Introduction: ‘Looking for trouble’

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides a background for the establishment of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), a single central government programme that aims to ‘turn around’ the lives of trouble families. The government used existing research carried out on families experiencing multiple structural disadvantages such as poverty, material deprivation, low skills, and poor-quality housing to prove that the troubled families were characterised by crime, antisocial behaviour, truancy, and worklessness. The chapter shows that troubled families were also associated with a much wider range of problems including drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, child abuse and poor physical and mental health, gang membership, radical extremism, and organised crime.