This article provides a policy-oriented overview of the five-year ESRC Growing Older Programme of research on quality of life in old age: the largest UK social sciences research endeavour to date in the field of ageing. By way of an introduction to the Growing Older Programme, its main objectives are stated and some of its unique contributions to knowledge and research methods are summarised. Then the bulk of the article focuses on the relationship between research and policy: first in general terms and then specifically with regard to the operation of and outputs from the Programme. The particular methods used by the Programme to engage with the policy process are described, within a broad enlightenment framework. This is followed by an outline of the key elements of a multi-dimensional approach to extending the quality of later life. The five priority elements of this skeletal strategy – inequalities in old age, environments of ageing, economic and family roles, participation and involvement, and frailty and identity – are derived from the Growing Older Programme's comprehensive evidence base. In each case the policy implications of the research evidence are illustrated. Finally, the role of older people in living their own lives of quality is discussed, and the results of the Programme are used to show how aspects of both structure and agency combine to determine the quality of later life.

Since the 1960s there has been an increasing number of proprietary agencies engaged in the delivery of social services in the United States. This development has generally been greeted with disfavour by welfare state advocates. Various arguments have been put forward against welfare for profit on moral, empirical and theoretical grounds. This paper analyzes these arguments and proposes several basic conditions that would seem to have significant bearing on the choice between profit and nonprofit providers for a given service.

The possibility of using public sector housing to disperse black people across our cities in the interest of racial integration is again attracting attention. Based on an analysis of housing department records, this article examines the effects on Birmingham's black settlers of the operation of one particular policy of racial dispersal. Having described the events leading to the introduction and ultimately the termination of the policy, the article proceeds to investigate the locations in which Asian, West Indian and native white tenants were housed, their area preferences, and the housing categories from which their allocations were made, as well as their ‘points’ levels on allocation. The article concludes by arguing that, on these dimensions, the consequences of the policy for black people were almost entirely negative.

This article applies the concepts of the financial-subject and micro-foundation of financialisation to young workers’ experiences with Hong Kong’s financialised pension regime. The results of our qualitative analysis show that many respondents doubt and belittle their financial investment for retirement. In response to the compulsory investment required by the government and the fact that their aspirations for security in later life seemed unfulfilled, some young workers undertook ‘uninformed’ investment and ‘age-led’ risk taking. The findings also show that employment precarity translates into investment precarity owing to workers’ unstable incomes and contributions; labour inequalities are reflected in financial inequalities. Arguably, the neoliberal crafting of the young financial-subject, including constructions of financial irresponsibility, irrationality, and illiteracy, is fraught with tensions, turning workers into investors and using finance to satisfy socio-economic needs. It contributes to social policy studies by connecting selfhood and institutions, and calls for questions about the future of financialised pensions.

Relationships of trust are central to the provision of public services. There are, however, concerns that public service reform may disrupt established trust relations. One such reform is the provision of services by a mix of organisations from state, for-profit and third sectors. This paper reports upon an empirical study of the trust relationships between parents and diverse organisations providing early years childcare. It considers whether organisational form or sector is perceived to be a significant indicator of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness, and examines organisational behaviours which may support or hinder trusting relationships. The paper reports that a priori signals, such as sector, have little effect on decisions to trust. Instead, parents actively construct trust through observation of and interactions with providers. Attention therefore shifts to trust-producing organisational behaviours, such as transparency, and to trust-reducing behaviours, such as staff turnover. The paper identifies some benefit in provision through an integrated centre, where parents develop trust over time prior to preschool childcare use. Such a process may be particularly helpful to parents who face disadvantage.

Individual hospitals within the NHS are having to cope with a number of competing priorities and policies in the context of difficult financial circumstances. One such policy is Equal Opportunities (EO). It is within the devolved system of individual trusts that the implementation of (EO) policy takes place. This ‘localisation’ of EO issues also applies to the tackling of racial inequalities in the field of job recruitment, training and promotion. The present study is an examination of EO policies and their implementation at a single National Health Service (NHS) hospital in relation to the recruitment, career development, training and promotion of female ethnic minority employees. Interviews were conducted with fifty ethnic minority females drawn from administrative, domestic and nursing grades; and a further twenty-two with hospital managers with responsibility for recruitment, training and promotion. A number of important deficiencies in the hospital's EO policies were identified by the female ethnic minority interviewees, particularly in respect of the recruitment process, experiences of career development and perceptions of discrimination and harassment. The article details the managers' attitudes towards and knowledge of EO policies in general and their responses to these deficiencies in particular.

