In this article, the first of two, the recent developments and current situation in the private rented sector are examined. Four roles for the sector are identified: housing those who traditionally lived in the sector, housing the young and mobile, providing accommodation with employment and acting as a tenure of last resort for those unable to find accommodation in the majority tenures. The types of household to be found in each sub-sector are described and their reasons for being in the sector and what they obtain are analysed. Different types of landlord are identified and their reasons for letting examined. The problems encountered by tenants and landlords in each sub-sector are described, leading to the conclusion that the private rented sector urgently requires considered and effective attention from policy makers.

Help with activities of daily living for people in the community is provided through formal services (public and private) and informal (often unpaid) care. This paper investigates how these systems interlock and who is at risk of unmet need. It begins by mapping differences between OECD countries in the balance between formal and informal care, before giving a detailed breakdown for the UK. New analysis of UK Family Resources Survey data for 2012/13 and 2013/14 suggests high levels of unmet need. We investigate who receives formal and informal care, and who receives neither, among the working-age and older populations. We find that while informal care fills some gaps left by the lack of availability of formal services (and vice versa), not all older or working-age disabled people are protected in these ways. Adults living alone and those with high but not the highest levels of difficulty are most likely to have unmet need. Means-tested public entitlements ameliorate but do not remove the increased risk among people in low-income households. The paper concludes that public policy needs to integrate its support for formal and informal modes of care, with particular attention to those groups most at risk of unmet need.

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household/family has the same standard of living. This article measures differences between spouses in a large sample in indicators of deprivation of the type used in recent studies of poverty at household level. The quite limited overall imbalance in measured deprivation in favour of husbands suggests that applying such indicators to individuals will not reveal a substantial reservoir of hidden poverty among wives in non-poor households, nor much greater deprivation among women than men in poor households. This points to the need to develop more sensitive indicators of deprivation designed to measure individual living standards and poverty status, which can fit within the framework of traditional poverty research using large samples. It also highlights the need for clarification of the underlying poverty concept.

The article charts the history and trajectory of neoliberalism provided in Foucault's 1979 lectures on ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’. In these fascinating contributions, first published in English translation ten years ago, Foucault identifies German and American forms of neoliberalism, defined in opposition to both the Beveridge reforms and Roosevelt's New Deal. In seeking to comprehend Foucault's articulation of neoliberalism it is important to locate it in the context of contemporary debates on the future of socialism and the reconfiguration of social policy. Despite theoretical problems with his account, the lecture series continues to aid our understanding of the contemporary evolution of social policy.

User participation has become one of the most important concepts in the social care sector in many European countries, but the literature has mostly paid attention to disabled people or those with mental health problems. This article compares the user participation policies directed at social care for older people in Norway and England. Using a discourse analytical approach, a selection primarily of White papers from the 1960s until today are analysed. The analysis draws on the literature's discourse discussion, including a democratic/rights based discourse (full citizenship), a consumer discourse (consumers’ rights to choose welfare services), a co-production discourse (users and state/local authorities partnerships), and nuances of these discourses. The analysis shows that, while both countries start with variations of a democratic discourse, Norway develops a temporary and weak consumer discourse in a middle phase, then moves to co-production in current times. England, on the other hand, develops a comprehensive consumer discourse but also a surprisingly strong co-production discourse – the idea of a ‘Big Society’ – in early and current times.

Pension reform in Western societies has sought to shift the balance of provision towards the private sector. In Britain, the 1986 Social Security Act marked a watershed in privatisation by promoting personal pensions while cutting the value of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme. The article assesses the effects of the Act, especially the different implications according to gender and position in the labour market. Data from the 1993/4 and 1994/5 General Household Surveys is used to examine the changing pension arrangements of employees. We distinguish between personal pension membership among those who rejected the opportunity to belong to an occupational pension and those for whom this option was not available. The extent to which personal pensions were taken up by the intended target group or by those unlikely to benefit is assessed. Rejecting membership of an occupational pension scheme was associated with labour market disadvantage but those who opted for a personal pension were more advantaged than those who remained in SERPS. Among those lacking access to an occupational pension scheme, take-up was higher among younger and more advantaged employees. However, a substantial proportion of personal pension contributors were low paid, especially among women employed part time, illustrating the extent of mis-selling of personal pensions to those who are likely to have been better off in SERPS.

