It's time problem families took the blame: Pickles calls for tougher action on those who blame background and childhood for their troubles

• Councils to get cash bonuses for cutting unemployment and crime among problem families
• Troubleshooters to be sent into communities and tackle those causing the most issues
  

By Steve Doughty for the Daily Mail

Published: 07:16 EDT, 10 June 2012 | Updated: 02:57 EDT, 11 June 2012

Forceful: Communities Secretary Eric Pickles says problem families need to take more responsibility for their actions

Eric Pickles yesterday called for tougher action to rein in problem families who are expert in blaming their background and their childhood difficulties for their troubles.

The Communities Secretary said: ‘Sometimes when you meet some families, they have got  the language, they are fluent in social work.’

Mr Pickles said it was time to level blame at 120,000 ‘troubled families’ said to be at the root of high amounts of crime and social disorder.

‘Sometimes we have run away from categorising, stigmatising, laying blame,’ he said. The Government is spending £450million to try to lessen the problems these families cause, which are calculated to cost taxpayers £9billion a year.

The money will go to councils that succeed in reducing truanting, cutting crime and anti-social behaviour and helping parents get jobs.

But critics said it is likely to have little effect without greater efforts by ministers to end welfare dependency and encourage parents to form more stable families. Mr Pickles said in a newspaper interview that attempts to target help to troubled families had been frustrated in the past by politically correct attitudes among officials and politicians.

Costly: Problem families cost the country billions in social care costs, police man hours, crime and anti-social behaviour

‘Folks sat around this table saying, “We can’t call these people troubled families because that’s stigmatising them”,’ he said. ‘Well, what do you want to call them? Mildly discomforted families? No, these folks are troubled: They’re troubling themselves, they’re troubling their neighbourhood. We need to do something about it.’

The Communities Secretary said he was furious last summer when he saw three rioters on television pointing at their homes and complaining about deprivation.

‘I thought, “Bloody hell, that’s better than the house I was brought up in, much better, but I didn’t go looting”,’ he said.

He compared the attitude of troubled families to the New York delinquents in the 1950s musical West Side Story, who have a song called Gee, Officer Krupke in which they blame their drug addict mothers and drunken fathers for their problems. Mr Pickles said the song summed up an excuse culture that blights communities.

He added: ‘Come artificial boom, come bust; come tough times, come good times, these folks have been completely immune from it. It has been the easiest thing for authorities to say, “Here’s some money, go away”.’

The £450million initiative is based on concentrating the efforts of social workers and other authorities on the 120,000 families. The methods, adopted nationally by the last Labour government, involve high costs for each family targeted.

Focus: David Cameron listening to Kirsty Ireson, 15, (right) in Birmingham after announcing on December 15, 2011 spending of £448million on 'turning around' problem families

Social workers and other state staff spend large amounts of time with each family trying to encourage better behaviour.

Councils will receive £3,900 for each family they persuade to send their children to school for 85 per cent of the time, to cut anti-social behaviour by 60 per cent, and to cut youth offending by a third.

A further £4,000 will go to councils for each adult in a troubled family who holds down a job for three months.

Mr Pickles’s ministry has also set up a Troubled Families Team, headed by former Labour homelessness tsar Louise Casey, which will oversee the new system.

But Patricia Morgan, an author on family life, said: ‘It won’t work. This time next year there won’t be 120,000 troubled families, there will be more.

‘These families are lazy, feckless and irresponsible. These are old methods that have never worked. We need changes in the way people are rewarded and penalised by the state, and a dose of morality.’

Another writer on the family, Jill Kirby, said: ‘There is a link between troubled families and welfare dependency.

‘The Government should be tackling the problem at its roots rather than launching Blairite initiatives.

‘The need is for an end to welfare dependency and stronger family structures. That includes encouraging marriage as a means of improving family stability.’