Another misleading half-truth from Ed Balls

Yesterday, Ed "I quite often lie about figures on the radio" Balls MP, responded to an article in the Sunday Express about 24 hour surveillance of problem families with the following on Twitter.

Ah yes Ed, but your Respect Agenda does talk about something called "core residential units" and the official Respect Guide notes that,

Intensive outreach programme to families in their own homes

Families are visited by project staff within their own home who provide/refer to structured individual and family sessions to work with the family on a range of issues identified as causing their anti-social behaviour.

Intensive outreach programme to families in dispersed accommodation

Families are provided with a non-secure tenancy by the project. Staff visit and provide/refer to structured individual and family sessions to work with the family on a range of issues identified as causing their anti-social behaviour. If the family complies with interventions and
behaviour improves sufficiently then the tenancy can be made secure.

Intensive support programme in supervised accommodation

Families in this type of provision receive 24-hour support and supervision from staff in accommodation provided by the project.

Hmmm, so you're not going to have "CCTV in families' homes", but you are going to have "CCTV in the place where identified families live".

I'd say the "complete and total nonsense" is your semantics Ed. You are planning on putting families under surveillance and from what I can tell most of it will be done in an extra-judicial manner.

I think it's about time someone photoshopped you as Judge Dredd.

Update: I seem to bothered Tom Harris with this post. He has taken issue with me using quotation marks when I said,

Hmmm, so you're not going to have "CCTV in families' homes", but you are going to have "CCTV in the place where identified families live".

Apparently the second piece in quotes could be conceived to be from the Government document.

Now, I have faith in my readers to know how I write and spot that I rather obviously took Ed Balls' comment and repeated it with a change between "homes" and "where identified families live". I did this precisely because if you read the document, as the sections above show, there will be unit's where families will have to "live" which will be under 24/7 "supervision"?.

You can't monitor/supervise someone 24 hours a day without putting them under surveillance, and the idea that the monitoring will take the form of a social worker shadowing someone's every move every minute of the day is absurd, ergo it stands to reason that closed-circuit recording devices would have to be used.

Of course, if they don't use closed-circuit recording devices then I fail to see how they can make the claim they'll be supervising 24 hours a day. Ironically, that would be misleading too.