Society daily 11.06.12

Sign up to Society daily email briefing Today's top SocietyGuardian stories • Antisocial behaviour: Eric Pickles insists troubled families are not victims • Elderly care cuts are dangerous and short-sighted, says charity • Conservative ministers must end civil service blame game – thinktank • Larry Elliott: George Osborne's recovery via austerity plan is undone amid crisis of capitalism • David Nutt: Is the future of drugs safe and non-addictive? • The Tory folly of cutting back the Equality Act All today's SocietyGuardian stories The pick of the weekend's SocietyGuardian news and comment • Renting to be 'way of life' for young UK families • How firms with eye on welfare budget promised to get jobless back to work • John Harris on Britain's growing army of unpaid labour All Sunday's SocietyGuardian news and comment All Saturday's SocietyGuardian news and comment On the Guardian Professional Networks • Would a version of the health standards body Nice work for social policy , asks David Walker • Jack Dromey : Labour to put housing 'centre stage' at next election - video • Dick Vinegar, the Patient from Hell, reads between the lines of a doctors' magazine , to reveal the inner workings of the GPs' soul • The voluntary sector should use open data to innovate and improve service delivery, fundraising and campaigning , says Charlotte Beckett, of the Good Agency • High quality integrated care : what can we learn from Japan , asks Natasha Curry, of the Nuffield Trust On my radar ... • Troubled families . Eric Pickles has today announced that all 152 upper-tier local authorities in England have signed up to a payment-by-results scheme to get children off the streets and back into school, reduce youth crime and antisocial behaviour and get adults off benefits and on a path back to work. But Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, challenges the communities secretary over his claim that there are 120,000 troubled families . He picks up on how definitions of what consistututes a troubled family have shifted, and also asks whether families should be categorised and stigmatised. Portes writes: ... the Department, and the governnment, have become hung up on the 120,000 number despite the fact that they are well aware that it is now completely discredited, either as a national estimate of the number of "troubled families" or as a sensible guide to local policy. Even leaving aside the morality of using the language of "stigmatising" with respect to a set of families many of whom neither deserve nor will benefit from any such thing, this is a terrible way to make policy. Using data - and a completely arbitrary national target number - that everyone knows are simply wrong, solely because it would be embarrassing to admit a mistake, will make the programme less effective and risks wasting public money. Not only does it reflect badly on Ministers, it also does no credit to the senior civil servants who allow the publication of information which - at the most charitable - appears to reflect a complete lack of understanding of the relevant data. Commentator Jules Birch also looks at the origins of the 120,000 figure, noting: ... the figure of 120,000 families comes from research estimating the number of families with multiple disadvantages. There is no evidence that they also cause trouble – although some of them may do, just as some without multiple disadvantages do too And he adds: Nobody denies that there are families with multiple problems or that some of them cause trouble for themselves and for others. The point of the Social Exclusion Unit and all the other initiatives under the last Labour government was to try to do something about it by helping individual families. However, regardless of what you thought of that, there was always a danger that a future government would simply conclude that if there are problems out there then they must be caused by 'problem families'. Pickles says that politicians from all parties have run away from 'categorising, stigmatising, laying blame'. He now seems proud to a politician prepared to do all three. The Guardian's Patrick Wintour tweeted this morning that: Prime minister's spokesman admits the claim England and Wales has 120,000 troubled families is based on "an approximate figure". And the British Association of Social Workers has accused the government of bullying the poor . In a strongly worded response to the problem families initiative, BASW professional officer Nushra Mansuri, says: Now we have the government stirring up hatred against poor families, stigmatising them and attempting to dismiss the entire social work profession as wishy washy do-gooders. If Mr Pickles was "fluent in social work", he would realise that cutting back social work services to children and families and not deploying frontline social workers in the most effective way is not the answer. Early intervention ends up costing the state less both financially and socially. ... The government seeks to punish and bully people for being disadvantaged. We fail to see how this will result in a fairer and more harmonious society for any of us. • News of the death of disability campaigner Karen Sherlock . In a heartbreaking post on her Diary of a Benefit Scrounger blog, Sue Marsh writes: Karen embodied our fight in almost every way. She was desperately ill. Her kidneys were failing, putting a huge strain on her body. Ultimately it seems she died of a cardiac arrest. An operation had recently been cancelled at the last minute, though I have no idea why or if it is relevant to her death. She had been found capable of some work by the DWP. Placed in the Work Related Activity Group, her Employment and Support Allowance was time limited to one year after the welfare reform bill went through. Not only that, but it was limited retrospectively, meaning that she only had a few months left to appeal for long term support (Support Group) before she lost everything. ... She was terrified. Beside herself with fear. She lived her last months desperately scared that her family would not survive the onslaught it faced. She was "the most vulnerable" whatever that is. The system failed her and she spent her last precious moments in this world fighting. For herself, for her family and for others. She was one of us. She was Spartacus. And now she's dead and she died in fear because the system failed her, because cruel men refused listen and powerful men refused to act. Dawn Willis collates some of her comments and experiences , while Kaliya Franklin has retweeted her 2010 post telling Karen's story , and Latent Existence retweets one of Karen's own blogposts, written two months ago after she was told her ESA was being stopped : what the government are doing is totally unbelievable. Stripping the most vulnerable of the essential benefits they need. No thought for the effect it will have. Just throw them on the scrapheap. Don't worry if they can't feed themselves or heat their homes, or pay for taxis to take them places because they cannot walk anywhere. No, that doesn't matter, they are leeches on society. The thing is, we are not. We need this money to have some quality of life, not scrimping and scraping to get through one month to the next, not being punished for something we have not done. Other news • BBC: NSPCC sees record calls about neglect • Community Care: Cuts drive inequalities in care home provision, say providers • Independent: 10-year low for cervical cancer tests • Inside Housing: Labour urges data watchdog to investigate Shapps • LocalGov.co.uk: Survey finds 70% of residents satisfied with councils • Telegraph: Olympics and Euro 2012 will turn Britain into nation of couch potatoes, warn health experts Guardian Public Services Awards 2012 - Entries open until 13 July Enter the Guardian Public Service Awards to showcase your teams' innovative approaches. The awards are designed to reward creative achievements and contributions that have helped to establish more effective and best practice across public services in a tough spending climate. Enter today to ensure you get the recognition you deserve. Events and seminars Scrutiny: making an impact Tuesday 26 June, Kings Cross, London This interactive seminar challenges traditional approaches to scrutiny, demonstrating in-depth questioning techniques and exploring the use of video evidence. It also considers the difference between a finding and a recommendation, how to word recommendations so they can't be ignored and work through good practice to evaluate each scrutiny process. 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