Comprehensive reviews of the available research are generally considered to be the cornerstone of contemporary efforts to establish ‘evidence-based policy’. This article provides an examination of the potential of this stratagem, using the case study of ‘mentoring’ programmes. Mentoring initiatives (and allied schemes such as ‘coaching’, ‘counselling’, ‘peer education’ and so on) are to be found in every corner of public policy. Researchers have been no less energetic, producing a huge body of evidence on the process and outcomes of such interventions. Reviewers, accordingly, have plenty to get their teeth into and, by now, there are numerous reports offering review-based advice on the benefits of mentoring. The article asks whether the sum total of these efforts, as represented by five contemporary reviews, is a useful tool for guiding policy and practice. Our analysis is a cause for some pessimism. We note a propensity for delivering unequivocal policy verdicts on the basis of ambiguous evidence. Even more disconcertingly, the five reviews head off on different judgemental tangents, one set of recommendations appearing to gainsay the next. The article refrains from recommending the ejection of evidence baby and policy bathwater but suggests that much closer attention needs to be paid to the explanatory scope of systematic reviews.

Welfare conditionality, and the underlying understanding of unemployment because of lack of motivation, has been widely criticized. This article analyses if and how more co-created services can be a pathway to address some of these challenges. As Denmark currently is moving towards a softening of welfare conditionality for the vulnerable unemployed, and local authorities try to develop models ‘in between’ welfare conditionality and genuine user involvement, this constitute a good case for analysing this question. The analysis build on comprehensive ethnographic data from a four-year research- and innovation project in six Danish municipalities. The employment services in the project have tried to design new strategies involving clients in the development and implementation of services. Among other things, this includes developing integrated services, qualifying the meeting and the talk between front-line workers and clients, engaging the employer side and NGO’s outside the public services and promoting other measures to ensure real involvement of the citizens in the processes. The analysis lists some of the potentials and pitfalls in these innovative processes and reflects upon the feasibility of such new type of co-created services.

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.

The identification of the poor in this paper follows that of most contemporary applied work and consists of comparing a scaler indicator of welfare with a predetermined minimum level. The data is provided by the 1985 Family Expenditure Survey. Two measures of welfare are developed, one based on income which reflects the entitlement analysis of poverty and the other on expenditure, reflecting the standard of living. Households ranked very low by expenditure are considerably less likely to be ranked highly by income than vice versa. Further doubt on the rankings suggested by the income measure is provided by ownership of consumer durables. The expenditure measure suggests that the number of poor retired individuals is more than three times that implied by the income measure. The instability of the latter measure suggests that more confidence can be placed on assertions based on evidence employing the expenditure measure.

Street children might not be securely lodged in the life-patterns that the middle class impose on young people, but their reward from trying to maintain a minimum standard of living that their parents and governments are unable to provide them is infinitely preferable to living in the absolute poverty that surrounds them. Based on a critique of our current knowledge of the maturation of children, which is informed primarily by Northern mores and ‘scientific’ proofs whose findings derive from this normative framework and feed back into it, this article seeks to explain why we find child streetism so abhorrent and take it for granted that certain norms can, and should, prevail in the South just because they are found in Northern societies.

A Regulation Approach framework has been adopted to analyse the very rapid period of change in social security policy since the late 1980s. It is argued that the changes can be explained in terms of a number of regulatory dilemmas which emerged or were intensified under neo-liberal capital accumulation. Some of the regulatory dilemmas – high levels of economic inactivity, inflationary pressures consequent to higher employment and low levels of wages – it was thought could be managed through the social security system using what we call ‘market workfare’; by which we mean in-work means-tested social security benefits which have some measure of compulsion to work attached, such that it counts as workfare. The aim of in-work benefits is to reduce wages further so that the market can respond by creating more low-wage employment. By this stratagem it is the market which responds to labour demand, rather than the government creating work opportunities. The parliamentary neo-liberal right's approach to ‘market workfare’ is discussed, and then it is suggested that the marked similarities between New Labour and the previous parliamentary neo-liberal right can be explained because both administrations were attempting to manage the same regulatory dilemmas.

There has been extensive concern about the effect of recession and of subsequent public spending austerity on the voluntary sector – but a lack of comprehensive sector-wide data to examine this empirically. We construct a unique longitudinal dataset, which follows through time the population of charitable organisations in England and Wales since 1999, and assess the impact of recession and austerity by placing organisations’ recent annual income within the context of longer-term trends. The results reveal the scale of the impact on charities’ incomes for the first time: since 2008 median real annual growth in income has been negative for six consecutive years, leading to sizeable cumulative real income decline over the period. Mid-sized charities, and those in more deprived local areas, have been most significantly affected, consistent with concerns about a ‘hollowing out’ of the charitable sector and about the uneven impact of austerity. However, there has also been considerable variation in the fortunes of charities working in different fields of activity. The analysis in this paper helps to widen our perspective on the implications of the Great Recession and of public spending austerity for social policy.

