Our task is to improve a system that is already very effective, albeit far from perfect.
Fewer children are going into care. Crime is reduced. The taxpayer is saving money. The Government was right to defy the critics of this initiative.
The second piece in a five-part series on ConHome on a new Manifesto to Strengthen Families, which will be launched in Parliament this week.
A focus on children in isolation misses the need for stable families.
The Government is not only for the JAMs (Just About Managing), but now also apparently for the NAAMs (Not At All Managing).
There is plenty of evidence that married couples provide children with a major head-start in life, but this privilege is increasingly confined to the wealthy.
The tale of the Troubled Families programme helps to prove that if the state doesn’t work properly, we won’t gain from leaving the EU.
We can fret about statistical counterfactuals. But nobody disputes that 116,654 families have been turned round.
Half of all family breakdown now takes place among unmarried parents either during pregnancy or before their child’s second birthday.
This programme has transformed the lives of thousands of families. Both they and the people who helped them should be proud.
Measuring women’s status by earning power alone ignores the enormous role full-time motherhood plays in children’s life chances.
I am a strong advocate of a family test. However, I don’t want the focus to be a bureaucratic test but a human one: call it the Lucy Test.
Acting on Centre for Social Justice insights has become become central to the Prime Minister’s legacy aspirations.
My decades of experience suggest that the knowledge, experience, and will to combat this crisis is out there. We need to tap it.