Sometimes, it's hard not to feel to feel sorry for communities secretary, Eric Pickles. As the self-styled champion of localism in Whitehall, it is embarrassing the number of times he seems to be brought down by ‘friendly fire' from his cabinet colleagues.
Nowhere is this more so than with the Department for Education (DfT). Clearly, lurking in the bowels of their building is a Napoleonic spirit who yearns for the French system, where every teacher is a civil servant and every child reads the same textbook at the same time. The announcement of community budgets in the Comprehensive Spending Review was a welcome attempt to bring together all the various agencies involved in dealing with ‘complex families' – an eye-watering £8bn involving 600,000 families.