Some commentators view reforms to the German political economy since the 1990s as constituting a broad liberalisation of a previously coordinated market economy (e.g., Streeck, 2009). Others argue that by maintaining protection for core workers the reforms represent a dualisation rather than liberalisation (e.g., Palier and Thelen, 2010). This debate has paid little attention to public–private pension reform since 2001. This paper argues that pensions have been a crucial component of the German social model since 1957 and demonstrates why comprehensive analysis of its development must consider them. After summarising how public and occupational pensions have supported core German workers since 1957, the paper calculates core workers’ projected net pensions and those of less privileged employees before and after recent reforms. On this basis, it concludes that pension reforms have created a system more characteristic of a liberal than a dualised political economy. Since the reform, the projected pensions of today's young workers are closer to the poverty line, and the gap between the projected benefits of core and peripheral workers has narrowed. Increasingly, as young core workers age, they will thus have less incentive to invest in employer specific skills, a development that threatens the model as a whole.

In recent decades, the use of conditionality backed by benefit sanctions for those claiming unemployment and related benefits has become widespread in the social security systems of high-income countries. Critics argue that sanctions may be ineffective in bringing people back to employment or indeed harmful in a range of ways. Existing reviews largely assess the labour market impacts of sanctions but our understanding of the wider impacts is more limited. We report results from a scoping review of the international quantitative research evidence on both labour market and wider impacts of benefit sanctions. Following systematic search and screening, we extract data for 94 studies reporting on 253 outcome measures. We provide a narrative summary, paying attention to the ability of the studies to support causal inference. Despite variation in the evidence base and study designs, we found that labour market studies, covering two thirds of our sample, consistently reported positive impacts for employment but negative impacts for job quality and stability in the longer term, along with increased transitions to non-employment or economic inactivity. Although largely relying on non-experimental designs, wider-outcome studies reported significant associations with increased material hardship and health problems. There was also some evidence that sanctions were associated with increased child maltreatment and poorer child well-being. Lastly, the review highlights the generally poor quality of the evidence base in this area, with few studies employing research methods designed to identify the causal impact of sanctions, especially in relation to wider impacts.

This essay presents the Danish Act of 1891 on old age relief as an alternative to the German social insurance approach and as a precursor to the British Act of 1908. The hypothesis is that a form of welfare provision for the elderly developed in Denmark under agricultural rather than the industrial conditions which conventional thinking usually assumes necessary for such welfare developments. The influence of the Danish scheme upon the debate in Britain is documented and discussed.

In 1997 the Irish government adopted the National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS), a global target for the reduction of poverty which illuminates a range of issues relating to official poverty targets. The Irish target is framed in terms of a relative poverty measure incorporating both relative income and direct measures of deprivation based on data on the extent of poverty from 1994. Since 1994 Ireland has experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth that makes it particularly important to assess whether the target has been achieved, but in doing so we cannot avoid asking some underlying questions about how poverty should be measured and monitored over time. After briefly outlining the nature of the NAPS measure, this article examines trends in poverty in Ireland between 1987 and 1997. Results show that the relative income and deprivation components of the NAPS measure reveal differential trends with increasing relative income poverty, but decreasing deprivation. However, this differential could be due to the fact that the direct measures of deprivation upon which NAPS is based have not been updated to take account of changes in real living standards and increasing expectations. To test whether this is so, we examine the extent to which expectations about living standards and the structure of deprivation have changed over time using confirmatory factor analysis and tests of criterion validity using different definitions of deprivation. Results show that the combined income and deprivation measure, as originally constituted, continues to identify a set of households experiencing generalised deprivation resulting from a lack of resources.

Britain, like other advanced urban industrial countries, is passing through economic changes more fundamental than the recession and inflation which take so much of the headlines. These changes in industrial structure have political implications which influence the distribution of power and the allocation of opportunities and rewards, both through the market and through the social wage furnished by governments. They call for a critical reappraisal of old ideas about the practice, the study and the teaching of social policy, and an attempt to formulate new approaches to this field – or to reformulate the old approaches.

Fifteen per cent of British babies are now born to parents who are neither cohabiting nor married. Little is known about non-residential fatherhood that commences with the birth of a child. Here, we use the Millennium Cohort Study to examine a number of aspects of this form of fatherhood. Firstly, we consider the extent to which these fathers were involved with or acknowledged their child at the time of the birth. Secondly, we identify characteristics that differentiate parents who continue to live apart from those who move in together. Thirdly, for the fathers who moved in with the mother and their child, we enquire whether they differ in the extent of their engagement in family life compared with fathers who have been living with the mother since birth. Finally, for fathers who were living apart from their child when the child was nine months old, we assess the extent to which they were in contact, contributed to their maintenance and were involved in their child's life at this time.

