Louise Casey

Louise Casey, Baroness Casey of Blackstock, (born 29 March 1965), is a British government official working in social welfare.

Louise Casey was born on 29 March 1965 in Redruth, Cornwall, to Peggy and Martin Casey, a union representative at Plessey.

She was educated at Oaklands Catholic School, near Portsmouth, and graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a degree in history.

Casey began her career with the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), administering benefit payments for homeless people.

She then worked for the St Mungo Association, a charity that helps homeless people.

She was the deputy director of Shelter in 1992, the head of the Rough Sleepers' Unit (RSU) in 1999, a director of the national Anti-Social Behaviour Unit (ASBU) in 2003, head of the Respect Task Force in 2005 and the UK's first Victims' Commissioner in March 2010.

She became director of the Homeless Network in London, before becoming deputy director of Shelter in 1992.

Following the 1997 general election, the Labour government in December that year created the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), which had tackling rough sleeping as one of its priorities.

At Shelter she gained a reputation as an "ambitious, pragmatic worker who got results" and was largely responsible for the creation in 1998 of Shelterline, the country's first 24-hour telephone helpline for homeless people.

Introduced in 1998, an Anti-Social Behaviour Order is a civil order made against a person who has been shown, on the balance of evidence, to have engaged in anti-social behaviour.

In April 1999 the RSU was created and Casey appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair as its head, referred to in the media as the "homelessness czar".

The RSU published its strategy in December 1999.

In November 1999 Casey said that the activities of some charities had the effect of keeping homeless people on the streets: "With soup runs and other kinds of charity help, well-meaning people are spending money servicing the problem on the streets and keeping it there. Even The Big Issue is perpetuating the problem."

The editor of The Big Issue disagreed with her comments.

In November 2000, the government launched the RSU-led "Change a Life" campaign, which encouraged people to give money to homelessness charities instead of to beggars, following research suggesting that 86 per cent of beggars used drugs.

Casey said giving money to beggars was "misplaced goodwill".

The RSU achieved its target in November 2001, several months before the deadline, but allegations were made that they had used underhand tactics; Casey responded that they were false.

With her work at the RSU finished, she became director of the newly created Homelessness Directorate.

With an eventual budget of £200 million, the RSU's aim was to reduce the number of rough sleepers in England by two-thirds by April 2002.

The donations hotline set up as part of the campaign was closed in March 2002, having collected £10,000, with advertising spending of £240,000.

In January 2003, Casey became head of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit (ASBU) at the Home Office.

In September 2005, Casey was appointed head of the Respect Task Force as part of Blair's "respect agenda", becoming known as the "respect czar".

The Respect Action Plan, launched in January 2006, was designed to deal with anti-social behaviour and problematic young people and families.

In December 2007, the task force was closed down, and Casey moved to another job concerned with community policing.

Her review of "Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime" was published in 2008, being based largely on her contact with the public.

She recommended the requirement, introduced in December 2008, that offenders doing community work should wear fluorescent orange jackets with the words "community payback" printed on the backs.

In October 2009, while working as the government's neighbourhood crime adviser, Casey said that the justice system favoured criminals, and the public wanted a justice system that was not a "criminal's justice system".

On 30 March 2010, Casey was appointed the inaugural commissioner for victims and witnesses, created under the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, whose objective is to "promote the interests of victims and witnesses, encourage good practice in their treatment, and regularly review the Code of Practice for Victims which sets out the services victims can expect to receive".

As Victims' Commissioner, Casey said crime victims were treated poorly by the system, and suggested jury trials were unnecessary for many lesser offences.

She held the post from May 2010 to October 2011 and was succeeded by Baroness Newlove in March 2013.

She became director general of Troubled Families on 1 November 2011.

It was reported in September 2011 that Casey would work with Prime Minister David Cameron in dealing with the consequences of widespread rioting a month earlier, and she resigned from the position of Victims' Commissioner on 12 October 2011.

She became Director General of the Troubled Families Unit on 1 November 2011.

The programme intended to focus interventions on the 120,000 most dysfunctional families to break the cycle of abuse.

In July 2012 Casey published the Listening to Troubled Families report which featured 16 case studies following interviews with families about their situations.

In a half-way report released in November 2013, the government stated that 22,000 families had been "turned around".

In February 2020, Boris Johnson appointed her as an adviser to help tackle homelessness, and she was later appointed as Chair of the Rough Sleeping Taskforce, which was set up to curb rough sleeping during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In July 2020 she was nominated for a crossbench peerage.

In August 2021, Casey was appointed to review the circumstances and prepare a report on the spectator invasion of Wembley Stadium, London, in July 2021 when thousands of ticket-less spectators broke through security arrangements for the final of the UEFA Euro 2020 football tournament.

Later in 2021, Casey was appointed to lead an independent review of culture and standards into the Metropolitan Police in London following the Murder of Sarah Everard.