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Since completing her report, she has made little effort to sugar-coat her findings.

After Alexis Jay’s independent inquiry estimated that, between 19, at least 1400 children in Rotherham had been abused, Casey was tasked by Eric Pickles to inspect the council and decide whether Rotherham was fit for purpose. Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth Casey has had to deliver has been her report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. “Uncomfortable truths are still true,” she adds. This response is frustrating for Casey, who says she always bases her recommendations on evidence, and isn’t trying to go out of her way to be ‘difficult’. So on the one hand they say: ‘Louise, come back and tell us what we need to do to do something better’ and then you find yourself with a permanent secretary – not a current one I might add – who says to you: ‘You’re just too difficult for us Louise, we don’t really want to hear it.’” “Sometimes people don’t like hearing that things aren’t good enough. Unapologetic about her methods, Casey admits she often finds the typical Whitehall style of management challenging. “If I had arrived in the Home Office and said: ‘I tell you what everyone, the solution to all of these yobs on the street is, actually, if you just spend millions of pounds and stick them into youth clubs, all your problems will be over,’ I’d have been hailed and loved by everybody! Instead, I said we need to do a crackdown on anti-social behaviour, because that’s actually the right thing to do.” Presenting Casey with her award, Hodge joked that while Casey has never managed not to swear during a select committee hearing, she “has support across the political system”.Ĭasey admits that her outspoken style has not always been popular, but then again, she isn’t trying to be popular. That has driven me throughout my entire life, and I have had the extraordinary privilege, and it is an extraordinary privilege, to have been paid by the taxpayer to do that for the last 16 years.”ĭescribed by Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge as a “bloody good thing for the civil service”, Casey was awarded the PAC award at last year’s Civil Service Awards, making it a double whammy for the Troubled Families team, who also won the Policy Award. A society is only as good as how it treats its most vulnerable. “When I was much younger, I never thought that anything was too difficult to solve. “On a very personal level, I am motivated to try and do something about disadvantage, and that predates coming into the civil service,” Casey says. What drives her to take on some of the most challenging work in Whitehall? Never one to shy away from a challenge, she has also – at the behest of communities secretary Eric Pickles – spent the last six months conducting an in-depth investigation into Rotherham Council’s failure to address widespread child sexual exploitation in the community. Then, in 2010, she was appointed as Whitehall’s first victims and witnesses commissioner, a role created following a critical report by victims’ champion Sara Payne, mother of murdered schoolgirl Sarah.Ĭurrently the director general of the Troubled Families Programme – a £448m initiative that works with councils to tackle the underlying problems of 120,000 British families identified as “troubled” – Casey has worked solidly to ensure the programme hits target by May 2015. Having met the Labour government’s target of reducing rough sleepers by two-thirds by April 2002, Casey went on to head up the Anti-social Behaviour Unit. Troubled Families on track to hit target, Eric Pickles announces She didn’t want to come in, and I just said to her: ‘Well, I’m not leaving you here.’”Ĭivil servants should take more ownership of policy – Casey “I was talking to people to try and get them to do something about it. “Everybody was refusing to engage because the girl was making an ‘active choice’ to be there,” Casey remembers. She might have been 16 – but she was awfully young – and she was a care leaver, and I just felt this extraordinary sense of anger that that was how she ended up,” Casey recalls of her time at the Rough Sleepers Unit, which she led between 19. “I have an image, which I will carry forever, of a tiny blonde girl sitting outside McDonalds on The Strand late into the evening, begging. Photos by Tal CohenĪs one of Whitehall’s most outspoken civil servants, Louise Casey has always been vocal about the government’s responsibility to protect the vulnerable.

From the homeless and crime victims to the abused children of Rotherham, Louise Casey has spent her career fighting for society’s most vulnerable.

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