No major reform of the welfare state has a chance of going through unless one can make a plausible case as to both its ‘ethical value’ and its ‘economic.value’, that is, that it would have a positive effect in terms of both justice and efficiency. In this essay, this rough conjecture is first presented, and its plausibility probed, on the background of some stylised facts about the rise of modern welfare states in the postwar period. Next, the focus is shifted to the current debate on the introduction of a basic income, a completely unconditional grant paid ex ante to all citizens. It is argued that if basic income is to have a chance of meeting the strong twofold condition stipulated in the conjecture, some major changes are required in the way one usually thinks about justice and efficiency in connection with social policy. But once these changes are made, as they arguably must be, the chance that basic income may be able to meet the challenge is greatly enhanced.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are respected cross-national studies of pupil achievement. They have been specifically designed to study how countries’ educational systems are performing against one another, and how this is changing over time. These are, however, politically sensitive issues, where different surveys can produce markedly different results. This is shown via a case study for England, where apparent decline in PISA test performance has caused policymakers much concern. Results suggest that England's drop in the PISA ranking is not replicated in TIMSS, and that this contrast may be due to data limitations in both surveys. Consequently, I argue that the current coalition government should not base educational policies on the assumption that the performance of England's secondary school pupils has declined over the past decade.

This article describes the processes of assessment and administration of certain aspects of the supplementary benefit scheme in a social security office in Northern Ireland. Based on evidence obtained observing staff-claimant interaction and interviews with over fifty unemployed claimants, the analysis attempts to demonstrate that a combination of resource constraints, staff attitudes and beliefs, and claimant tactics gives rise to practices which sustain and reproduce the categories ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ at the very same time that staff insist that such practices are actually intended to vitiate this distinction.

Although mixed public–private provisions of welfare have always been a typical characteristic of continental welfare states, recent international scholarship has pointed to a historically new process of institutional hybridisation, with a more systematic intermingling of rationalities of the state, market and third sector within one and the same organisation. In this article, we address two limitations in the current knowledge: first, the absence of an indicator-model for exploring organisational hybridity empirically; second, the lack of sensitivity to cross-national variation depending on the welfare regime. We develop a multi-dimensional analytical framework that takes regime differences into account and empirically assess organisational hybridity in a (post-)corporatist welfare regime. Based on a survey of 255 third-sector organisations (TSOs) in Flanders (Belgium) and using latent class analysis, we find three clusters of TSOs that reflect different types of organisational hybridity. Contextualising our results further shows that the positioning of TSOs in our cluster model to a large extent results from the institutional context in which TSOs operate.

This article considers the current state of help with funeral expenses in Britain. It argues that assistance has been progressively and deliberately eroded to the point where the famous ‘from the cradle to the grave’ protection of the welfare state has been removed from increasing numbers of poor people. The article sets these developments within the context of the contemporary British funeral industry, with emphasis upon its treatment of less-well-off consumers. The changing nature of social security provision for funeral expenses is traced in detail, including the actions of the incoming 1997 Labour government. This article investigates the public health role of local authorities in the case of burials, concluding that such services are insufficiently robust to meet the new weight placed upon them. The article ends with a consideration of the impact which these different changes produce in the lives of individuals upon whom they have an effect.

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 concept of systematic inequalities in social and health outcomes has come to form part of contemporary policy discourse. This rhetoric is deployed even in the face of policy decisions widely viewed as iniquitous. Moreover, there is a widespread view, expressed across the political spectrum, that those in more deprived circumstances are less likely than their more affluent counterparts to be in receipt of optimal public services. Such individuals and communities are variously described as excluded, disadvantaged, underserved or hard to reach. Across countries and policy domains the term ‘hard to reach’ is used to refer to those deemed not to be in optimal receipt of public sector services which are intended to increase some aspect of material, social or physical wellbeing. It is increasingly used in health policy documents which aim to address health inequalities. However, it is an ill-defined and contested term. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it offers a critical commentary on the concept of hard-to-reachness and asks: who are viewed as hard to reach and why? Second, using a case-study of a Scottish health improvement programme that explicitly aims to reach and engage the ‘hard to reach’ in preventive approaches to cardiovascular disease, it tests the policy and practice implications of the concept. It finds that a lack of conceptual clarity leads to ambiguous policy and practice and argues for possible theoretical refinements.

Securing adequate food and nutrition is essential for the maintenance of our health and function in society. This article examines the household characteristics associated with food and nutrition security in the United Kingdom population aged 60 years and over. Data are taken from the Expenditure and Food Survey, a continuous cross-sectional survey of household expenditure, food consumption and income. Survey data for 2002–05 provided a total sample of 5,600 households. Household food consumption is evaluated using national Dietary Reference Values recommended by the Department of Health. A multivariate logistic regression model examines the risk of being food and nutrition insecure by individual and household characteristics. The results suggest that certain sections of the older population are significantly more at risk of food insecurity than others: low-income households, the oldest-old, elderly from black and minority ethnic groups, those with a disability and men living alone. Influencing nutrition of elderly people in the home is complex and poses a major challenge to social policy. Coordinated activity at national and local levels will be required to help ensure that some of the most vulnerable members of society achieve healthy balanced diets.