Jayne Dowle: If we patronise troubled families, we will not make them change their ways

Emma Harrison, the Sheffield social entrepreneur billed as the Prime Minister’s “families czar”, reckons that taking on problem families on an individual, case-by-case basis is the only way for the Government will tackle endemic social problems.

And those doing the adopting will be Ministers, MPs, government advisors, and possibly, me or you.

The idea is that “respectable” middle class folk would become “family champions” to pitch in and help those less fortunate with matters such as financial planning and tackling bureaucracy.

It sounds nice on paper, doesn’t it? But on paper is the only place it is ever going to work.

I can just see me rocking up to the school gate in a couple of weeks, seeking out a feckless single mother with a raft of kids and offering myself up as a paragon of virtue. As if I really know any better than she does.

Just because I have a husband, and a job, doesn’t give me the right to tell her how to live her life. In fact, I could probably learn a few things from her. Like how to fill in benefit forms with exactly the right words to get free school dinners.

I really don’t think anyone is in a place where they are automatically qualified to dish out advice, unless it is sought. It’s different if you are asked.

As something of a “geriatric” mother, I know other mothers old enough to be my own daughter.

When they’re struggling with the idea of going back to work perhaps, or worrying about relationships, I have been known to act as de facto mum to them, or perhaps make that big sister. But I would never force my opinions, and certainly not in any semi-official capacity. It’s just so, well, patronising. Call it “mentoring” if you like, but we might as well go back to when the good women of the parish went out administering alms to the poor.

And how would we choose which members of “the poor” to help? Only those who looked pretty, like on those little fund-raising envelopes we used to bring home from Sunday School to help the African babies?

Anyway, don’t we already have a system of social workers whose (paid) job is to help those families who need it? You can only imagine how they would resent having yet another agency pitching in. Or is this latest initiative an admission that social services are simply no longer up to the job? And Sure Start, set up to help families under New Labour, is already being re-targeted at the neediest, with a legion of health visitors and advisors who are supposed to be there for the sole purpose of supporting vulnerable children.

Talk about helping with bureaucracy. This idea would simply make a bigger mess. Surely it would be better to undertake a root-and-branch re-organisation of the entire existing set-up, rather than bolting on yet another level?

And this obsession with individual families ignores the bigger picture. Far better to look to the communities, villages and towns – and there are plenty in Yorkshire – where strong, established values of looking out for each other and helping your neighbour come naturally and have not yet had to be manufactured.

In places like Barnsley where I live, we have our problems, no doubt, but there is still communal pride to shame those who let their kids thieve and fight and mug and deal drugs into sorting themselves out.

Let’s look at what we get – generally – right, and others get so wrong. Or is it the case that weeding out specific families is easier than challenging the sweeping themes of unemployment and plummeting social aspiration?

I am sure multi-millionaire Emma Harrison genuinely wants to help. But you can’t run a country as if it’s a television programme. It costs too much money, for a start.

She is well-known for her appearance in Channel Four’s The Secret Millionaire, in which she swapped her super-comfortable lifestyle for a week on a Dagenham council estate, handing out advice and largesse to those deemed to deserve it.

Like Iain Duncan Smith who speaks a lot of sense about “Broken Britain”, she clearly supports the idea of “early intervention” which suggests that certain young people need help early on in their lives to prevent them from being sucked into a cycle of delinquency.

Only a fool would argue with the fundamental sense of this. But the problem is that the scheme suggested by Ms Harrison purports the divisive idea of “them and us” which causes so many social ills in the first place.

It places one group in society automatically above another, and assumes to them the moral high ground without really giving them any justification for taking it.

If you’re looking for one of the reasons why young people appeared so immune to authority earlier this month, there it is, staring you in the face.

It’s not quite Prince Charles and Camilla making soothing noises on the riot-torn streets of Tottenham, but it’s almost as awkward. We’re all in this together? I don’t think so.