The launch of the Troubled Families Programmed in the wake of the 2011 riots conflated poor and disadvantaged families with anti-social and criminal families. The program aimed to 'turn around' the lives of the country's most 'troubled families', at a time of austerity and wide-ranging welfare reforms which hit the poorest families hardest. This detailed, authoritative and critical account reveals the inconsistencies and contradictions within the program, and issues of deceit and malpractice in its operation. It shows how this core government policy has stigmatized the families it claimed to support. Paving the way for a government to fulfil its responsibility to families, rather than condemning them, this book will empower local authority workers, policy-makers and researchers, and anyone interested in social justice, to challenge damaging, aggressive neoliberal statecraft.
