A consensus has developed in political and also media circles that in Britain over recent decades social mobility has been in decline. According to the consensus view, as construed in political circles, educational policy is seen as the crucial instrument for increasing mobility. This article shows how the consensus emerged from the research of a group of economists into intergenerational income mobility. It is argued that, primarily on account of various limitations of the available data, the economists’ finding of declining mobility is open to question; and, further, that, because no explicit distinction is made in their work between absolute and relative rates of mobility, its reception, among politicians especially, has been attended by considerable confusion. An alternative to the consensus view is put forward, based on extensive research by sociologists into social class mobility, which is seen as better capturing the intergenerational transmission of economic advantage and disadvantage. This research indicates that the only recent change of note is that the rising rates of upward, absolute mobility of the middle decades of the last century have levelled out. Relative rates have remained more or less constant back to the inter-war years. According to this alternative view, what can be achieved through education, whether in regard to absolute or relative mobility, appears limited.

There is a large consensus among international organisations (e.g., United Nations and the World Bank) in considering Early Childhood Care and Education a prominent policy to equalise opportunities. Moreover, it is common opinion that interventions in early childhood aiming at equalising ‘opportunities’ rather than ‘outcomes’ will overcome political dissent. These two claims draw upon a particular interpretation of the work of contemporary egalitarian philosophers, as well as a number of studies in both developed and developing countries, finding higher benefits for disadvantaged children. Despite the tradition of analysing welfare provision from an equality perspective, the shift towards early childhood education as an equality policy has not yet fully been analysed. We critically examine the consensus advocated by international organisations regarding Early Childhood Care and Education as key to ‘levelling the playing field’ and suggest that the first claim (early childhood as greatest equaliser) should be considered with caution. We also argue that the alleged consensus on this claim may lead to a depoliticisation of social policy.

Education is crucially important for later outcomes but has received limited attention in comparative research on welfare states. In light of this, we present an exploratory analysis of education systems across fourteen EU countries and the US. This builds on existing work on educational institutions, educational outcomes and welfare regimes. We focus on institutional features associated with inequality of educational opportunity, including academic selection, tracking and public/private provision; on educational outcomes; and on education expenditure. Our quantitative analysis identifies four clusters of countries: the Nordic, Continental, Mediterranean and English-speaking, which bear similarities to those identified in the welfare states literature. Each ‘education regime’ is associated with particular institutional features, educational outcomes and levels of public expenditure. Our analysis suggests that further comparative research on education, viewed as a key component of the welfare state, is warranted.

In a number of countries, the state has become more closely involved in helping low-income families with children to make ends meet – including those with low earnings as well as out-of-work families. The adequacy of such support can be assessed against benchmarks measuring the additional cost of a child in households that maintain spending at a level sufficient to participate adequately in society. A socially defined minimum income standard provides an empirically based benchmark, which allows more meaningful measurement of adequacy than measures based on relative income or actual spending patterns.

Using evidence from the Minimum Income Standard for the United Kingdom, this paper considers the extent to which the UK state covers the additional cost of having children for non-working and low-earning families respectively. It finds that the present system has come close to covering this cost for some low-income families, but has started to withdraw from this position. The paper concludes by considering advantages and pitfalls for countries of adopting targeted forms of support for children focused on income adequacy. Such support can help working as well as non-working families escape poverty, but also makes them heavily dependent on state transfers to make ends meet.

The welfare state literature has recently identified a shift from the protection against traditional risks to social investment. In this new future-oriented and activation-based social policy, the focus is on the redistribution of opportunities instead of income. Even if vertical redistribution from the rich to poor may be only one rationale of social action, it should not be overlooked when directing social policy from insurance to investment. This article has two objectives: first, it investigates how real this shift is in macro-economic terms, and, secondly, whether the increased focus on new social risks and social investment has possibly changed welfare states’ commitment to redistribute from the rich to poor. I compare the distribution of benefits from ‘old’ spending categories (such as retirement or unemployment) with those from ‘new’ ones (such as having care responsibilities). Analysing six European countries representing different welfare state regimes, I find no evidence that new social spending would mean necessarily renouncing egalitarian ambitions. On the contrary, in all countries the distribution of new spending is more equal or pro-poor than the spending on old social risks. Different households benefit in distinct ways: the elderly benefiting the most from traditional spending (with the exception of elderly care that is categorised here as ‘new’ social spending) and families with children and single parents from new spending.