Recent writing in social policy on the role of agency has made important assumptions about social administration in the post-war period. In particular it is suggested that interpretations of the causes of poverty, and the thinking of Richard Titmuss, were characterised by a ‘denial’ of agency and almost total emphasis on structural factors. The implications were that this left the Titmuss paradigm vulnerable to more individualistic interpretations in the 1980s. In this article we look more closely at Titmuss's work and thought in the three decades of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced analysis. We argue that the distinctive position adopted by Titmuss was in large part his response to earlier and on-going debates about social pathology. What he was trying to do was to make others aware of the broader context in which behaviour had to be analysed. But Titmuss himself became constrained by the paradigm that he did more than anyone else to create. Thus debates about behaviour, structure, and poverty have been marked as much by continuity as by change.

Health visiting is adopting an enabling model of practice, which may promote social inclusion, but is under pressure to justify itself. The article focuses on health visitors' work with Pakistani women and comparable white women in Glasgow, examining the nature of health visiting and women's responses to it. Health visitors' perspectives involve the appreciation of cultural differences, building relationships with clients, and some stereotyping of clients. Techniques include highly valued home visiting, and processes of negotiation with clients. Problems faced include difficulties with interpreters, lack of training, relationships with other professions, recent changes in the NHS, and issues of stress and personal safety. Women's views of health visitors are generally positive, especially concerning home visits, time spent with clients, and gate-keeping access to GPs. Negative views came mostly from white women, and concerned the more controlling models of health visiting. Thus, enabling health visiting practice was widely appreciated, and could act as an inclusionary force, facilitating access to and use of health services. Exclusion was operating at institutional level, towards minorities and women of lower socio-economic groups, but was being actively resisted by practitioners.

The expansion of ‘social duties’ has been a prominent feature in the development of social policy and the welfare state. Drawing on unique time-series data in the database of SCIP (Social Citizenship Indicators Project), this article describes and analyses the development of ‘social duties’, primarily in the form of taxes and social insurance contributions, in eighteen countries from 1930 to 1990. In focus are the institutional and longitudinal variation in the increase and change in these duties and how they have been distributed among employers, the insured and state authorities.

Any predictions that solicitors acting for divorcing parents might become redundant, as increasing use is made of mediation services, are unsubstantiated by the research on which this article is based. This study shows how solicitors, far from retreating from issues of arrangements over the future of children of divorcing parents, are busy adapting themselves to the new working environment. For some this process involves themselves qualifying as mediators. For these and others, it entails acquiring and presenting to their clients an understanding of ‘child psychology’ which enables them to advise their clients on how to sort out their differences in ways that will safeguard their children's welfare. By constructing children's welfare within a legal discourse of justice and protection of their clients' lawful interests, solicitors are able to convince themselves that justice, in cases involving children's welfare, is achieved by persuading their clients to ‘be sensible’ and sort out their differences, and that those parents who are openly hostile and/or pursue their own (selfish) interests have lost sight of justice and need to be brought back into line. The article demonstrates how solicitors claim to achieve these ends and raises questions about their practical and theoretical implications.

Welfare policy discourse plays an important role in shaping how marginalised groups are identified and how poverty is addressed. Research on welfare policy discourse has mostly adopted a top-down perspective, examining how marginalised groups are constituted through interrelated discourses that are produced and enacted by powerful actors. However, little attention has been given to understanding how welfare policy discourse is used and enacted by marginalised groups themselves. This article focuses on asset-building discourse, a newly ascendant discourse which suggests that poverty can be alleviated through savings and building wealth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 poor single mothers of colour participating in a matched savings programme, the article explores how poor women rely on asset-building discourse to make sense of their poverty challenges and how to overcome them. The study finds that the women express neoliberal ideals as they seek to portray themselves as committed to becoming self-sufficient, financially literate, disciplined savers and entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that the women feel empowered and see themselves as worthy citizens, irrespective of whether their economic situation has actually improved or whether they ultimately come to resist asset-building discourse's individualisation of their predicament.

This article examines country differences in the association between education and voluntary or involuntary labor market exit and whether these country differences map onto institutional characteristics of the countries. Work exit is defined as involuntary or voluntary based on the reasons of exit. Four different types of institutional factors, push and pull, aiming for an earlier work exit and need and maintain factors to retain older workers in employment are considered. Using data from 15 European countries from the longitudinal Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), discrete-time event history models with a categorical outcome are estimated for each country separately. In a second step, we add macro-level indicators and conduct meta-analyses to analyze country differences. Results show that in almost all countries a social gradient in involuntary work exit exists but not in voluntary exit. Lower-educated workers are more likely to involuntarily exit the labor market. Institutional factors, especially those supporting older workers’ retention in employment, are associated with a smaller social gradient in work exit. Our findings suggest that investments in active labor market expenditures, especially in lifelong learning and rehabilitation for lower educated workers, may help to reduce the social gradient in involuntary work exit.

