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We investigate the labour market situation of older individuals in Europe in relation to their previous employment history as well as the regulations relating to employment protection legislation and early retirement. Specifically, we look at the competing risks of early retirement and late career unemployment. The central research question is whether policy effects differ according to the characteristics of an individual's previous work history. We employ data for twelve European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARELIFE) and estimate multilevel regression models. The results show different mechanisms for the risks of unemployment and early retirement. Late career unemployment results from individual factors related to fragmented careers, marginal employment and short tenures. In the case of early retirement, we find the interplay of individual and policy factors to be crucial. Persons with consistent careers have an increased probability of early retirement, but only in countries with generous early retirement benefits. However, employment protection legislation appears to counteract early retirement for this group of individuals. We conclude that policy factors do not have uniform effects for older individuals, but should rather be viewed against the background of previous developments in individual career paths.

User involvement has become an explicit goal within social service provision. Even so, the term remains ambiguous, and its implementation troublesome. Implementation theory lists a number of factors influencing bureaucratic behaviour; in this paper we investigate the ‘human factor’. Our ambition is to provide a framework for analysis of user influence in activation programmes that includes the individual characteristics of both service users and service providers. Building on theoretical insights from the literature on activation and agency, we develop a framework that distinguishes between two ideal types of service users: Pawns and Queens, and two types of service providers: care-oriented Carers and rule-oriented Clerks. This framework is then applied to identify key challenges for the interaction between users and caseworkers in two challenging situations: when service users express little or no agency and when they express agency that is incompatible with the overall goals of the programme. We find that Carers show pronounced reluctance to overrule the choices made by service users even when they have conflicting views – and tend to postpone decisions when they interact with Pawns. Clerks tend to overrule the decisions of Queens when they have conflicting views, and to make decisions on behalf of Pawns. The analysis draws on data collected from 126 qualitative interviews with service providers and participants in the Norwegian Introductory Programme for immigrants and a survey of 320 caseworkers.

Data from household surveys have increasingly been used as a basis for social policy. They are generally inappropriate for obtaining information about the poorest, and therefore for policies concerned with tackling poverty and deprivation. They omit certain groups by design: the homeless; those in institutions; and mobile, nomadic or pastoralist populations. In addition, in practice, they typically under-represent those in fragile, disjointed or multiple occupancy households, those in urban slums and those in areas deemed as insecure. These sub-groups constitute a pretty comprehensive, ostensive definition of the ‘poorest’.

The sources of worldwide estimates of the missing populations are briefly described, with those for the UK discussed in greater detail, paying attention to their likely income and wealth. At least 250 million of the poorest of the poor are omitted worldwide; and in the UK about half a million of the poorest are missing from survey sample frames.

In the UK, these ‘missing’ population sub-groups bias the analysis of income inequalities and affect the validity of formulae that have been developed for the geographical allocation of resources to health and social care.

‘Creaming’ and ‘parking’ are endemic concerns within quasi-marketised welfare-to-work (WTW) systems internationally, and the UK's flagship Work Programme for the long-term unemployed is something of an international pioneer of WTW delivery, based on outsourcing, payment by results and provider flexibility. In the Work Programme design, providers’ incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ differently positioned claimants are intended to be mitigated through the existence of nine payment groups (based on claimants' prior benefit type) into which different claimants are allocated and across which job outcome payments for providers differ. Evaluation evidence suggests however that ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ practices remain common. This paper offers original quantitative insights into the extent of claimant variation within these payment groups, which, contrary to the government's intention, seem more likely to design in rather than design out ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’. In response, a statistical approach to differential payment setting is explored and is shown to be a viable and more effective way to design a set of alternative and empirically grounded payment groups, offering greater predictive power and value-for-money than is the case in the current Work Programme design.

