‘Troubled Families’ or ‘Troubled Bankers’?

Daniela Tepe-Belfrage  - Faculty Research Fellow, Social Sciences, University of Sheffield

Johnna Montgomerie - Lecturer in Economics, Goldsmiths, University of London

Most people can accept that ‘Troubled Families’ is a scandal because it justifies welfare spending cuts.  What is significant, though, is how this scandal is made. The ‘Troubled Families’ discourse mobilises longstanding narratives of poor women with children as a ‘threat’ to the general public.  Right up until the Beveridgean welfare state, unmarried women with children (generally referred to as ‘whores’) were deemed a threat to public decency, while married poor women were a threat to public stability because they ‘bred’ countless children and thus filled the legions of the underclass.  Today, ‘Troubled Families’ are similarly a threat to the public finances and stability.  As David Cameron states:

I want to talk about troubled families.  Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase.  Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’.  Whatever you call them, we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are a source of a large proportion of the problems in society.  Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse.  Crime.  A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations.  We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money.

As of August 2014, the cost of ‘Troubled Families’ is estimated, very generously, at £30 billion, which includes the direct cost of benefits and estimated costs of services to these families.  To put this in some perspective, this is equivalent to a mere 2.3% of the (conservative) estimate of ‘direct’ costs of £1,300 billion of taxpayers’ money already spent supporting the banking sector.  Put in this context, it is clear that the ‘costs to taxpayers’ is marginal when compared to any other line of expenditure.

What is more relevant is the powerful imaginary of the threat that ‘Troubled Families’ pose to the rest of society.  In short, a ‘Troubled Family’ is a threat not simply because it has problems, but rather because it supposedly causes problems that must be dealt with using public money and services.  These families are constituted overwhelmingly by households headed by single mothers. The gender dynamics thus being statistically obvious, they are also formative of the discourses that legitimise the targeting of poor women for welfare reform, whilst leaving rich men untouched or, even worse, supported by corporate welfare.

Interviews that we have conducted with ‘Troubled Families’ programme directors in different locales as well as nationally have shown a deep gender bias, with lifestyle choices of poor women being condemned as morally wrong.  Exemplary is one programme director who expressed almost a resentment at welfare help given to poor women in need:

I think there’s an anomaly, in the sense of, going back culturally and in the government of the country, it was very much geared towards single-parents, and you’re talking about women, aren’t you?  It was very much geared up towards women and women were given three-bedroom properties, for instance, and then felt the need potentially to fill those with children.

Juxtaposing the proclaimed crisis of ‘Troubled Families’ with the apparent non-crisis of ‘Troubled Bankers’ exposes why gender matters in permanent-crisis Britain.  It is women and children that are deemed to threaten public finances and thus singled out as needing of reform.  By contrast, the hedonistic lifestyles of City bankers are not held up as the underlying cause of their welfare dependence, although they might very well be.  Their ‘private lives’ are neither the subjects nor objects of reform.