This article explores recent UK government aspirations towards ‘open policy making’ (OPM). Against a backdrop of scholarly literatures on power inequalities in policy making, I consider to whom processes of policy formulation under a banner of OPM are expected to be ‘opening up’. The article draws on an analysis of government documents from 2012–2018 plus some supplementary data from expert interviews. It notes aspirations towards ‘opening up’ policy formulation to new experts and a particular preoccupation with encouraging private sector involvement. Ideas which may boost ordinary citizens’ input are also part of what ‘makes up’ UK Government OPM, though citizen involvement appears restricted, sitting uneasily alongside commitments to austerity influencing how ‘openness’ is understood.

One of the crucial issues in the evolution of the welfare state is the preferred means of funding and providing social services. In the absence of a federally-funded and centrally-administered child day care programme in the United States, a variety of services and programmes have evolved. Public policy which seeks to encourage service diversity must consider the ability of social service consumers to afford, select or utilize services of quality, or to demand quality from service providers. This study compares child day care services provided under different auspices — public (state and municipal), quasi-public (military), quasi-private (employer-sponsored), non-profit and private proprietary. Consumer ratings of the day care programmes provided under six different auspices are compared to a research assessment of the same six programmes. The data indicate a tendency among consumers to be inattentive regarding the basic elements of care and to overestimate the quality of care. If we accept the view that consumer choice is desirable on procedural grounds (a desirable freedom), then the findings of this study suggest that public policy should strive to enhance the effectiveness of consumer choice.

The practice of social administration is founded on the human response to problems of industrialization and urbanization. Motivation and effort towards ‘social service’ were once taken for granted, but this seems no longer justified in the light of changes in the material and intellectual contexts in which service to the community is undertaken. These changes include the politicization of the service ideal; the emergence of radical social work; the managerialism of service reorganization; new interpretations of professional accountability; and new fashions in sociology and psychology. Although hitherto stable assumptions have been questioned, the dogmatic basis for recent developments and the reactions to them justify a fresh evaluation of the human factor in social administration. The human factor remains the basic resource in identifying and meeting social needs.

One in six of the population is an old-age pensioner and everyone has the prospect of becoming one in their time. It is therefore unsurprising that pensions have been a subject of much political debate. There has, however, been little investigation of what people think about pensions. Politicians have tended to declare that pensions are too low but have in practice been constrained in raising them by their conception of the willingness, or unwillingness, of the working population to pay for higher pensions.

This paper presents qualitative evidence about managers' perceptions of retrenchment in the National Health Service in England. It outlines the financial situation of six case-study district health authorities during the expenditure crisis of 1987/8, and presents the results of an interview survey of district general managers and directors of finance about the implementation of cutbacks. Similar policies of cost-containment and service reduction are mirrored by similarity in the views held by managers and treasurers. Key concerns included the need for a reconstruction of local priorities in service provision, and the advocacy of an extension of managerial control over hospital consultants. These issues are discussed briefly in the context of the recent government proposals to introduce market mechanisms into the NHS, and wider arguments about medical dominance and bureaucratic/professional conflicts.

Five evaluations of the same community regeneration project in Newcastle upon Tyne are compared. It is argued that the separate evaluations are weak in method, atheoretical, ahistorical and lacking in a sense of social structure. To progress, community evaluations must typologise communities rather than treat community as a nebulous quality of relationships. A typology is offered. Further, it is suggested the community regeneration in this case was an extension of urban governance which artificially constructed what is called an ‘inverse’ community.

This paper provides a detailed overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the income of charitable organisations – an under-researched theme within social policy, which thus far has largely focused on the impact of the pandemic on individuals’ and households’ wellbeing. It analyses a unique longitudinal dataset that follows through time c.90,000 charities in England and Wales. The results, for the first time, illustrate the scale of the pandemic’s financial impact on the charitable sector: the median charity experienced a 13% real decline in annual income, while a charity at the 25th percentile of the annual relative growth distribution experienced an income decline of 43%. Importantly these annual declines are much more sizeable than those associated with the Great Recession and subsequent period of public spending austerity. Smaller charities, particularly those with an income under £100k, have been most significantly affected. The declines have been pervasive, extending across most fields of charitable activity, though certain charitable fields have seen particularly acute declines. While there has rightly been considerable emphasis on the important role of voluntary action in responding to the pandemic, this new empirical evidence helps to communicate the extent of the recent challenges faced by the charitable sector.

