Eradicating poverty through empowerment: what’s the responsible thing to do?

Posted by Stephen Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, Northumbria University

On this day, 17th October, in 1987, at the instigation Father Joseph Wresinski, the founder of ATD Fourth World, an anti-poverty movement, around 100,000 people congregated in Paris to honour victims of poverty, hunger, violence and fear. Five years later, and following the death of Father Wresinski, the United Nations announced the day as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, and published a resolution by the General Assembly that, amongst other things, ‘invited all states to devote the day to presenting and promoting, as appropriate in the national context, concrete activities with regard to the eradication of poverty and destitution’.

This year is the 27th anniversary of that resolution and the theme of this year’s observance is ‘Acting Together to Empower Children, their Families and Communities to End Poverty’. Themes such as this matter. How people in poverty are spoken about has consequences for how they are viewed, and the solutions that are put forward to address poverty. Discourses of empowerment are often used by governments and service providers to encourage people to view themselves as active agents with the ability, if not the responsibility, to change their circumstances for the better. This reflects attention away from what governments themselves can do.

In an examination of ‘dimensions of family empowerment’ within the ‘troubled families’ discourse in England, Sue Bond-Taylor (2014) highlights the merging of empowerment talk with encouraging families to take responsibility for both their situation and the improvement of it. This occurs not only in the ‘troubled families’ discourse, but also in the practices of family workers, suggesting that families are empowered ‘only in so much as they are compliant and accept the normalising discourses of the services through engagement with their agendas for change’ (2014: 12). She argues that families’ participation in the programme ‘merely legitimates existing power relations under a veneer of empowerment discourses’ (2014: 8). 

In another similar research project examining how education services engaged with disadvantaged families, Fretwell et al (2018: 1056) highlight how a project exhorted parents to take greater responsibility for the educational performance of their children and to take measures to address it. Notions of empowerment were deployed, particularly when discussing employment:

This aspect of the programme was couched in a discourse of empowerment. The parameters of choice are firmly circumscribed, though. Parents can choose which activities to pursue, but they are not free to choose just anything; they must make the right choices. Empowerment is thus restricted to making choices within conditional limits and is itself a strategy of government; a sanctioned means for producing the kind of active citizen demanded by neoliberalism (2018: 1056).

One of the most powerful organisations in the world
is encouraging us to 'act together' to end poverty 

It is therefore interesting, perhaps even worrying, to note that one of the most powerful organisations in the world, made up of over 190 national governments, is encouraging us to ‘act together’ to ‘empower children, their families and communities to end poverty’, as if the responsibility for ending poverty lies primarily with ‘us’ as individuals or with the people experiencing poverty. Not only are impoverished groups expected to deal with and be ‘resilient’ about their own hardship, and the problems that come with it, but they’re now also expected to be the solution. Nelson Mandela argued powerfully that overcoming poverty was an act of justice, not a gesture of charity, and John Veit-Wilson (2000, 144) has noted that the responsibility for ending poverty ultimately rests with governments:

“Ensuring that all the members of society, residents in or citizens of a nation state, have enough money is a clear role which governments can adopt or reject, but they cannot deny they have the ultimate power over net income distribution.”

It is shameful that this is where we are at in 2019. Poverty continues to exist because of political and economic decisions, by powerful groups, regarding the allocation of resources, both nationally and globally. Impoverished communities lack political power because they lack economic power. Nobody feels the need to empower millionaires or politicians to take greater control of their lives. Perhaps if we increased the economic power of those living in poverty, we might find that they were more fully able to participate in society and there might be less need for ‘empowering’ projects and services. That would be the responsible thing to do.


Stephen is currently working with Kayleigh Garthwaite (University of Birmingham) and Ruth Patrick (University of York) on an online project exploring representations of people living in poverty in the UK. This blog also appears on their website www.whatstheproblem.org.uk



References:

Bond-Taylor, S. (2015) Dimensions of Family Empowerment in Work with So-Called ‘Troubled’ Families, Social Policy and Society, 14 (3): 371-384. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746414000359

Fretwell, N., Osgood, J., O’Toole, G. and Tsouroufli, M. Governing through trust: Community‐based link workers and parental engagement in education, British Educational Research Journal, 44 (6): 1047-1063. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3478

Veit-Wilson J (2000) Horses for Discourses: poverty, purpose and closure in minimum incomes standards policy. In: Gordon D and Townsend P (eds) Breadline Europe: The Measurement of Poverty. The Policy Press, Bristol, pp 141-164. https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/breadline-europe

The website for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty can be found here:
https://www.un.org/en/events/povertyday/

Images:

