The issues that arise in responding to repeat reports to the police of people missing from institutional locations (such as hospitals, mental health units and children's residential care) are the focus of this article. This focus relates to the broader issue of policing vulnerability and the concepts of 'duty of care', 'safeguarding' and 'risk' as they apply to role of the police in their response to missing people. The current study is based on research on 1,321 missing persons cases that were closed in 2011; these cases came from 149 institutional locations in a police force in central England and account for nearly half of all repeat reports to the police in this force area. The top ten organisational addresses accounted for over a quarter (27.6%, 364 of 1,321) of the repeat reports over a one year period. Seven of these organisational addresses are private children's care homes (275 reports, 75.5% of the top 10 reporting locations) and three are mental health units (89 reports, 24.5% of the top 10 reporting locations). The cost to the police of responding to reports from these 10 locations is estimated to be between £482,250 to £879,060. The article highlights that a significant part of police work on missing people relates to institutional locations that present the police with different types of potential risk.

This article outlines and critiques a key area of contemporary social policy in England: the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), launched in 2011. This is a national programme which aims to 'turn around' the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in England by 2015. Troubled families are characterised as those who have problems and cause problems to those around them. Troubled Families can be viewed as a 'wicked problem' in the sense that the issues surrounding these families tend to be reconceptualised regularly and re-solved differently, depending on changes in government. The article critically reviews the evidence base for the overall approach of the programme and the way the scale and nature of the issue is understood. It debates whether this is a case of evidence based policy or policy based evidence. Early indications are that behavioural change is likely to be achieved in some families (increased school attendance, reductions in anti-social behaviour and crime), but that addressing worklessness (a key focus of the programme) presents the biggest challenge. An even bigger challenge is helping families to find work that will move them out of poverty. The article draws on ongoing research in two contrasting local authorities implementing the programme.

This paper focuses on offending behaviour and children in residential care. The paper considers whether children's residential care is a ‘criminogenic’ environment, i.e. whether this type of care environment helps to provide the conditions that produce crime or criminality. The paper draws on the findings from recently completed research on 10 children's homes in a large county local authority in England. This paper focuses on the patterns shown in trend data collected on problematic and offending data across these homes over a 7‐year period (2001–2007) and a 1‐year cohort study of 46 young people. Interviews with care staff and young people are used to contextualize these patterns. The data provide evidence of an environment where conflict and offending behaviour are common. It is argued that the residential care environment, particularly for older teenagers, often presents a set of risks that tend to reinforce offending behaviour and that this is in part due to its ‘last resort’ status.

Evidence-based policy making presents challenges for researchers as the pragmatic imperative of delivering 'the right information, at the right time, for the right people' can appear to compromise traditional academic roles and responsibilities. Using the recent evaluation of the UK Cabinet Office-led 'Better Government for Older People' programme as a case study, we discuss attempts to meet these challenges in practice. Our experience confirms that there has been a shift from the assumption of rational models (i.e. that evidence will be used as part of a linear planning process) to a more 'realistic' perspective in which evidence from research requires advocates to promote its potential contribution. In turn, this suggests that it is in the interest of the research community to try to understand the policy-making process, and so design, undertake and disseminate their research in a way that maximizes the likelihood of its use in actively contributing to policy development. K E Y WO R D S : action research; evidence-based policy; policy evaluation; role of the evaluator; utilization

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