Trouble shooting

Louise Casey's report for  the Department of Communities and Local Government, Listening to Troubled Families,  suggests above all that long term problems need long term solutions.  Based on interviews with 16 such families, Louise Casey stresses that "the traditional approach of services reaching individual family members, at crisis point or after, and trying to fix single issues such as 'drug use', 'non-attendance at school' or 'domestic violence' in these families is most often destined to fail."  In this way it endorses the government's commitment to Family Intervention Projects and to the payment by results Troubled Families Programme.  Critics of the approach, such as those who contributed  a recent BMJ editorial, suggest that evidence for the effectiveness of Family Intervention Projects is poor, however.