Weekly Challenge 14th June 2012

Forgotten children

The government minister heaved his bulk into the radio studio. He sat across the desk from John, who was his designated interviewer today.

      ‘It will be about seven minutes before your interview starts minister. Would you like a cup of coffee while we wait?’

The minister eyed John’s mug of suspicious looking mud and refused the offer. He was used to some food with a drink and nothing was available. He passed the time listening to Evan who was trying his best to coax some English language from the lips of Robert who was reporting on the Euro crisis. He had done this many times over the last couple of years so he should have been word perfect but instead managed to managed to sound like a recent immigrant from Bakuu who was just starting his mandatory English lessons.

      Wilfred watched as the clocked slowly moved on and prepared himself for the usual cut and thrust with John. The Production Assistant on the other side of the glass in the control room counted down by folding his fingers down and then pointed to John to start the segment.

      ‘Thank you for coming on the Today program minister, to help us to understand your new proposal to help these problem families that you have talked about.’

      ‘No problem, John, it is always a pleasure to come and talk to you.’ He oozed, faking  sincerity with his usual skill.

      ‘Tell us, minister, how many problem families there are in the country and how much they are costing the tax payers.’

      ‘We in the government have calculated that, including social services and police time, it adds up to something like 238 million pounds a year John to pay for these 120,000 families.’

      ‘That is certainly a huge amount of money, minister, what is most of it spent on?’

      ‘A lot goes on social services taking children into care, rehab programs for drug users and alcohol abusers and, of course, the necessary police time to cope with the crime resulting from these abuses and the cost to the NHS coping with the consequent diseases.

      Our idea is that, by shifting some of this spend from paying for the after effects to providing more early support for problem families we will eventually reduce the money required.’

      ‘Is this something like “Sure start” , the child centrered initiative from the last government that the coalition has scrapped?’ asked John.

      ‘Not at all, the central plank of this new initiative is to get these problem families back into work by training them in the basic skills of time keeping, taking instructions and realising how industry and commerce works. If you have never had a job, it is very difficult to get to a place of work regularly and to understand what is required of you in the work place.’

      ‘So what happens to all these newly bright eyed and bushy tailed job seekers when they go out and find that there are no jobs to be had. We are after all, in a recession, you know.’

      ‘Yes, that is true, the last Labour government just threw money at the problem without sorting out the underlying issues so what happened?’

      ‘You tell me minister.’

      ‘It meant that unemployed people suddenly received a lot more money and so, when jobs became available, they were snapped up by recent immigrants allowed in from the EU under Labour’s lack of control of our borders. UK residents realised that they would be worse off if they took a job and so they stayed at home.’

      ‘Oh, I understand now minister, it is all the fault of the last government?’ asked John.

      ‘Not completely of course, but they certainly have a lot to answer for and the coalition now has to pick up the pieces and we are determined to get to grips with the problem. We have to do this while reducing the deficit so we don’t have any spare money to play with. As the economy starts to improve, we will encourage people back into work, so increasing their self esteem as they provide for their families. No one will be worse off taking a job. They will always be better off than staying on benefits. We will be setting up a task force to identify those dysfunctional families and put actions in place to help them. This will prevent the problem trickling down the generations.’

      ‘That sounds very laudable, minister, but how will you identify these families?’

      ‘There will be a range of identifiers, John. These will include, poor performance of the children at school, truancy, free school meals, unemployed parents, alcohol and drug abuse and poor parenting skills. No one of these items on their own, of course, show a problem family but taken together, we have found that they are a fairly reliable set of indicators.’

      ‘I see, so lets take an example, erm, say a family spends a lot of time in a pub with their young children, setting a bad example on alcohol use and then goes home leaving their eight year old in the pub because they had had too much to drink, presumably, to remember to take them home. Would that qualify as a dysfunctional family under your set of identifiers?’ asked John smoothly, trying to be helpful.

      ‘Well, yes, of course that is exactly the type of family that we would be targeting. Are either of the parents unemployed?’

      ‘In the example I am thinking of, the father has a temporary job but he is likely to be unemployed in a couple of years time.’

      ‘Well, in that case, even more so, it is essential that we target a family like that before they cause even more trouble,’ insisted the minister.

      ‘Ok then, if I give you the address of that family, would you get the officials in your task force to go and help them?’ asked John with an innocent look on his face.

      ‘Yes, I would be very keen to have that address and we will get started working with that family straight away.’

      ‘I have it here minister, it is 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London. Do you need the post code or the surname of the family?’

      ‘Err, umm, no, err, I don’t think so,’ stuttered Wilfred as he felt his ministerial career gurgling down the drain. ‘That is ludicrous, of course, there is no way that the Camerons are a dysfunctional family.’ He said desperately trying to regain some sort of dignity as his face turned red and sweat started dripping down his face. ‘You just proposed some spurious indicators just to trip me up.’

      ‘No minister, I just wanted to show you that if you are posh and rich, you can get away with anything. If that family had been poor and unemployed, I am sure your task force would have been around to sort them out and probably have taken their children into care  and put the parents into an alcohol rehab clinic before you could say Ian Duncan Smith,’ summarised John. ‘Thank you minister. Now it’s time for sport with Rob.’