British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in the autumn of 2001 that he wanted to extend individual consumer choice in the public services (Blair, 2001). What do we know from recent experience about the conditions under which such policies can be sustained? In this article, the experience of individual consumer choice over the last ten, and in some cases, fifteen years, is compared across nine fields of British public services. The article identifies the policy goals for introducing choice, considers how far they were typically achieved, and identifies problems and unintended side-effects, including distributional problems, inefficiencies and one type of political risk. This provisional evaluation is based on a widely ranging review of literature spanning several disciplines. The principal products of the argument are two detailed tables, setting out, respectively, the degree to which the goals seem to have been achieved for each choice programme, as far as the available literature can tell us, and how far distributional, efficiency and political risk problems have dogged consumer choice in each field. In the discussion section, trends and variations are summarised. Finally, some lessons are drawn from the comparisons, for policy makers who may be considering the further extension of consumer choice in public services.

This article is concerned with the evolving social construction of older workers and retirement. Evolving and competing ‘world-views’ from public policy, and social advocacy of productive and vulnerable older workers, are described and critiqued. Contradictions and disjunctions, in terms of public policies aimed at changing employer behaviour towards older workers, are identified. It is argued that present representations of older workers have serious flaws that provide a weak basis for policy development and may not only undermine the prospects for overcoming prejudicial societal attitudes but may in fact strengthen them. It is further argued that sheltering older workers in employment placements will inevitably limit the extent and nature of their participation. Instead, the mainstreaming of their employment is justified, bearing in mind negative attitudes towards ageing.

The risk of poverty is very unevenly distributed in society. Some groups – unemployed people, lone parents, large families, people with disabilities, and some ethnic groups – have much higher poverty rates than average. Some events – losing a job, marital breakdown, having children – also put people at high risk of poverty. But being in a high-risk group does not necessarily mean you will be poor, nor does experiencing an event with a high poverty risk attached to it. Some people avoid poverty, despite being in high-risk groups or facing high-risk events. This article focuses on one such group – low-paid workers – and explores whether and how people in low-paid jobs are able to avoid poverty. We consider three main options – own wages and in particular working long hours, living with other people and sharing income, and state transfers through the tax and benefit system – and compare these across different family and household types. The results highlight the importance of household living arrangements in protecting low-waged individuals against poverty.

Three successive Labour governments have developed a range of work/family balance (WFB) policies, including child care services, leaves and flexible working hours, which have also become an increasingly coherent package. Drawing on Hall (1993), we explore the extent to which these represent a significant change at three levels: that of ideas (the goals of policy), mechanisms (the nature of the policy instruments), and settings (the fine-tuning of policy instruments). We examine how far the ideas driving the policy developments have been about the welfare of the family and its members, and the nature of the balance of continuity and change in policy instruments and settings, making some suggestions as to how this might be explained.

The relationships between paid work and informal care are critical to understanding how paid work is made possible. An extensive source of childcare in the UK is the intergenerational care grandparents provide. Using data from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative sample of children born in 2000, biprobit and instrumental variables (IV) analysis of mothers’ participation (given the social construction of caring responsibility) identifies a significant causal effect of grandparents’ childcare in that it:

1. (i) raises the labour force participation of mothers with a child of school entry age on average by 12 percentage points (the average marginal effect);

2. (ii) raises the participation of the group of mothers who use grandparent childcare by 33 percentage points compared to the situation if they did not have access to this care (the average treatment effect on the treated).

This article demonstrates that the making of post-communist social policy in Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union is being influenced by a number of international agencies. The implicit and explicit social policy advice being offered by the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, to the countries of the region, is described and evaluated. The policy thinking of the Bank is given particular emphasis. Brief reference to the role of the International Labour Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, in this regard, is also made. The advice, both at the general level of the broad orientation of social policy and at the specific level of social security and social assistance of the agencies, is compared. It is suggested that the making of post-communist social policy is a testing ground for the future of social policy elsewhere in the industrialised world. This future, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, is being influenced by the global social policy discourse that now exists within and between the global agencies studied here. This discourse is mapped and reflects both existing social policy orientations (liberalism, conservatism, social democracy) and the new post-Fordist social policy orientations of social liberalism, as well as that based on the concept of a citizenship income.

This paper examines the growth of housing inheritance in Britain since the late 1960s using Inland Revenue statistics. It also uses survey evidence to examine the uneven distribution of inheritance by housing tenure, class and region, and assesses its implications for consumption cleavage theory. It argues that at present the social distribution of housing inheritance is far from equal, benefiting home owners and the professional and managerial classes, but that, over the next 40 years, it will become much more widespread as the post-war generation of home owners bequeathes property. It is likely, however, that the children of tenants will be generally excluded from housing inheritance which is largely confined to the children of home owners.

This article contends that the New Labour government's current policies on street homelessness in England prioritise ‘social cohesion’ over ‘social justice’ objectives. While the government has implemented substantial improvements in services for street homeless people in recent years, and has achieved a significant reduction in the numbers sleeping rough, a strong ‘social control’ emphasis has now emerged in this policy agenda, as those remaining on the streets are increasingly viewed as an ‘anti-social behaviour’ problem. The article argues that coercive or forceful measures aimed at street homeless people cannot be justified from a social justice perspective, unless it can be demonstrated that they have a positive impact on the welfare of this marginalised group. The evidence presently available, although not definitive, indicates that such measures are more likely to undermine than promote the well-being of street homeless people.