1. Courtesy of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: https://www.un.org/development/desa/socialperspectiveondevelopment/international-day-for-the-eradication-of-poverty-homepage/2019-2.html
2. 'I like the campaign so far, Bob- I've already made my poverty history' by David Austin via University of Kent, British Cartoon Archive (Reference number: 86494, Published by: The Guardian, 02 July 2005, with thanks to Copyright holder: Janet Slee): https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=86494

Looking for trouble: deceit and duplicity in the Troubled Families Programme

Introduced by Peter van der Graaf

Guest post by Stephen Crossley, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University

Many families facing health problems, limiting illnesses, or with disabled family members have been labelled as ‘troubled families’ under the government’s Troubled Families Programme. Originally established following the 2011 riots to ‘turn around’ the lives of 120,000 allegedly anti-social and criminal families, the programme is now in its second phase and is working with a far larger group of families, many of whom experience troubles, but don’t necessarily cause trouble. In April of this year, the focus of the programme shifted again in an attempt to improve the number of so-called ‘troubled families’ who moved back into employment, despite the majority of them being in work and many of the remainder not being expected to be looking or available for work.

The programme has been dogged by controversy from day one. Research about families experiencing multiple disadvantages was misrepresented at the launch of the programme to provide ‘evidence’ that there were 120,000 troublesome families in England. The government has since been accused of suppressing the official evaluation of the first phase of the programme after it found ‘no discernible impact’ of the programme and also of ‘over-claiming’ the 99% success rate of the first phase. 

David Cameron with Louise Casey, former Director General of Troubled Families

Many health workers will be involved with the delivery of the Troubled Families Programme in their day-to-day work, although there is also a good chance that they will not be aware of it. Many local authorities do not refer to their local work as ‘troubled families’ because of the stigmatising rhetoric and imagery associated with it. Many families are not aware that they have been labelled as ‘troubled families’ for the same reason, and because it would undoubtedly hinder engagement with the programme. They are not always made aware that the data that is collected on them as part of the programme, is shared with other local agencies and, in an anonymised format, with central government.

My PhD research, conducted in three different local authority areas, found that the programme was based on, and relied upon duplicity from design to implementation. Despite government narratives about the programme attempting to ‘turn around’ the lives of ‘troubled families’, the programme appeared to be more concerned with helping to restructure what support to disadvantaged families looks like, and reducing the cost of such families to the state.

For example, support – both symbolic and financial - for universal services, such as libraries, children’s centres and youth projects, is reducing. Direct financial support to marginalised groups is also being cut, with welfare reforms hitting many of the most disadvantaged groups hardest. These forms of support, and many other more specialist services, are being replaced, rhetorically at least, by an intensive form of ‘family intervention’ which allegedly sees a single key worker capable of working with all members of the family, able to ‘turn around’ their lives no matter what problems, health-related or otherwise, they may be facing or causing.

The simplistic central government narrative of the almost perfect implementation of the Troubled Families Programme was not to be found ‘on the ground’, where there were multiple frustrations and concerns about the depiction of the families and the programme, and numerous departures from the official version of events. Despite the rhetoric of ‘turning around’ the lives of ‘troubled families’, in the face of cuts in support and benefits to families, my PhD thesis concluded that the Troubled Families Programme does little more than intervene to help struggling families to cope with their poverty better, despite the efforts of local practitioners.

Put simply, the programme does not attempt to address the structural issues that cause many of the problems faced by ‘troubled families’, but instead encourages them to ‘learn to be poor’. In my previous Fuse blog, I drew on the concept of ‘lifestyle drift’ advanced by David Hunter and Jenny Popay: where the focus of interventions drifts towards attempting to change individual behaviour, despite the wealth of evidence pointing to other solutions. There is no room in the narrative for wider determinants of people’s circumstances. Because of this, the government’s Troubled Families Programme will do little to turn around the lives and health of the families it claims to help.


A summary of Stephen Crossley’s PhD research can be found here. His first book In Their Place: The Imagined Geographies of Poverty is out now with Pluto Press. He tweets at @akindoftrouble


Photograph ‘Almost 40,000 troubled families helped’ (14087270645_3453006d12_c) by ‘Number 10’ via Flickr.com, copyright © 2014: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/14087270645

The Troubled families Programme: what's health got to do with it?

Guest post by Stephen Crossley, PhD student in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University

A couple of weeks ago, the expansion of the Troubled Families Programme was formally announced during the Queen’s Speech. This formality came two years after the government itself announced their plans to expand it, around 10 months after they announced further details such as the criteria to be called a ‘troubled family’ under Phase 2 of the programme, and around six months after some local authorities started working with ‘troubled families’ as part of the expanded programme.

