Introduction

The TFP has been likened to a ‘policy fiasco’ (Lambert, 2016) and a ‘policy disaster’ (Portes, 2016) and it would not be stretching it too far to call it an ‘omnishambles’ with mistakes made at almost every turn. While there has been a degree of public and academic scrutiny of many of the overblown claims of the programme, there has been less written of the deceit, underhandedness and political chicanery that has been evident throughout the programme. From the misrepresentation of research surrounding 120,000 disadvantaged families at the outset of the programme, to claims of a near perfect success rate and the criticism of researchers who challenged official claims, the TFP has been built on a sort of structural duplicity that requires closer attention. Louise Casey has argued that ‘people like me and others … believe we have nothing to hide and nothing to be worried about’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2016a: 8) in relation to scrutiny of the TFP. Casey used the same turn of phrase, stating she had ‘nothing to hide’ (BBC, 2001), when she was accused of involvement with homelessness figures being fiddled. Some light-touch muckraking research, however, suggests that the government not only has plenty to hide in its representation of ‘troubled families’, but that it has also managed to marginalise and deflect attention away from important determinants of the lives of disadvantaged families.

A wide variety of dirty data is raked into a heap in the following section, providing a summary of some of the deceptions associated with the TFP that are widely known or have already been discussed in this book. This summary includes misrepresentations of the kinds of ‘troubles’ faced or caused by families involved with the programme, the invented survey that ‘proved’ the need for radical reform, attempts to pressure local authorities into claiming for more ‘turned around’ families, the suppression of the official evaluation, and attempts to undermine critics of the programmes claims of success. to pressure local authorities into claiming for more ‘turned around’ families, the suppression of the official evaluation, and attempts to undermine critics of the programmes claims of success.