoods and causes misery.

Oldham has been singled out as a high-performing local authority, one of several that will begin working with up to 40,000 troubled families in a five-year programme to help both the families and their neighbours, often just as badly affected by bad behaviour.

The focus is on redundancy, truancy, crime and anti-social behaviour as well as domestic violence, improving poor health and mental health. The five year programme in places like Oldham will be an enormous help to communities as well as to individual families.

Louise Casey, who heads the programme and has been able to deliver success in many poor and deprived areas across the country, relies on what she calls “tough love” to bring stability to families and neighbourhoods.

Says Louise: “Families with an average of nine different serious problems need help that gets in through the front door of their home and to the heart of what is really going on in their lives. This has been the start of a revolution in the way that we work with our most challenging families.”

That Oldham is to be among the beneficiaries of this tough love can only be good for individual families facing a wide raft of problems they cannot resolve alone.

We wish Louise and her team every success on their challenging but life-enhancing task.