‘Tax expenditures’ are public revenue losses which result from special allowances and reliefs given to various categories of taxpayer for reasons of economic and social policy. In 1983/4 tax expenditures in the personal income tax system cost nearly £11 billion which was equal to 35 per cent of revenue from personal income tax or 9 per cent of total public expenditure. This paper assesses their significance in the context of public expenditure and tax policy. It identifies those allowances and reliefs in the personal income tax system which may be regarded as tax expenditures, evaluates them and compares their cost with direct expenditures in similar areas. Many tax expenditures are inequitable and inefficient; and they are difficult for governments to control. If they were reduced some public expenditures could be protected from cuts, or the general burden of income tax could be reduced.

In pension systems characterized by low or moderate state benefits, reliance on voluntary private pensions creates a dualism of access to adequate retirement income. This dualism is expected to persist over time. Yet while some private-heavy pension systems continue to rely on dualising voluntarism, since the 1980s most have introduced regulatory reforms to make private pensions more encompassing. This paper uses fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify three paths to the regulatory extension of private pension coverage – collective self-regulation, top-down regulation in Continental Europe, and top-down regulation in Anglophone countries. A case study of the UK then shows how it is that unions have been able to bring about more encompassing private pensions in Anglophone countries, despite strong employer opposition, weak formal influence in policymaking, and a weak institutional capacity for collective self-regulation.

This article addresses two issues. First, using data drawn from the Sample of Anonymised Records of the 1991 Northern Ireland Census, for over 13,000 individuals, it constructs a deprivation index and then, using this index, compares the deprivation levels of Catholics and Protestants. Second, it relates the level of deprivation of the individuals in the sample to their personal characteristics and circumstances. In particular, it examines the possibility that while higher deprivation levels among Catholics may have been partly due to the fact that they possessed, to a greater degree than Protestants, the attributes that were correlated with deprivation, it may also have been the result of Catholics being penalised more harshly than Protestants for possessing these attributes.

The shift from national insurance to employer administered, state funded Statutory Sick Pay has been discussed in terms of the privatisation of social security and its impact upon the living standards of sick-absent employees. This paper reports a survey of employers’ perceptions of the change. Many employers have seen the introduction of the scheme as an opportunity to extend control of sickness absence among workers. The new regime may be better understood as part of a process whereby the government and employers link together to manage labour in the interests of capital, rather than as the privatisation of one aspect of social security.

The sale of council dwellings under the right to buy has been a prominent feature of the privatisation policies of the Thatcher governments. The impact of such changes in the ownership and control of dwellings remains a subject of considerable debate. Whilst there is now substantial evidence on the short term effects of council house sales, the longer term impacts on dwellings and households have largely been a matter for speculation. This paper explores some of the central policy and theoretical issues through new research evidence on dwellings sold by local authorities in the late sixties and early seventies. In particular it focuses on what has happened to households and dwellings since privatisation, the political orientation of those households and on attitudes towards and experiences of state provision. In general it presents a picture of continuity and stability rather than dramatic change and transformation following privatisation.

As has been the case in a number of countries, parents in England have increasingly been given the opportunity to choose between different types of schools. Doing so is regarded as a way of meeting individual needs and improving academic standards. Faith-based schools long predate this move towards a more diversified educational system, but have come to be regarded as one of the ways of fulfilling the recent agenda. Drawing on social identity theory, we suggest that attitudes towards faith-based schools reflect social (religious) identities and group interests associated with those identities rather than beliefs about the merits of individual choice. We demonstrate this is the case using data from all four parts of the UK. However, the extent to which attitudes towards faith-based schools are a reflection of religious identities varies across the four parts in line with the structure of the religious economy and educational provision locally. We conclude that rather than reflecting a supposedly a-social concern with choice, support for diversity of educational provision may be rooted instead in collective – and potentially antagonistic – social identities.

Policy discourse surrounding Britain’s unusually well-resourced private schools surrounds their charitable status and their relationship with low social mobility, but informative evidence is scarce. We present estimates of the extent to which private and external benefits at age 25 are associated with attendance at private school in England in the 21st century. We find a weekly wage premium of 17 percent, and a 12 percentage point lower chance of downward social mobility. By contrast, private schooling is not significantly associated with participation in local voluntary groups, unpaid voluntary work, or charitable giving and fundraising; this finding casts doubt on claims that private schools deliver ‘public benefit’ in this way.

This article argues that postmodernist theory is something which students of social policy should neither accept uncritically nor dismiss out of hand. Firstly, the article takes issue with the responses made to postmodernist theory by Ramesh Mishra and Peter Taylor-Gooby. Secondly, it argues that the ideas loosely known as ‘reflexive modernisation’ constitute a more measured and critical response, though such ideas are likely to be of little use to social policy research in the absence of any reference to a left-right spectrum. Thirdly, it argues that by combining reflexive modernisation with a left-right spectrum, a decentred conception of welfare emerges which could be of value to a radical left politics. Finally, it argues for a Citizen's Income as a reform proposal which has the potential to establish such a system of decentred welfare.