The concept of the ‘social investment state’ refocuses attention on the productive function of social policy eclipsed for some time by the emphasis on its social protection or compensation roles. Here we distinguish between different social investment strategies, the Nordic ‘heavy’ and the Liberal ‘light’, with particular reference to the inclusive growth approach adopted in Australia. In 2007, social democrats in Australia returned to government with a clear mandate to reject the labour market deregulation and other neoliberal policies of its predecessor, and to tackle entrenched social and economic disadvantage in Australian society. For the last five years, social investment and inclusive growth has been at the centre of the Australian social policy agenda. Against this background, the article examines and critically assesses the (re)turn to ‘social investment’ thinking in Australia during Labor's term in office (2007–13). Analysis focuses not just on what was actually achieved, but also on the constraining role of prevailing economic and political circumstances and on the processes that were used to drive social investment reform. In many ways, the article goes some way to exposing ongoing tensions surrounding the distinctiveness of ‘social investment’ strategies pursued by leftist parties within the (neo)liberal state.

In England, policy piloting has become firmly established in almost all areas of public policy and is seen as good practice in establishing ‘what works’. However, equating piloting with evaluation can risk oversimplifying the relationship between piloting and policy-making.

Using three case studies from health and social care – the Partnerships for Older People Projects (POPP) pilots, the Individual Budgets pilots and the Whole System Demonstrators (WSD) – the paper identifies multiple purposes of piloting, of which piloting for generating evidence of effectiveness was only one. Importantly, piloting was also aimed at promoting policy change and driving implementation, both in pilot sites and nationally. Indeed, policy makers appeared to be using pilots mainly to promote government policy, using evaluation as a strategy to strengthen the legitimacy of their decisions and to convince critical audiences. These findings highlight the ambiguous nature of piloting and thus question the extent to which piloting contributes to the agenda of evidence-based policy-making.

This paper offers a constructive critique of a recent account, in this journal, of the place of compassion as a virtue within social policy. The critique suggests that the ‘compassion thesis’ collapses into an account of duty rather than virtue, and that compassion as a virtue can only be exercised by individuals, and not by institutions. The paper goes on to suggest an alternative account of the relationship between social policy institutions and the virtue of compassion. It develops a broadly Humean account of ‘sympathy’ triggered by proximity to distress. In this alternative account, social policy is used to create the background conditions in which individuals are moved, and able, to exercise the virtues of sympathy and compassion. Special attention is paid to housing and mixed communities policy as a means of creating the social proximity that may underpin a welfare culture of understanding rather than blame.

While the concept of migrant integration is a contested one, national, sub-national and local governments over the past forty to fifty years have professed support for integration in various forms. However, practical measures have been rare, with broad race-relations policies from the 1960s being the primary means of ‘inclusion’. Under New Labour, refugees were identified as a migrant population with particular challenges and they have been the only migrant group subject to specific integration programmes. Nevertheless, policy and rhetoric about asylum seekers and refugees more generally have tended to operate against integration and have made it increasingly difficult for refugees to rebuild their lives. This paper examines refugee integration from the perspectives of the refugees themselves, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It also looks at the governance of integration in Scotland and highlights Scottish distinctiveness vis-à-vis the UK. The article suggests that the consequences of broader UK Government policy around asylum and refugee issues negates any positive support in the form of refugee integration programmes and actively inhibits integration.

Despite the growth of cash transfers to reduce poverty, promote child and family well-being and women's empowerment, the gender dynamics and impact of social protection remains poorly understood. We hypothesise that poor female care-givers receiving a cash transfer for their children are better able to contribute to the material and social well-being of their children than female care-givers who do not receive a cash transfer. This paper reports results of a household survey in one of the poorest wards in Johannesburg, South Africa. Structural equation modelling is used to analyse the data. We found that cash transfers increase women's individual income, which is in turn positively associated with increased financial independence, decision-making power over financial resources and decisions about children's well-being. Beneficiaries were more actively engaged in care activities with their children. There are two implications for the insertion of gender and care into social protection policies. First that it is not necessary to attach behavioural change conditions to social protection policies in order to stimulate female care-givers to be more engaged in developmental activities with their children. Second, there is no risk of promoting a maternalistic model of care or ‘maternalism’ in the South African context as the transfer contributes to both women's individual incomes and their financial decision-making power.