Despite its significance in determining poverty risk, family size has received little focus in recent social policy analysis. This paper provides a correction, focusing squarely on the changing poverty risk of larger families (those with three or more dependent children) in the UK over recent years. It argues that we need to pay much closer attention to how and why poverty risk differs according to family size. Our analysis of Family Resource Survey data reveals how far changes in child poverty rates since 1997 – both falling poverty risk to 2012/13 and increases since then – have been concentrated in larger families. Social security changes are identified as central: these have affected larger families most as they have greater need for support, due to both lower work intensity and higher household needs. By interrogating the way policy change has affected families of different sizes the paper seeks to increase understanding of the effects of different poverty reduction strategies, with implications for policy debates in the UK and beyond. In providing evidence about the socio-demographics of larger families and their changing poverty risk it also aims to inform contested debates about the state’s role in providing financial support for children.

While pioneering has long been assumed to be the unique function of voluntary agencies, the flow of private invention to public adoption has rarely been studied empirically. Drawing on an exploratory study of twenty national agencies serving the physically and mentally handicapped, this article re-evaluates the vanguard role of the voluntary agency. Much of what has been regarded as ‘innovative’ consisted of small-scale, non-controversial, incremental improvements or extensions of programs with few original features to under-served clienteles. A series of external and internal organizational constraints to the statutory adoption of new programs is identified, which suggests that the conventional notion of voluntary pioneering is no longer appropriate. A new model of program change is proposed based on multiple outcomes and a redefinition of the concept of innovation. Some hypotheses are offered regarding conditions conducive to the initiation of new programs.

This response to Stein Ringen's paper recognises the importance of his recent work and the validity of some of the criticisms he makes of poverty studies, but argues that his own approach suffers from some of the same defects. He dismisses this research too hastily, partly because he has neglected some of the best of it. Drawing on these sources, this paper formulates with their help a more rigorous presentation of the relative concept of poverty and the analytical steps which should be taken by those using this concept.

The core of this paper is a case study of how a District Health Authority (Paddington and North Kensington, now Parkside DHA following a recent merger with Brent DHA) in Inner London responded to a major new health care issue of the 1980s—Aids, but the paper also seeks to locate this case study material within wider debates. What theories are there of organisational change which could be used to illuminate policy and service change in the health care sector? How, indeed, do we best study change in health care organisations? The paper is thus in three parts. In the first section we identify some streams of literature which act as a frame of reference defining our initial research question and discuss implications for methodology. The second section presents the case itself, while the last section discusses some emerging findings.

Pensions are a controversial issue in Britain. During the past fifty years, pension reforms have been challenged by the competing policies of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. There were differences in the nature, scope and extent of pension policies between them: the Conservatives encouraged private pension provision while the Labour Party promoted state provision. Based on core principles of freedom and personal responsibility, the Conservatives persistently over time implemented policies in line with these beliefs. This article explores this transformation of the post-war pension regime. An attempt is made here to sketch out a new explanation of this transformation in drawing on recent theories of the role of ideas and ideology in the policy process. The recent apparent convergence in policy thinking on pensions between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party highlights the importance of core ideological principles.

Noting limited attention by international development agencies to inequalities compared to global poverty, we ask how these two challenges have been framed in agencies’ policy publications during the past several decades. Following a recent application of algorithmic analysis to health policy narratives in the UK, we use text-mining software to compare the frequency of two alternative conceptualisations of poverty and inequality in three different document categories: the World Bank's World Development Reports, the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Reports and a set of white papers by bilateral donor agencies. In a second step, we visualise each document's degree of contextual similarity in using the two conceptualisations of poverty and inequality with all documents in the same source category. We find that while references to poverty have, on average, been twice as prominent as references to inequality, conceptualisations of poverty and inequality as well as the textual contexts in which they appear differ both temporally and substantively between agencies included in our sample. We show how such agency-specific framing patterns can be leveraged politically to forge more effective social policy coalitions. We also outline follow-up research capable of capturing the politics of language underpinning our observations.

