View report page

APPENDIX A
PROBLEM FAMILIES IN LONDON
An account of the position in London in 1956
Introduction
in recent years increasing attention has been focused on the measures that can
be taken to prevent neglect and ill-treatment of children and to avoid the break-up
of families. Greater prominence has thus been given to the needs of what have become
known as 'problem families'—i.e. those families who have not responded to the
general improvement in social conditions, who are unable by their own efforts to raise
the standards of their families and homes to a reasonable level and who have failed to
make full use of the social services of which they are in need. It was stated in Ministry
of Health Circular 27/54 that 'children in the "problem families", where one or both
parents arc often handicapped by physical ill-health or are of low intelligence or suffering
from mental instability, arc peculiarly exposed to physical neglect and risk of mental
illness such as psychological disturbance and retarded mental development. Problem
families thus tend to reproduce themselves in the next generation and cost the community
an expense out of all proportion to their numbersThus, the continued
existence of such families in the community, and their active or passive resistance to all
attempts to improve their standards, constitutes a challenge to the social services and is
a problem which must be tackled effectively by the statutory and voluntary agencies
concerned with the health and welfare of the community. Many enquiries have been
made into the reasons why these families remain apparently unmoved by the improved
social conditions around them and efforts have been made to ascertain how best their
living standards may be raised. In the event, the possibility may have to be accepted,
and allowed for, that a number of the parents in these families will always remain an
intermittent burden on society, despite intensive ease work, but the case worker, by
prompting and subsequently sustaining the parents to provide the most they are capable
of, may well achieve success with the children and so break the unhappy cycle which
would otherwise lead to the production of new problem families in the next generation.
To understand why there is such interest in this problem it is necessary, however, to
refer to the development of the social services in this country in recent vears.
The
background
to social
legislation
Up to the end of the war in 1945 our social services had been deployed mainly to
serve the needs of individuals and there had been an emphasis generally on physical
needs and the improvement of environmental conditions. After the war it became
accepted that it must be the duty of the State to intervene and to overcome the five
giant evils listed by Lord Beveridge as Disease, Want, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness,
so as to raise physical, mental and moral standards, and to afford greater opportunities
for development to the nation. The measures of social legislation passed after the
war—the Family Allowance Act, 1945, the National Health Service Act, 1946; the
National Insurance and the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Acts, 1946, and the
Children and National Assistance Acts, 1948—changed the pattern of the social and
welfare services by transferring to the State the basic responsibility for the continued
welfare of all members of the community and made available to all without distinction
the benefits of these services. The expectation then was that these social reforms,
supported by full employment and assisted by the post-war rehousing drives, would
usher in a new era of progress and achievement based on a society whose basic needs
were guaranteed by the State. However, it is apparent that this expectation is not to
be realised in full immediately, for the new legislation, coupled with general advances
in living standards and education, has thrown into sharp relief the continued existence
of problems which the legislation itself was intended to solve.
The needs of
the family
Reasons have to be found for the apparent failure of the new social services so far
as a minority of families arc concerned, and here it may be apposite to quote from
150