Former Troubled Families programme boss Louise Casey leaves civil service

The founding head of the Government's beleaguered Troubled Families programme is to leave the civil service, it has been announced.

Dame Louise Casey will leave government in the summer to take up “new opportunities” in the voluntary sector and academia.

She ran the programme from its foundation by David Cameron after the 2011 riots, until 2015. An official evaluation published in 2016 found that despite a £1 billion price tag, the programme failed to have any significant impact.

Dame Louise has done a number of other jobs in the civil service, most recently heading up the Casey Review into community cohesion and extremism.

The review claimed that segregation of different communities was at “worrying levels” and recommended that immigrants should take “an oath of integration with British values and society” and that schoolchildren should be taught about “British values”.

She caused controversy in January when she claimed that integration was not a "two-way street" and that she believed it was mostly the duty of immigrants to adjust to the society they were arriving in.

Dame Louise said: “It has been an incredible privilege to work at the heart of government on some of the most challenging and important areas of social policy including homelessness, poverty, protecting communities from crime and anti-social behaviour, child sexual exploitation, troubled families and social integration and exclusion.

“I would like to thank everybody who I have worked with in this time for what we have achieved together in helping those less fortunate than ourselves. I wish all those that I have had the pleasure to serve and work with over the last 18 years the very best wishes for all their future work.

“While I am leaving the Civil Service, I am not leaving public service and will be pursuing a number of issues close to my heart.”