I have borrowed this term from Richard Crossman. When he wrote his contribution to the New Fabian Essays in 1952 he took stock of the present state of socialism, as the original Fabians had done in 1889. He hoped to discover ‘a philosophy of Socialism’ with life in it. But he failed. An obvious place to look for it was in the Welfare State, as it had emerged from the hands of the post-war Labour government. But the Welfare State, he decided, was not socialist; it was ‘the climax of a long process, in the course of which capitalism had been civilised and to a large extent reconciled with democracy’. Later on he referred to the product of this process as ‘welfare capitalism’. He ought to have called it ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’ because, as I shall argue, democracy deserves to have a position as a third party of independent status, not just to be taken for granted.

This paper explores how different discursive sites have sought to define and/or deny the actuality and harm of child sexual abuse in the first half of the twentieth century in England and Wales. Primary data from journal and archival sources suggest that there were a range of competing accounts of sexual abuse (usually referred to as sexual assaults or even just as ‘outrages’). It is argued that there was not a monolithic silencing of this abuse but a contest over the meaning of childhood, over the sexual innocence of girls, and even over the significance of discovering venereal diseases in babies and in children's homes. The paper suggests that there has been an overemphasis on the silencing potential of psychoanalytic discourses during this period, and insufficient attention paid to the role of the legal establishment and the practices of the criminal justice system in the persistent, but multifaceted, inability to define adult/child sexual contact as abusive or harmful.

Is public support for redistribution affected by the number of people experiencing economic strain in a country? This question is investigated by comparing twenty-eight countries in the fourth round of the European Social Survey 2008–09 using two-level linear regression models. The results show that individuals reporting economic strain support redistribution more strongly than those who do not experience economic strain. Further, individuals living in countries where many other people report economic strain also support redistribution more strongly than individuals living in countries with less economic strain. The latter correlation is not explained by objective measures of the economic situation such as household income or the income dispersal of the country. The country-level effect of economic strain holds for all income levels. It is largely driven by a tendency to strongly believe in redistribution when living in countries of widespread economic strain. The results indicate that governments would receive more rather than less public support for redistributive policies during periods of economic strain.

This paper sets out a general framework for analysing long-term care (LTC) systems for older people in different countries and then applies this framework to a specific national setting. The paper considers the extent to which South Africa's emerging LTC system conforms to broader patterns observed across low- and middle-income countries and how far it has been shaped by more local effects. It finds that patterns of demand for LTC vary across different racial categories. Despite having lower rates of ageing that the white population, Africans account for the majority of LTC demand. Residential services cater primarily for older whites and there is a widespread perception that LTC for Africans should be a family responsibility. Across the sector there is evidence of gaps in service availability, limited state oversight and uneven service quality. In 2016 this led to a high-profile political scandal which may prompt more effective state responses to this growing societal challenge.

A significant, and probably increasing, proportion of older people are ‘asset rich, income poor’. This raises a number of social policy issues around poverty and living standards in later life. For example, perhaps older people are ‘living poor to die rich’ because they wish to pass on their assets to future generations or because they feel they have an ‘inalienable right’ to their property. Or perhaps they would like to use up their assets but find this difficult, for example, because of concerns around equity release products. This article focuses on attitudes to assets and inheritance, drawing on findings from in-depth interviews and focus groups. The data suggest that people generally take a balanced and pragmatic attitude to their resources. They do not wish to ‘live poor to die rich’ but nor are they keen to spend their resources recklessly as they wish to leave something to their families, while also maintaining a reasonable standard of living in later life. It concludes by suggesting that the current ‘asset-based welfare’ debate should broaden its focus on asset accumulation to consider issues around asset use.

In this paper we explore whether the recent rise in food bank usage in the UK has been induced by the roll-out of Universal Credit. We bring together official statistics on the introduction of Universal Credit with data on food bank usage from the UK’s largest food bank network. We test the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution using a range of causal identification strategies (such as fixed-effects model, Granger causality tests, and matching designs) and consistently find that an increase in the prevalence of Universal Credit is associated with more food parcel distribution. We also find that the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution is stronger in areas where food banks are active, suggesting food insecurity arising from Universal Credit may be hidden in places where food banks are largely unavailable. Though it is challenging to implement any large-scale change to social security, our analysis suggests systemic and persistent problems with this new system. Whilst the logic of Universal Credit is intuitively appealing, it has also proven to be unforgiving, leaving many struggling to make ends meet.

A comparison of unemployment rates in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, the UK and the United States suggests poor performance by the German labour market. The present study endeavours to show that a more sophisticated picture of unemployment can be drawn by taking into account additional forms of non-employment (such as incapacity, retirement or labour reserve). For this purpose, data from the ‘European Social Survey’ (ESS) and the survey ‘Citizenship, Involvement and Democracy’ collected in 2004 and 2005 have been analysed. While ‘unemployment’ plays a dominant role in Germany, people with comparable demographic characteristics and similar health status are more likely to identify themselves as ‘permanently sick or disabled’ and hence are classified thus in other countries. The results of this study underline that an international comparison of labour market performance, particularly a comparison of the effectiveness of labour market and social policy reforms, should not rely only on employment and unemployment rates. Taking alternate forms of non-employment into account can enhance one's knowledge and understanding of the functional differences between the labour markets in Europe and the United States.