This paper considers implications for the English voluntary sector of recent shifts in the terms of engagement with the state following rapid political and policy changes under the UK Coalition government. It explores how ideas of what constitutes the voluntary sector are being reconstructed in policy and practical settings, examining processes contributing to re-shaping the voluntary sector's conception of itself and beliefs about legitimate activities and aspirations. It draws on theories of institutional isomorphism and governmentality to explore these changes which appear to be modifying and restricting the voluntary sector's role in social welfare, limiting its influence and its ability to act simultaneously within and against the state. The paper argues the integral role of the state in recasting the roles of different sectors but also discusses the extent to which voluntary sector compliance is necessary to ensure organisational survival, asking what spaces exist for independent activity and resistance.

This article considers different approaches to policy evaluation within recent writings on governance and evaluation research. Governance theorists locate evaluation within a new ‘mode of regulation’ aimed at managing a ‘dispersed state at arms length’. The strength of this approach is that it places policy evaluation within an explicitly political framework. However, the governance perspective focuses on evaluation as a state-centred activity and tends to underplay its contested nature. Within the evaluation research literature, on the other hand, attempts to deal with the ‘politics of evaluation’ tend to focus on evaluation as a research practice. This misses the discursive construction of evaluation as a political project. While some approaches within the evaluation literature stress the ‘democratising’ role of ‘stakeholder participation’, they are set within a democratic pluralist model of politics, which frequently fails to deal with underlying power relations within which the clash of competing stakeholder interests takes place. This article challenges these constructions. It draws on the strengths of both approaches to propose a critical ‘politics of evaluation’ based on service user control. It suggests some practical strategies drawn from a review of recent evaluation research.

For excellent reasons, in response to pressures from social, economic and political changes, welfare states are undergoing reform. A central theme in the new policies, particularly influential in the UK, is the use of incentives through activation programmes and reforms to public sector management to promote rational responsible choices by both service users and providers. The theoretical underpinning of this approach relies on a model of people as plural in their values, but holding values that are independent from social context and institutional framework. Policy seeks to harness those values to produce desired behaviour. This article focuses on two relevant literatures. Analyses of rational action at an individual level by economic psychologists, evolutionary biologists and game theorists indicate that the context in which choices are framed influences responses. Further work by economic sociologists and social psychologists suggests that the values that guide behaviour have an important social element as normative systems embodied in institutional frameworks. The norms appropriate to market interactions typically differ from welfare norms, so that different value frameworks and responses apply. The implication is that the transition to quasi-market and individualised incentive systems risks damaging the norms that sanction support for distant but vulnerable groups. The article falls into three sections: reviewing the background to reform and the emergence of an emphasis on individualised rational choice, considering each of the literatures mentioned above and discussing policy consequences.

Disabled children are significantly more likely to grow up in poverty than their non-disabled peers. We used longitudinal data from Waves 3–7 (2001–2005) of the UK Families and Children Study to explore the relationship between the presence of a disabled child in the family and poverty transitions. When compared to other families, families supporting a disabled child are more likely to be exposed to persistent or recurrent poverty, less likely to escape from an episode of poverty and more likely to descend into poverty. However, statistically controlling for the effects of salient family characteristics either attenuates, eliminates or reverses these associations. That is, when compared to other families with similar levels of personal and social resources, families supporting a disabled child are no more likely to escape from or descend into poverty than other families. Results are discussed in relation to the need for social policy to invest in strengthening the broader capabilities of families of disabled children.

In common with the experiences of many other groups – and despite changing legal landscapes and increasing recognition within social policy of different groups’ needs – LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) people continue to face discrimination and abuse, and improving safety continues to be a key touchstone for policy makers and practitioners engaging with LGBT lives. Based on evidence from Count Me In Too, an LGBT participatory research project in Brighton & Hove, UK, the paper challenges approaches to dealing with LGBT safety that narrowly focus on reporting within a hate crime paradigm, and recognises the shift towards multi-agency approaches to LGBT safety. Our evidence shows that many LGBT people differentially recognise or do not recognise abuse, instead ‘normalising’ much of the abuse they experience in order to carry on with day-to-day life. By focusing on the effects of abuse and how it is dealt with by individuals and communities, rather than focusing on what constitutes abuse, we show the importance of addressing LGBT safety in ways that move beyond questions of criminal justice and the reporting of hate crime. We argue for a broader social policy framework that uses multi-agency approaches to community safety for those who experience abuse on the basis of their sexual and/or gender identities, which should attend to how safety services may provide more appropriate contexts of care and support, and which should build upon relevant knowledges within LGBT communities. Fostering solidarities among LGBT people may also empower them to work towards broader social transformation.