In an attempt to counter changes in family structures, a number of nation states are designing policies to make men fit into families. In the case of the USA, decision makers view fatherhood and marriage as the cure for poverty among African Americans. To assert that training these men to be better fathers and husbands will help them improve other dimensions of their lives (particularly poverty) is a good idea, but it is also simplistic. Decision makers rely on an intra-group, which privileges an individualistic and cultural approach, in their development of policies. This approach tends to ignore that other subsystems, such as previously existing policies, can have an impact on the effectiveness of marriage and fatherhood promotion. Using the USA as a case study, I hypothesise that the effectiveness of fatherhood and marriage promotion is limited because of their interaction with other policies. Fatherhood and marriage promotion initiatives will be negatively affected by the absence of a progressive national urban policy, particularly in the area of economic development and in the context of current crime policies. The socio-economic and cultural reality faced by African American men must be incorporated into the decision-making processes in order to identify the most effective policies.

The high level of academic, public and policy attention paid to the deservingness of the poor and (especially) of welfare recipients contrasts with the scant attention paid to the deservingness – or otherwise – of the rich. This discrepancy reflects socially dominant – but contestable – ideas about equality of opportunity and the role of individual merit within market systems. In this journal, Karen Rowlingson, Stewart Connor and Michael Orton have noted that wealth and riches have remained invisible as policy ‘problems’. This invisibility is socially important, in that policy efforts to address current, socially damaging, levels of economic inequality require attention to the deservingness of the rich, as well as of the poor. This article draws on recent survey data from New Zealand to provide new insights into public attitudes to the rich. It finds that the New Zealand public view the rich as more individually deserving of their outcomes than the poor are deserving of social assistance, and that attitudes towards the rich are related to redistributive sentiments at least as strongly as attitudes towards the poor. In concluding, the article reflects on the limitations of existing data sources and makes suggestions for future research.

The welfare state is but the vehicle for the provision of welfare and the latter does not necessarily entail the former. Much recent debate occasioned by government policy and rhetoric has therefore confused means and ends. This paper argues that a defence of welfare must come before a concern for protecting the welfare state. A number of foundations for guaranteed welfare provision, including justice, rights and contract are considered but the most persuasive foundation for welfare as need-meeting is found to lie in the Kantian categorical imperatives. Not only do these provide a moral prescription that welfare ought to be provided, they also dictate the ways in which it ought to be provided. It is against these requirements therefore that the necessity of a welfare state as a means of providing welfare can be tested. The second part of the paper then considers how extensive a welfare state needs to be, and how the boundaries between the public and private domains in the provision of welfare may be drawn. The equality principle, allied to the notion of equality of welfare, is found to be a useful instrument in determining the bounds of the public domain but only (so the paper concludes reluctantly) when harnessed to objective specifications of need.

The social security structure has been seen as a serious disincentive to the employment of women married to unemployed men. The implied significance of this disincentive is not apparent from verbal accounts, where only a minority of such women cite social security considerations as having any direct relevance in their own labour force experience. Recent research, critical of the social security model, has been conducted with a view to exploring the employment strategies of couples. In such research, economic structure is seen as the context of household employment strategies but not, it appears, as part of their substance; household level processes and ‘external’ economic processes are separated. In this respect, such approaches parallel the social security model. The present paper is based on an analysis of the household circumstances and employment histories of 790 couples in Hartlepool. Our findings suggest that ‘strategies’ regarding household income maintenance are patterned in relation to labour demand and occupational opportunity. This association contributes to the coincidence of spouses' employment status and is indicative of the problems of separating employment demand and labour supply processes, a separation which leads the social policy literature to overstate the significance of social security disincentives to employment.

This article briefly reviews American and British literature on welfare dynamics and examines the concepts of welfare dependency and ‘dependency culture’ with particular reference to lone parents. Using UK benefit data sets, the welfare dynamics of lone mothers are examined to explore the extent to which they inform the debates. Evidence from Housing Benefits data show that even over a relatively short time period, there is significant turnover in the benefits-dependent lone parent population with movement in and out of income support as well as movement into other family structures. Younger lone parents and owner-occupiers tend to leave the data set while older lone parents and council tenants are most likely to stay. Some owner-occupier lone parents may be relatively well off and on income support for a relatively short time between separation and a financial settlement being reached. They may also represent a more highly educated and highly skilled group with easier access to the labour market than renters. Any policy moves paralleling those in the United States to time limit benefit will disproportionately affect older lone parents.

