Introduction

While conditionality has been a facet of the UK welfare state since its birth, academic and policy literature has highlighted that there has been increasing conditionality in the design, referral criteria and delivery of welfare support services, particularly in the last two decades (Watts et al, 2014; Ball et al, 2016). Conditionality can be defined as a contractual relationship based on ideas of social responsibility, where the citizen receives social assistance from the state, which is reciprocated by practices of positive behaviour change by the citizen (Dwyer, 2004).The ‘terms’ of conditionality are therefore inherently behaviour-based.

Individuals have access to their social rights only if certain (governmentally defined) desirable behaviours are performed. This is often linked to ideas of the neoliberal worker-citizen, where individuals must demonstrate their independence from the state through jobseeking behaviours (Gray, 2014). Conditionality is not limited to social security benefits only, but is also applicable in other areas of national and local social policy, including parenting, housing and education. For example, in the context of housing, the tenant must adhere to certain tenancy conditions, including not committing anti-social behaviour, in order to maintain tenure.

Both long-standing and new behaviour-based expectations that are placed on families accessing certain benefits and public services are not always fully understood or easily adopted by families themselves. Consequently, vulnerable families continue to garner the attention of services, due to frequently facing periods of crisis and, more recently, increasingly finding their benefits being sanctioned, as they are unable to meet the required behavioural expectations. In turn, this has created ongoing demands by politicians for more intensive and enforcement-based approaches to address unacceptable behaviour, including those that ‘grip’ the whole family and their problems before long-term effects of poor behaviour manifest themselves (CLG, 2012). The development of Intensive Intervention Projects and the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) – programmes rolled out nationally to work intensively with families to correct problematic behaviour – established during New Labour and the Coalition governments respectively, are examples of this approach to dealing with ‘problem families’. They are the focus of this chapter.