The moral, the political and social licence in digitally-driven family policy and intervention: Parents negotiating experiential knowledge and ‘other’ families

The article provides a conceptually informed empirical critique of the pursuit of social licence as a warrant for data linkage and predictive analytics in the field of family policy intervention. It draws on research focusing on parental views of digitally-driven family governance in the United Kingdom. We identify the notion of consensus that undergirds the concept of social licence that acts to obscure inequalities and silence conflict, and to reframe digital surveillance and prediction as a moral rather than political issue. Using focus group and individual interview material, we show how parents assert professional or lay experiential knowledges in making judgements about the legitimacy of and trust in operational data technologies, involving struggles between positionings as parents like ‘us’ and ‘other’ parents. We demonstrate how parents have different leverages from these unequal and morally charged social locations. Inevitably, the application of social licence in the domain of digital family policy and intervention is fractured by entrenched social divisions and inequalities.