In the past two decades ‘decarceration’ and ‘deinstitutionalisation’ have been key themes of youth justice in the West. Restrictions have been imposed on the courts, limiting their ability to hand out residential and custodial training sentences to young offenders. As an alternative, resources have been redirected into the development and expansion of community-based rehabilitation programmes. However, in Hong Kong large numbers of young offenders continue to be placed in residential and custodial institutions after very brief criminal careers, and for crimes which do not pose a serious risk to the community. This article makes use of a recently published research study to discuss the experiences of young male offenders in the Hong Kong youth justice system, and to consider why community-based rehabilitative programmes as direct alternatives to residential training and custody have been slow to develop. It then goes on to explore how from a cultural perspective the use of community-based programmes might be justified and how they could be developed around existing sentencing guidelines.

This article proposes a novel way of measuring cross-national changes over time in the outputs of social security systems. Traditional approaches to the comparative analysis of social security systems use expenditure levels, regime types or poverty and inequality rates to rank countries and map change over time. All these approaches encounter the problem of determining how much of the observed change is due to internal developments within the social security system, and how much due to exogenous social and economic factors. Taking the example of public pensions in five European countries since 1950, this article demonstrates how formal social security rules can be used in a simulation model to evaluate changes in public pension payments for a variety of hypothetical individuals characterised by different levels of lifetime income. This procedure produces direct measures of the impact of changes in social security systems which are entirely independent of exogenous developments in social and economic structures. This new method reveals the ‘pure’ effect of internal social security system development over time.

The Netherlands and Britain have treated lone mother families in similar ways in the post-war period. Until very recently they have been alone among countries of the EU in allowing lone mothers to draw benefits without making themselves available for work so long as they have dependent children. At the beginning of the 1990s, both countries attempted (unsuccessfully) to enforce the obligation of ‘absent fathers’ to maintain. In 1996, the Dutch government took decisive steps towards treating lone mothers as workers rather than mothers. In Britain, the last Conservative government began to move in the same direction, something that has been confirmed by the new Labour government. This article reviews the structure and characteristics of lone motherhood in the two countries and the nature of the recent policy changes. It then reports the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of divorced mothers in both countries. The evidence from the interviews reveals the strength of the primary commitment that women in both countries make to care. It also shows the difficulties divorced women face in combining paid and unpaid work, which, we suggest make the pendulum swing from treating lone mothers as mothers, to treating them as workers unrealistic.

The use of private welfare services in the UK has risen. But relatively little is known about the patterns of use of private welfare services. This article investigates whether there is a private welfare class, and how attitudes to welfare state spending are linked to use of private services. It finds that there is considerable use of the private sector, but the size of the group consistently using a range of private welfare services is small. Changes in attitudes to public financing of welfare spending do not appear to be directly linked to use of private services.

The aim of this article is to widen the grounds of the debate on the relationship between values, social change and welfare reform. In the public debate on welfare reform and the Third Way the significance of the welfare politics and campaigns of civil society in challenging the old welfare order has received little acknowledgement. The article argues that these politics and campaigns have, along with both the New Right and New Labour, attempted to construct a new vision of an ‘active welfare subject’. In the process they have also expanded the moral repertoire for understanding people's engagement with welfare beyond the self-interest/altruism dichotomy. The article uses this new repertoire to propose seven key principles for a reordering of the social relations of welfare.

In the UK in recent years, a dramatic growth in media concern with same sex relationships has led to the suggestion that the resulting visibility is indicative of the extent to which the intimate lives of non-heterosexuals are becoming more acceptable. In this article we question this using data drawn from the Families of Choice Project, a qualitative research project based on interviews with over a hundred non-heterosexual women and men, which highlight the ways in which they are prevented from participating as full citizens in civic, political, economic, and legal society. Using Plummer's (1995) notion of intimate citizenship, we discuss first how respondents talk about the ways in which their intimate relationships are not recognised or validated legally, economically, politically or socially. We then analyse the respondents, ideas about what policy options could be considered to include their ‘families of choice’. Finally, we argue that the family model on which most legislation and policy is based is too narrow, exclusive and inflexible to include families of choice.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health (formerly Health care)

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Government (formerly Local government)

11 Gender

12 Demography