This article reconsiders the origins of ‘self management’ in pre-school daycare services in the light of new data from a national study of playgroups in England. In the absence of comprehensive nursery education, playgroup provision has mushroomed in Britain. ‘Parental involvement’ has been a central premise in the philosophy of playgroups. However, data now available suggest that aspects of this premise require reassessment.

The study establishes that ‘parents’ who are playgroup managers are in fact mothers mostly drawn from white, higher income, higher educated groups. Furthermore, they tend to be resistant to taking on such management functions. Playgroup workers in turn are dissatisfied with available levels of support and effective management. Both groups however are subject to structural pressures – not least of which is women's increased participation in paid employment – and many of these pressures are likely to increase in the 1990s.

The future management of this sector therefore requires reconsideration within a broader public sector policy framework. Such an approach should address both the real cost of effective management and such employment policies as may facilitate the involvement of all parents – irrespective of gender, income or ethnic group – in services for their children.

This article investigates the impact of NPM reforms on two prominent welfare state professions; medical doctors and teachers. The case study context is Sweden, where the impact of NPM led to a series of reforms in health care and education after 1990. The focus in the paper is on professional autonomy, which can be seen as a core trait in professional work. The findings in the article point to both medical doctors and teachers having lost professional autonomy as a result of NPM-reforms, particularly with regards to the dimensions of work organization and evaluation. Autonomy in individual decision-making seems to have been least affected, even if there are indications of this being infringed upon as well. Despite these broad similarities, the loss of autonomy is found to be more pronounced in the case of teachers. One reason behind this difference, which manifests itself in teachers having become subject to higher level of direct administrative control by school managers while at the same time experiencing a more distinct loss of autonomy to evaluate their work, appears to be that medical doctors have been more successful in establishing themselves as experts in relation to new public audit agencies.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an important component of social assistance in developing countries. CCTs, as well as other cash subsidies, have been criticized for allegedly crowding out private transfers. Whether social programs crowd out private transfers is an important question with worrisome implications, as private support represents an important fraction of households’ income and works as a risk sharing mechanism in developing countries. Furthermore, empirical evidence on the effect of public transfers on private transfers is mixed. This paper contributes to the literature by using a unique dataset from the quasi-experimental evaluation of a CCT in Colombia and an empirical strategy that allows us to correct for pre-existing differences between treated and control groups. Our results suggest that the public transfer did not crowd out private transfers, neither in the short-run nor in the middle-run. Instead, it increased the probability of receiving support in cash, in kind, and in non-paid labor from different private sources by approximately 10 percentage points. Moreover, we find that the monetary value of private transfers increased by 32-38% for treated households.

Two approaches to Information and Advice Centre provision are reviewed and their consequences for work with individuals and groups outlined. The approaches – called the ‘extension’ and ‘advocate-organizer’ models of Centre function – are then examined in the light of findings from research on an ‘Information and Action Centre’ in West Cumbria. Policy implications of the ‘advocate-organizer’ type of service are discussed with reference to questions of management and auspice.

Difficulties encountered in the transfer of money to a minority group in society are explored. Should benefits for disabled people seek to mitigate earnings loss, functional incapacity or damage? Should they take the form of contingency benefits, merited payment, or compensatory and reparatory ‘gifts’? What are the reasons for the different approaches adopted in the War Pensions, Industrial Injuries, and Invalidity Benefit schemes?

