Introduction

When David Cameron (2011b) launched the TFP in December 2011, he remarked that the thing he was ‘really passionate about’ was ‘fixing the responsibility deficit’. If we, as a country, were to address the ‘broken society’, Cameron believed that it was ‘only by recognising the problem that we can fix what's gone wrong’. Cameron's focus was firmly on those families he labelled ‘troubled’ and the gaze of the TFP has remained firmly on those families and the activities of the workers tasked with ‘turning them around’. Workers have been expected to ‘look at the family from the inside out’ (DCLG, 2012a: 4) in attempting to make ‘troubled families’ take responsibility for the circumstances in which they find themselves. The heart of the TFP remains on a supposedly strong relationship between different individuals and the ‘service transformation’ in local authorities that is being driven by the TFP. Such a perspective, Garrett (2013: 8) argues, ‘under-theorises’ the role of the state and, more specifically, central government, and means that the resolution of family troubles is ‘entirely displaced onto micro-encounters’ between workers and families. The ‘private troubles’ of hundreds of thousands of families are never viewed as the ‘public issues’ they undoubtedly are (Wright Mills, 1959).

Bourdieu's advice to be wary of ‘pre-constructed’ problems, and drawing on many other sociologists who advocated the need to ‘study up’ in different ways, encourages us to look away from the problems presented or created by the state. The focus in this chapter shifts from the emergence and evolution of the TFP to developments in other areas of social policy and welfare administration taking place at the same time.