Research into public policy and public opinion demonstrates ample evidence that opinion affects policy, but relatively limited empirical findings regarding how policy might affect opinion: a process dubbed policy feedback. Much of the literature examines aggregate reactions to policy, while related public opinion research emphasises individual findings driven primarily by party affiliation or political ideology. This article takes the research one step further, examining whether individuals' judgements of policy effectiveness contribute to their support for or opposition to government policy spending. Specifically, it examines the case of US welfare reform and public reactions to it using a national survey conducted in 2001. Findings based on multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrate not only that people's judgements of welfare reform's effectiveness contribute to their support for government spending on the poor, but also that the reasons behind their judgements matter.

This paper discusses issues raised by the uneven expansion of private health care in Britain in recent years. The problems being experienced by the industry have exposed divisions in the private health care industry and have provoked criticisms of the Government and requests for a greater degree of state support for, and regulation of, the industry. The paper therefore examines the scope for changes of government policy to facilitate further expansion. It argues that few of the alternatives are either technically adequate, in terms of solving the private sector's problems, or politically feasible, in the sense of being electorally justifiable. It concludes that policies to further private sector expansion could be implemented only at the cost of the private sector's independence, or at the expense of the Government's commitment to the NHS.

Issues such as caring and family policy have received increased attention within the sociological literature on the welfare state during the past decades. At the same time, there has been much debate about the protection of social risks. In particular, scholars have questioned the ability of welfare states to respond to so-called new social risks, such as reconciling work and care. The literature on new social risks assumes welfare states will have difficulty addressing these risks due to pressures for reform and assumed individual responsibility for new social risks. In contrast, the Dutch welfare state has been successful in re-orienting existing institutions to develop a semi-collectivised yet market-driven form of childcare policy. Using qualitative interview data and document analysis, this article analyses the development of Dutch childcare policy from 1995 to 2009. The development of childcare policy is attributed to three social mechanisms: a common perception among actors viewing childcare as a solution to improve women's employment; a party politics mechanism, which creates a distinct Dutch approach to childcare; and a corporatist mechanism, referring to the interaction between the state and industrial relations, which failed in the area of childcare policy. The development of childcare policy has not been wholly unproblematic, however, and therefore a critical discussion of these developments is offered. Also, an update of policy developments through to 2013 is provided.

In 2012, the Government invited local councils in England to participate in a pilot programme to test direct payments in residential care. While the programme was set up to allow for comprehensive summative evaluation, the uptake of direct payments in residential care was substantially lower than anticipated, with only 40 people in receipt of one at the end of the programme. Drawing on qualitative data collected for the evaluation, this paper aims to understand better the barriers to implementing direct payments in residential care. Evidence from the use of direct payments in domiciliary care identified gatekeeping by council frontline staff as a major barrier for service users to access direct payments. Our findings suggest that, whilst selectivity of both service users and providers was an integral part of the programme design, gatekeeping does not fully explain the poor take-up. Other factors played a part, such as lack of clarity about the benefits of direct payments for care home residents, the limited range and scope of choice of services for residents, and concerns from care providers about the financial impact of direct payments on their financial sustainability.

Two-parent families with dependent children are known to be at lower risk of poverty and significantly less reliant on state financial help than lone-parent households. It might therefore be expected that the factors influencing partnership transitions among low-income women would represent a key area of policy interest. However, driven by concerns about weak work incentives, policy focus and research has to date concentrated on understanding lone parents’ labour supply and encouraging the transition from benefits into employment. Surprisingly little is therefore known about demographic decision making among women reliant on UK means-tested welfare. As part of a wider qualitative study exploring family formation, partnership dissolution and repartnering decisions among low-income mothers, this paper examines whether and to what extent entitlement to welfare benefits or tax credits influenced the decision to live with or apart from a partner or child's father. The research found that the aspects of welfare that remove or reduce a mother's access to an independent income and require one partner in a couple to be financially dependent on the other had been strongly influential in partnering decisions and living arrangements. Policy implications are discussed.

The role of means-testing within social policy has become more important and more central in the 1990s. However, extensive reliance on means-testing brings with it the accompanying problems of the unemployment and poverty traps. In the 1990s these take on more of the form of a poverty plateau, accentuated by a new savings trap. This article uses hypothetical calculations of benefit entitlement in order to explore the extent of the poverty plateau, and looks in particular at the impact on this of the growing use of means-tested rebates by local authorities. Means-tested rebates have been developed by authorities because of a concern that the new charges for services that they are making might disadvantage poor local citizens. Drawing on work of one typical authority, this article reveals that these rebates do add significantly to the poverty plateau, and yet that this is an issue which is little understood by both local and national policy planners.