Of all the cowflop that David Cameron speaks, there is no bigger pile than his deceitful and misleading “culture of entitlement” line on people on benefits.

Lives on benefits are not, as Cameron would have us believe, simple and sorry stories of unreal “expectations” from people who believe “the state will support you whatever decisions you make… you can have a home of your own… you will always be able to take out, no matter what you put in.”

It’s one of modern politics’ most loathsome sells: this notion that people who need state support hold any cards, let alone all of them. The idea of a culture of entitlement is entirely romantic. There’s nothing left for anyone to feel entitled to. No aspect of taking state money in this day and age is painless, or liberating – except, perhaps, if you’re a bailed-out banker.

The civil servant who thinks she can fix troubled families

For the first time, local councils will be allowed "without informed consent" to access benefit records. The idea is to build up a map of troubled families – which will be shared with other agencies such as the police, GPs and housing associations.

Casey, a self-confessed Guardian reader, believes that, for all the liberal hand-wringing over the prospect of a too-powerful state assaulting civil liberties, more lives are blighted by the erosion of authority than by its extension. "We need to find out what is happening in relation to all of the data. I don't think that is about someone's civil rights. I think it's about their right to get help and the system's right to challenge them to take it."

In fact, Casey's unit is the culmination of 20 years' drift rightwards in social policy. She has little time for academics who claim there is no link between poverty and crime. Troubled families, she says, are leading to a collapse of the communities they live in.

"If you have such a high proportion of these problems [little cash, mental health problems, poor housing], you are disproportionately more likely not to be in school, more likely to be involved in crime, more likely to be workless."

She recalls how she came to the conclusion that spending cash on prettifying estates did little to help change people's lives – they simply carried on with destructive lifestyles in nicer surroundings. As head of the Labour government's antisocial behaviour unit she would turn up to housing estates that had just been "renovated" and find "small people wandering the housing estate".

She recalls: "I am counting the number of kids wandering around, and wondering what the hell they are all doing there. I realised then [that] we needed to get through [people's] front doors early and that you could not just ignore behaviour ... If that makes me politically incorrect so be it. I think it is the right thing to do."

She recalls how she came to the conclusion that spending cash on prettifying estates did little to help change people's lives – they simply carried on with destructive lifestyles in nicer surroundings. As head of the Labour government's antisocial behaviour unit she would turn up to housing estates that had just been "renovated" and find "small people wandering the housing estate".

The government is paying a company to wake teenagers up in an effort to get them back to work, under a new scheme.

The firm, in the north-east of England, said it was "just one small part of the mentoring approach we have got".

And young people were also driven to interviews and helped to get into the habit of "turning up on time" to jobs.

Nick Clegg's £126m Youth Contract aims to cut the number of England's "Neets" - 16 and 17-year-olds not in education, employment or training.

The deputy prime minister has encouraged the firms chosen to deliver the scheme to be "creative" in their approach to getting poorly-qualified and often troubled youngsters into the workforce.

Pertemps People Development Group, a national training organisation awarded a Youth Contract in the north-east said it had found wake-up calls a useful way "to help young people develop a routine".
'Personal relationship'

Marketing director Paul King said youngsters who didn't have stable families and had dropped out of school "appreciated the fact that that there is someone there who cares for them".

Mentors were encouraged to "build up a personal relationship with these people" and would also drive them to interviews or jobs and instil in them "the importance of turning up on time".

Mr King said lateness was one of the most common reasons for young people being sacked - and ex-offenders were often better organised and more punctual than some of the Neets his organisation was trying to help.

Charities and businesses selected to help the 55,000 Neet youngsters return to college or find jobs will be paid by results.

Another company, in Yorkshire, will use ex-soldiers to deliver motivational sessions to disaffected young people through the Heroes to Inspire campaign.

The organisations get up to £2,200 for every young person helped, but the full amount will only be paid if the youngster is still in full-time education, training or work six months later.

Mr Clegg, who in 2011 vowed to stand up for "alarm clock" Britain - basic-rate taxpayers who get up in the dark to get ready for work - said the firms selected to deliver the scheme should "be as creative and innovative as they can".

Almost one in five young people aged between 16 and 24 are classified as Neet - with the most recent figure standing at 1,163,000.

The three-year programme will focus on 16 to 17-year-old Neets with no A*-to-C GCSEs who are at the highest risk of long-term disengagement.

Mr Clegg's scheme came in for heavy criticism from Labour when it was launched, with shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne saying it would not help 95% of young unemployed people.

Labour called the scheme "too small and much too late" and unions said it would not make up for cuts in other areas.

Chris Keates, leader of the Nasuwt teachers' union, has accused Mr Clegg of being responsible for an increase in Neets by scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance.

This thing is only intended to help a small number though, isn't it? NEET refers not just to jobs but employment and training. Those with no qualifications wouldn't be education, so EMA isn't really relevant to them. Though there are a million youth unemployed, most of those will be OK. These probably won't so are worth targeting specially.

But I certainly take your smokescreen point.

It just reinforces the stereotype of young people being lazy and unwilling to work. They readily quote Mr King about how prisoners in his experience are better at time keeping. He offers no evidence for such a statement. Yet, it's put in there without scrutiny.

Isn't the NASUWT guy's point that scrapping the EMA which was designed to keep kids in education will inevitably lead to more dropping out, and becoming, well, NEETS.

But the people referred to here wouldn't have been in education because they didn't get a C.

The Conservative former leader of North Hertfordshire District Council has raised eyebrows by suggesting that culled pigeons could be used as a “food source”. With officials in the town of Royston set to use a hawk to kill off hundreds of pigeons, Councillor John Smith ventured we should eat them:


“I’m being perfectly serious that pigeon pie is not eaten as often as it used to be – in other words shot pigeons give us a food source.”

Perhaps he should stage a press stunt to promote the idea — is Cordelia Gummer still available?