Another troubled family?

There have been numerous criticisms of different elements of the Troubled Families Programme since the programme was announced in the wake of the riots in England in 2011, with David Cameron promising to ‘turn around’ the lives of the most troubled and troublesome families in England by the end of the Parliament that finished in May 2015. Ruth Levitas and Jonathan Portes highlighted that the figure of 120,000 ‘troubled families’ used by the government (characterised as ‘neighbours from hell’ in the prime Minister’s launch speech), actually referred to research published four years earlier on families thought to be experiencing multiple disadvantages such as maternal mental health, poverty, material deprivation, poor quality or overcrowded housing. Levitas argued it was a discursive strategy which succeeded in feeding vindictive attitudes towards the poor.

A report carrying a series of interviews with families, written by Louise Casey, the senior civil servant in charge of the programme, was criticised for its lack of ethical process and the government admitted it was a ‘dipstick’ process which didn’t meet the government criteria for research and therefore didn’t require ethical approval. My own investigations revealed that a ‘survey’ used by Casey to highlight the need for ‘radical reform’ didn’t actually exist. In a series of speeches during 2013, Casey told audiences of a survey which showed that, in one deprived area in the North East, not one out of 3000 children had attended a dentist for a routine check-up, but that 300 had presented at A&E for emergency dental care. The survey was, in fact, an anecdote shared during a meeting about a different government programme, which Casey never thought to check before sharing with audiences, preferring instead to tell them it ‘encapsulates the problem’ of ‘troubled families’ in a single example. Casey also told the 2013 RCGP conference that these 120,000 families ‘dominated NHS budgets. That’s the long and the short of it’, which isn’t exactly true either.

To date, however, health has played a relatively minor part in the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and health issues were not mentioned in either the criteria for families in Phase 1, or the outcomes expected in order for their lives to be considered ‘turned around’. But this is starting to change. The government published a report in July 2014 entitled: ‘Understanding Troubled Families’ which included information on the characteristics of families entering the programme in its early stages (my brief (Mis)understanding Troubled Families is available here). The data showed that the majority of the families being worked with under the banner of the TFP were not particularly anti-social, weren’t serial offenders and most of the children were in education, albeit not all of the time. In fact, the only characteristics that could be applied to a majority of families included in the report were that they were white, they lived in social housing, they had an adult on out-of-work benefits (although we don’t know why) and they had a family member with a serious health issue or a disability. In short, and if any personal characteristic can adequately explain unemployment, these families were probably more likely to be out of work because of health, disability or caring issues than because of any intergenerational culture of worklessness.

In the expanded second phase of the programme, ‘parents and children with a range of health problems’ is included as one of the six criteria for families, who have to hit two of the criteria to be labelled ‘troubled’. Other criteria include ‘children who need help’ and ‘children who have not been attending school regularly’. These vague criteria are open to interpretation and councils will be encouraged to go out and find ‘troubled families’ in order to ‘turn them around’ (or make ‘significant and sustained progress’ in phase 2) and claim the cash bonus, via the Payment By Results process, for doing so. A health bulletin on ‘troubled families’ was also published when the new criteria were announced, highlighting the health related issues some ‘troubled families’ faced, and a ‘leadership statement’ followed shortly after, accompanied by information on skills and training and interim guidance on data sharing amongst partner agencies. With health visitors and school nurses now under the remit of local authorities in England, it is likely that many will become involved with the TFP.

All of these developments should concern health professionals. The TFP assumes that the answer to the families problems lie firmly within the four walls of the family home, with a strong rhetorical focus on ‘getting in through the front door’ and working with the family ‘from the inside out’. In short, there is no room in the narrative for wider determinants of people’s circumstances. Its alleged success has never been proven. There is scant evidence to justify such an approach and it is unlikely that having a determined, non-specialist key worker will make much difference to many of the health problems ‘troubled families’ experience. The programme is a good example of what David Hunter and Jenny Popay and others have called ‘lifestyle drift’, where the focus of interventions drifts towards attempting to change individual behaviour, despite the wealth of evidence pointing to other solutions. But this ‘responsibilization’ strategy is also a punitive, stigmatising discourse which is targeting some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in England, telling them that they are the architects of their own misfortune and that they just need to try harder and follow a routine. A simultaneously fascinating and alarming article in the BMJ recently, exploring the role of psychology in government workfare programmes highlights that this approach is not a unique aspect of the government’s welfare ‘reforms’. Health professionals should tread carefully.

Stephen Crossley's first peer-reviewed article on ‘troubled families’ can be found here.

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