An historical account of the development of these schemes shows that payments related to attributed characteristics or ‘condition’ avoid the pitfalls of undue stress on status, performance and achievement inherent in alternative, and apparently more integrative, benefits. Payments related to condition accentuate ‘difference’ but if they represent a collective liability for society's vicariously caused diswelfares, they need not be experienced as stigmatizing. It may therefore be possible to conceive of a compensatory / reparatory payment for all disabled people, as of right, independent of insurance status, average life earnings, current wage, and other measured achievements. To avoid ‘physiological and psychological means testing’ the basic payment would be assessed on a disabled person's assumed ‘loss of faculty’ but, in the interest of equity, individual measurements of functional limitation may be necessary for additional cash benefits and services.

The article develops a case study of the family and work history of an interviewee which is used to illustrate the context in which family arrangements for work, care and support develop. The study uses Finch and Mason's (1993) focus on human agency to develop a ‘family responsibilities account’, and then goes on to explore three aspects of the social structural context in which the life has been lived. These are developed from Connell's analysis (1987) of gender relations: constraints associated with the division of labour, with issues of power and with emotional and personal life (cathexis).

A detailed account of the life in question is given, and this is reanalysed using the four approaches indicated. The result is an overall account which emphasises the complexity of social life and of human decision-making, even at the apparently mundane level of choices about family life, paid employment, domestic work and the care and support of kin. The extent to which constraining factors interweave with individual agency is demonstrated, and the significance of the analysis for policymakers is noted: each change in arrangements for work and care in a life affects others, and policy must be made in an awareness of the complexity of its unintended effects as well as of its objectives.

The authors discuss the development of welfare rights advisory work in Britain, tracing its origins from the Community Development Projects of the late 1960s to services which are funded mainly by local government. Changes in social security legislation in 1980 introduced a largely non-discretionary regulated scheme which was quickly exploited by welfare rights advisers to maximise the take-up of single payments. Advisers and social workers were blamed for generating a deluge of claims by informing claimants of their right to extra benefit. Hence, in 1986, the government restricted entitlement to single payments. It is argued, on the basis of a survey of single payment queries made to welfare rights advisory agencies, that those restrictions foreshadowed the coming of the social fund—with its discretion, cash limit and extremely limited eligibility. The implications for welfare rights work in this changed climate are considered.

Social values are clearly an important influence on the development and administration of social policies. In discussions about social values, however, different political groupings use the same words but with different meanings. This article compares and contrasts ‘ideal-type’ liberal and socialist conceptions of the three social values of freedom, individualism and equality. It then goes on to discuss how far social policy reflects these differing conceptions. The conclusion drawn is that, so far as social policy is concerned, in the clashes between liberal and socialist conceptions of social values liberal values tend to emerge as dominant.

Justin Davis Smith, Colin Rochester and Rodney Hedley (eds.) (1995), An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector, London, Routledge, 260 pp., £42.50 (hbk), £14.99 (pbk).

Susan Saxon Harrold and Jeremy Kendall (1994), Researching the Voluntary Sector, Tonbridge, Charities Aid Foundation, 218 pp., £45.

Marilyn Taylor, Joan Langan and Paul Hoggett (1995), Encouraging Diversity: Voluntary and Private Organisations in Community Care, Aldershot, Arena, 103 pp. £9.95.

Katherine Gaskin and Justin Davis Smith (1995), A New Civic Europe: A Study of the Extent and Role of Volunteering, London, Volunteer Centre, 128 pp., £20.

Policymakers are liable to ‘treasure what is measured’ and overlook phenomena that are not. In an era of increased reliance on administrative data, existing policies also often determine what is measured in the first place. We explore this two-way interaction between measurement and policy in the context of the investment incomes and capital gains that are missing from the UK’s official income statistics. We show that these ‘missing incomes’ change the established picture of economic inequality over the past decade, revealing rising top income shares during the period of austerity. The underestimation of these forms of income in official statistics has hidden the impact of tax policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest. We urge a renewed focus on how policy affects and is affected by measurement.

‘The lines of a great housing policy have been developed as a result of mature deliberations and far reaching enquiries’ said the Report of the War Cabinet for 1918. So they had. The decision to provide Exchequer subsidies for housing was a major development in social policy. It was the result of a prolonged and detailed study which began in the spring of 1916 and was embodied in legislation in the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919.