The study of EU social policy highlights a number of issues especially well, among them the unfolding institutionalisation of a social field in EU politics and policy, and the changing nature of economic and social governance in Europe. This article examines recent EU social policy, following the course of the Lisbon strategy since it got underway in 2000. Focusing on the social inclusion process, the aim is to identify development over time, to review progress critically and to offer some explanation for events. Analysis is centred on an interrogation of the social policy model and the cognitive aspects of the process, especially as they are to be seen in the production of national policy plans and the responses to these on the part of different EU actors. A conclusion drawn is that, while social exclusion has provided an innovative focus within an EU context, the process as a whole is timid and key elements are weak. This is a spur to further analysis and so the article goes on to identify limitations in terms of design, rationale, and the place of the social inclusion Open Method of Coordination (OMC) the revised Lisbon Strategy. In effect, the conditions necessary to realise the new method and social vision are not in place. A key conclusion is that with survival under threat, the need to continually reinvent itself may actually be the death knell of the social process.

Recent government policy in the UK National Health Service (NHS) has carried with it an implicit assumption that greater consumer involvement in health care is both desirable and beneficial. This may be the case in theory, but in practice there are substantial barriers to consumers becoming more involved in health care. Following a consideration of the role the government envisages for consumers in the NHS, the extent to which it is possible for consumers to fulfil this role, and more fundamentally whether they want to fulfil it, are discussed. It is argued that because of the extent of the breakdown of consumer sovereignty in health care, the doctor–patient (agency) relationship assumes a particularly important role. The theory of agency and its application to health care is then discussed and a number of important issues highlighted. A review of the literature on the extent of consumer involvement in health care precedes the conclusion in which the key issues raised in the article are brought together.

Despite improvements in childcare provision since the implementation of the National Childcare Strategy in England in 1998, little is known about the practicalities of managing childcare and employment from a parental perspective. It is not recognised that dependent children have to be physically transported from home to the place of care-education, and if transported by the parent the latter usually also has to travel to their workplace in a different location. This article discusses the complexity involved in coordinating these events, the barriers posed to maternal employment, and the strategies used by working parents to overcome the difficulties. It presents an analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 40 mothers in a middle-sized city in England. The analysis exposes the additional work involved in temporally, spatially and physically coordinating childcare, education and work. It indicates that early education related to children's ages might have a greater influence on coordination difficulties, and therefore maternal employment, than the numbers of children in a family per se. The article argues that policy makers need to have a greater regard for the time and space dimensions attached to coordination, the coordination support provided by fathers and others (as opposed to childcare), transport issues and the need for fully integrated early years provision in all neighbourhoods.

The 1990s witnessed the spread and broadening in Europe of different types of relationships between public administration and private organisations (both for-profit and non-profit), derived from the two main categories of contracting out and accreditation. These models, linked to the process of developing new modes of governance, also focus on forms of contracting between providers and users of services. This contractual configuration of local welfare systems appears to encourage ‘civil society’ and recipients to play a more active role in designing interventions and putting them into practice. Nonetheless, several questions still remain to be answered, mainly concerning the different position adopted by the beneficiaries in the case of intervention theoretically aimed at ensuring or increasing their ‘freedom of choice’. This article sets out to analyse these questions with specific reference to the implementation of the Italian legal reform of social services. The field of observation covers interventions based on economic benefits looking to promote recipients' independence. Our intention is to focus on whether and how the present structures incorporate and elaborate this impulse towards change, with particular reference to the new configuration of the users' own position.

This article contributes to an understanding of how conditionality applies across social security and immigration policies in restricting the access to social benefits of national citizens, EU and non-EU citizens. Specifically, the article builds on Clasen and Clegg's (2007) framework of conditionality in the context of welfare state reform by extending that conceptual framework to include migration. The framework is applied to examine how different levels of conditionality have been implemented in UK policy reforms to restrict access to rights of residence and to social benefits. It is argued that a conditionality approach moves beyond a binary of citizens and migrants in social policy analysis, contributing to an understanding of the dynamics and interactions of work-related conditions in restricting access to social benefits, with implications for inequalities that cut across national, EU and non-EU citizens in terms of the relationship of particular groups to the market.

Individuals' donations to overseas charities are an important source of funding for development assistance from rich industrialised countries. But little is known about the nature of these charitable donations. The literature on giving focuses on total donations to all causes and does not identify separately the pattern or the determinants of giving to any particular cause. We investigate giving to overseas causes using UK survey microdata that record individuals' donations to different types of charity. We establish a picture of overseas giving, comparing this with giving to other causes. Socio-economic correlates of both types of giving are analysed, including gender, marital status, occupation, education and, especially, income. We also investigate the relationship between individuals' overseas giving and their attitudes towards poverty in developing countries.

This paper examines the nature of public opinion concerning the National Health Service. Data from two series of national surveys covering the period 1983–92 are used to analyse trends in opinion. OPCS data for 1991–2 are examined in more detail to investigate the determinants of satisfaction with health services. A range of demographic, socio-economic and health status characteristics, as well as media coverage of health-related issues, are found to be significantly related to expressions of satisfaction with the NHS, in addition to recent experience of using health services. The complexity of the formation and expression of public opinion is acknowledged. In particular, the importance of taking note of the methodological implications and political context associated with expressions of public opinion is emphasised.