> In British English it’s absolutely fine to treat most collective nouns as either singular or plural – you can say my husband’s family is very religious or my husband’s family are very religious.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h...

etc.

With something like collective nouns it's probably wrong to make blanket statements about correct and incorrect, even if you're a prescriptivist not descriptivist.

EDIT: And while I love (but am hopeless with) English usage this is the least interesting bit of the submitted article.