The idea that the happiness and wellbeing of individuals should shape government policy has been around since the enlightenment; today such thinking has growing practical policy relevance as governments around the world survey their populations in an effort to design social policies that promote wellbeing. In this article, we consider the social determinants of subjective wellbeing in the UK and draw lessons for social policy. Survey data are taken from the ‘Measuring National Wellbeing Programme’ launched by the UK's Office for National Statistics in 2010. For the empirical strategy, we develop bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models, as well as testing for interaction effects in the data. The findings show that wellbeing is not evenly distributed within the UK. Socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, employment, household composition and tenure all matter, as does health status. Influencing population wellbeing is inherently complex, though, that said, there is a clear need to place greater emphasis on the social, given the direction of current policy.

The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies is still relatively underexplored. This article examines the role of resentment in the construction of a particular form of ‘anti-welfare populism’ advanced by the Coalition Government in the UK after 2010. We argue that UK political parties have appropriated the discourse of fairness to promote fundamentally divisive policies which have been popular with large sections of the electorate including, paradoxically, many poorer voters. In focus group research in white working class communities in the UK undertaken just before the 2010 General Election, resentments related to perceived unfairness and loss emerged as very strong themes among our respondents. We examine such resentments in terms of an underlying ‘structure of feeling’ which fuels the reactionary populism seen in ‘anti-welfare’ discourses. These promote increasingly conditional and punitive forms of welfare in countries experiencing austerity, such as the UK, creating rivalries rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’ and drawing attention away from greater inequalities.

Apart from health care and education, it could be argued that working-age households with above-average income in the UK have never relied as much on the welfare state as their counterparts in many other European countries. How then do better-earning households expect to cope financially with the risk of unemployment, and to what extent do they plan ahead for a possible loss of earnings? Based on sixty-one interviews with couples, the article discusses various sources of income protection that these households envisage drawing upon in the event of unemployment. State benefits figure only marginally, private insurances to a limited extent and savings slightly more. However, there is little evidence of strategic planning. By contrast, many perceive their current job and personal employability as providing some security and regard the prospect of occupational redundancy pay as a major source of income protection. This finding contrasts sharply with a paucity of systematic information about the actual scope, quality and development of employer-based income security.

There is a long tradition in the assessment of UK social policy of examining benefit entitlement and access, yet little attention has been paid towards benefits associated with bereavement and, in particular, what happens for those people who cannot afford a funeral and require state assistance. This is despite the fact that every year approximately one in ten deaths in the UK results in a claim to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Funeral Payment for a contribution towards funeral costs. Beyond a paper in this journal over ten years ago, no research has been conducted into how the scheme is administered and what happens to those people who claim. Drawing on a study with both successful and unsuccessful Funeral Payment claimants, funeral directors and key stakeholders, this paper evaluates the Funeral Payment in terms of eligibility and entitlement, and timing and cost. It argues that closer attention needs to be paid to the issue of financial support for funerals to avoid the evolution of an unwieldy system at a time when the UK death rate is predicted to rise owing to the ageing of the population.

Recent developments in the drug field have prompted claims that criminal justice has displaced health from its formerly dominant position and have also been used to support general claims about the criminalisation of social policy. This article critically assesses such claims and offers an alternative interpretation, arguing that British drug policy has been shaped and reshaped by the broader workings of the modern state. Early controls reflected the influence of medicine and public health over emerging forms of state interventionism, while subsequent arrangements were consistent with the penal-welfare tradition that dominated criminal justice for much of the last century. More recently, it is the transformation of this tradition that has played a key role in reshaping the drug field, producing evidence of both continuity and change. What others have attributed to ‘criminalisation’, therefore, is said to reflect broader changes in the nature of criminal justice itself. Whilst the transformation of penal-welfarism helps to explain the development of more punitive and coercive forms of drug control, this is only part of the story. As with criminal justice more generally, the limitations of the sovereign state have given rise to various adaptive strategies and it is here that considerable continuity can be seen, particularly in relation to the on-going importance of drug treatment and harm reduction.