Drug addiction and alcohol abuse are also absent. What instantly leaps out from this list? It is that none of these criteria, in themselves, have anything at all to do with disruption, irresponsibility, or crime. G) Family cannot afford some food/clothing items It is a family which satisfies at least 5 of the following 7 criteria:Д®) one parent with longstanding disability/illness And, looking at footnote 2, we can finally establish what the definition of a 'troubled family', on which the Prime Minister's numbers were based, actually is. The Department for Communities and Local Government had, in fact, published an ' explanatory note' to the figures. Indeed, according the Metropolitan Police website, total recorded crime in Tower Hamlets is only about half that of Islington, where I live. But, as far as I am aware, it is not particularly remarkable for crime or anti-social behaviour. Tower Hamlets is a very deprived area by almost any measure. And my suspicions were further aroused by the fact that, as the Evening StandardВ pointed out, the detailed numbers stated that Tower Hamlets had more such families than anywhere else in London, and more than, say, Newcastle. The media response was predictable: reasonably typically, the Daily Mail described it as an 'assault on the Shameless generation.' More moderately - but still, as we shall see, entirely inaccurately - the Independent talked of ' 120,000 of the country's most dysfunctional families.'Д«ut where did the Prime Minister's numbers come from? Good, local data on individual or family-level drug and alcohol abuse, anti-social behavior, and so on is hard to get, let alone to match across different data sets, which you'd have to do to establish this. And the government knows not just how many of them there are, but where they live, by local authority area, and is publishing the figures. When he talks about 'troubled families', he doesn't mean poor or deprived families he means those who, through 'disruption and irresponsibility', cause 'a large proportion of the problems in society'. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, there are an estimated 4,500 of these families in Birmingham, 2,500 in Manchester, and 1,115 here in Sandwell.' Today we are announcing, council by council, our estimate from data, mapping where these families are. 'Up to now weвЂ™ve talked in terms broad numbers вЂ“ 120,000 troubled families across the country. Last year the state spent an estimated ВЈ9 billion on just 120,000 familiesвЂ¦' A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations.WeвЂ™ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of moneyвЂ¦вЂ¦but now weвЂ™ve come up the actual figures. Whatever you call them, weвЂ™ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society.

Some in the press might call them вЂneighbours from hellвЂ™. Officialdom might call them вЂfamilies with multiple disadvantagesвЂ™. 'ThatвЂ™s why today, I want to talk about troubled families.Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Late last year, the Prime Minister made an important speech about 'troubled families'. That in turn resulted in sensationalist and misleading headlines the end result, more likely than not, will be bad policy.

What began as a shortcut taken by civil servants with the data was translated into a speech by the Prime Minister that simply misrepresented the facts. Now I am not saying, and indeed I don't believe for a moment, that this is what the PM thinks. How would you describe an unemployed single mother, with moderate depression, who can't afford new shoes for her children, and whose roof is leaking? The Prime Minister calls her a 'neighbour from hell', and argues that she, and people like her, are part of a 'culture of disruption and irresponsibility.'

Neighbours from hell