The social investment approach has been advocated as a blueprint for recasting European welfare states since the years of the Lisbon Strategy. After the Euro crisis squeezed the fiscal space available for welfare recalibration, the question has been raised as to whether social investment could withstand the economic turmoil. Relying on a new welfare expenditure dataset constructed from various Eurostat sources, this article looks at the budgetary recalibration of 27 EU welfare states from the launch of the Lisbon Strategy to the aftermath of the Euro crisis (2000 to 2014). It compares the financial efforts that governments have put into social investment- and social protection-oriented policies, highlighting the different trajectories taken by EU welfare states at the crisis crossroads. Four scenarios for welfare recalibration are put forward, based on the social investment perspective and its critiques. The results show that the overall progress made by social investment in welfare budgets since 2000 came to a halt with the outbreak of the crisis. Bleaker scenarios materialised, whereas EU welfare states pursued retrenchment rather than investment, or had to face harsher budgetary trade-offs, expanding social investment to the detriment of social protection.

The paper explores the relevance of recent theorising around the body for the discipline of social policy. It aims to show how such work opens up new ways of thinking within the core areas of social policy as well as proposing new subjects for social policy consideration, arguing that the common image of the body as an absent presence that has been characteristic of sociological accounts in the recent past still applies in relation to social policy, but that considerable gains can be made from incorporating this new theorising and new subject matter into the scope of the subject. It explores this by means of six areas of relevance: health care, community care, disability, no-power consumption, as well as cross-cutting themes of age, ‘race’, gender, sexuality.

As policy makers have sought to reconfigure the public–private boundaries of their pension systems, trust has become an increasingly salient issue. At stake is the attainment of desired policy outcomes regarding retirement. By what criteria, then, should the capacity of pension institutions to build and sustain trust be assessed? This article emphasises the strategic importance of institutional design in the trust process. Building on Sztompka's seminal analysis of the institutional foundations of trust, and a substantial review of the literature and survey evidence regarding public confidence in pensions, we identify, justify and give indicative operational content to six trust benchmarks. This provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical research on the capacity of pension institutions to build and sustain trust.

Social scientists in the comparative policy tradition have long argued that welfare systems in modern capitalist societies can be broken down into ideal types. The idea of different worlds of welfare capitalism has an enduring appeal and growing practical policy relevance as governments seek to enhance population wellbeing. In this paper, we explore the worlds of welfare theory from the perspective of happiness. Drawing on data from the World Values Survey, we examine how welfare regimes may contribute to wellbeing and we consider the significance of our findings for the development of social policy. By using multilevel models, it is possible to separate out effects due to observed and unobserved, as well as both individual-level and country-level, welfare state characteristics and we can make inferences to the distribution of social wellbeing across welfare typologies. We find that respondents living in liberal and conservative countries experience at least twice the odds of unhappiness of those living in social democracies, after controlling for individual- and country-level explanatory variables. The observed differences between the worlds of welfare were found to be highly statistically significant.

The relationship between Holyrood and Westminster is an evolving one where there is some evidence of policy divergence. Underpinning policy approaches are different views of social citizenship, with the Holyrood approach maintaining elements of the post-1945 welfare settlement. The place of refugees and asylum seekers within these differing approaches is currently underexplored. This article looks at the Scottish and UK Governments’ views of social rights and how they apply to asylum seekers and refugees. It suggests that despite refugee ‘policy’ being at least partly reserved, the Scottish Government has been able to take a different approach from that of Westminster, an approach underpinned by these differing welfare outlooks.

The image of housing as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state has been widely used in recent years, and is clearly an attractive metaphor in the present period as residualisation deepens and privatisation continues. However, this paper is concerned with the early years of the postwar welfare state, when conditions for a securely founded housing service were, arguably, more conducive than they are today. Accordingly the paper focuses on policy work in the 1940s, drawing on new research on Public Record Office files, to reveal the amount of wartime planning within Whitehall for postwar housing policy, and the extent of continuity between the pre and post 1945 periods. It is shown that under the wartime coalition government there was considerably more planning for housing after the war than is acknowledged in the existing literature, and that this work shaped policy under the Labour government of 1945–51. Housing emerged as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state because of the amount of detailed wartime planning and Labour's acceptance of its analysis and prescriptions. Whereas most accounts concentrate on the size of the late 1940s building programme (and judge the government accordingly), the argument here is that to understand how housing emerged as the wobbly pillar it is necessary to look beyond quantity to the question of why a self-proclaimed socialist government failed to challenge the market dominance of housing provision.