Looking at core features of child and family related spending and policy design, and covering five domains of policy, the paper offers new empirical evidence and an original perspective for better understanding how EU countries and the UK responded to the needs of children and families during the pandemic and how to classify responses in terms of child-centredness. The paper is driven by a concept of child-centredness to examine developments from March to December 2020 in five policy fields: income support, food assistance, early childcare and education services, school opening and support for parental care-giving. The analysis shows strong variation across countries in terms of how active they were and what fields they were active in. One very striking commonality, though, is that the most popular field of policy action was in resourcing parental care of children at home, through paid leaves usually. A related finding is that there was little prioritising of children for most kinds of actions. Thirdly, in terms of national patterning those countries that were generous spenders on this field of policy prior to the pandemic were most child-centred in their response and there are few if any exceptions to this.

In this paper, we estimate the causal effects of a set of active labor market programs for male unemployed refugees on welfare who entered Germany between, 2013 and September, 2016. Using rich administrative data, we employ covariate balancing propensity scores combined with inverse probability weighting to estimate effects up to 33 months after the start of treatment. Our results show that relatively short-term training in the form of Schemes by Providers and In-Firm Training, as well as longer-term Further Vocational Training programs have a positive impact on both the employment chances as well as labor market earnings of refugees in the medium run. So-called “One Euro Jobs”, a public employment program, does not yield positive effects on employment or earnings. Sensitivity analyses confirm that our results are unlikely to be driven by unobserved confounding.

Social Policy as an academic discipline has been at the forefront of many progressive movements in society, exploring problems of poverty, hardship, exclusion and suffering, government intervention, and the critical appraisal of those interventions. Yet it has been strangely silent on issues of sexual identity and gender identity and the inequities faced by the LGBTQ+ community. In this article we draw upon lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies, to, first, unpack how heteronormativity is reinforced in social policy in practice and in its analysis within Social Policy as a discipline. This illustrates how the family, as a core basis for welfare in societies, has meant that, reflexively, the base unit of analysis within Social Policy has been the heterosexual family, without a full interrogation of what this means for different groups. Second, we review the limited evidence available around the inequalities LGBTQ+ people face, primarily in the UK (and wider global North), highlighting how the years of oppression have made “counting” this group of people difficult within our usual survey instruments. Thus, while Social Policy has aimed to achieve a universal social citizenship for all, it has inadvertently remained silent on how to include LGBTQ+ in its analysis.

In 2003, Norway implemented an ‘Introduction Programme’ that aimed to increase labour market inclusion among newly arrived immigrants. Its main objectives were to facilitate free courses in Norwegian language training and social studies, and education or on-the-job training. The participants were given an allowance to attend the programme. This paper uses administrative register data to evaluate the effect of the Norwegian introduction programme on female immigrants’ employment and earnings prospects. The sample consists of female immigrants from Asia or Africa who immigrated to Norway 18 months before or after the implementation of the introduction programme. The study measures their probability of being employed and their mean earnings 4–6 and 7–9 years after immigration. The results show that the Norwegian introduction programme had a small but significant effect on women’s employment, but not on their earnings. This article suggests that the small effect of the programme on employment and non-effect on earnings may imply a displacement effect rather than an improvement in language skills and labour market skills.

Introducing individual savings accounts into the system of social security may be an innovative way to reorganise European social security systems. This article examines the merits and drawbacks of this modernisation strategy using the Transitional Labour Market approach as a frame of reference. On the basis of normative criteria derived from this approach, we perform an evaluation of the Dutch life-course scheme (‘Levensloopregeling’). This scheme is a unique and pioneering arrangement that offers employees a fiscally facilitated option to save money to finance periods of unpaid leave. Following the assessment of the Dutch case, we identify several pitfalls of reforms based on individual savings accounts. Finally, we put forward some proposals to overcome these shortcomings.

Does governmental intervention in the form of occupational training and retraining and other forms of assistance improve immigrants' occupational opportunities both as self-employed and as salaried employees? These have been longstanding research and government concerns in societies that face large waves of immigration. This study reports on the research findings of a longitudinal study which sought to examine the effects of governmental support mechanisms on the incorporation of a large immigrant inflow from the former Soviet Union (FSU) high in human capital into the labour market. Three types of public support programmes were investigated: occupational retraining, subsidised salaries for immigrants and support for immigrants in business creation. The research population consisted of 910 new immigrants from the FSU who arrived to Israel in the 1990s; they were interviewed in-depth in 1992 and again in 1994/5. The findings show that the three support mechanisms differ in their contribution to the transferability of human capital of immigrants and their earnings from jobs. They also affect men and women immigrants differently. The question ‘what worked?’ is discussed from three viewpoints: accountability of public programmes, knowledge basis and implementation. A training system approach is used to explain differences in the effects of the three policy instruments on the occupational incorporation of the immigrants.

This article uses administrative data to explore benefit dynamics for children in Britain's second largest city, Birmingham, over the period January 1998 to June 1999. As the benefits in question (housing benefit and council tax benefit) are means tested, the dynamics are also informative about moves in and out of low income. The article is original in its use of quarterly data to provide a comprehensive picture of benefit dynamics, in treating the child rather than the benefit claimant as the unit of analysis, and also in including ethnic group differences in its analysis of benefit exit and re-entry. It provides a picture of substantial ‘welfare dynamics’: that is, movements in and out of benefit support. Living in a low-income family in receipt of benefit can be seen to be a part, and sometimes a recurring part, of the experience of a large proportion of children. It argues that policy needs to investigate and take account of the impact of insecure income as well as poverty when considering the welfare of children.

Homeless individuals often find that welfare services are inaccessible, despite being designed to meet their needs. This frictions with access which is a fundamental principle in western welfare states. Adaptations in social policy and service delivery are therefore made to deal with the problem of inaccessibility to services and welfare rights. One such adaptation is outreach work and is often developed to engage with homeless people and link them up with available services. This raises questions on the transformative potential of outreach work to deal with those mechanisms which result in inaccessibility. We argue that in a context in which accessibility is increasingly guaranteed by rights-based frameworks, exclusion management is also increasing. This is due to hybrid developments in social policy and welfare ideology. Nonetheless, the initial transformational potential of outreach work never really vanished.

The large and generous income transfer system in the Netherlands has caused increasing tax burdens and deficits in a period of sluggish economic growth. Confronted with this situation, the present Dutch government is trying to cut back the scope of the system substantially by reducing benefit levels. The distributional impact of this policy is simulated on a micro data set. It is found that the effects of the transfer cuts on overall income distribution are not very large: from 1983 to 1986, inequality as measured by the Gini or the Theil index increases by 3 per cent. However, inequality between working and non-working people as measured by the Theil index between groups is simulated to increase by as much as 50 per cent. On the other hand, people can be hypothesized to increase their work effort when benefit levels are lowered. Using a behavioural model, it is estimated that from 1983 to 1986 the working population might increase, ceteris paribus, by 0.5 per cent yearly as a consequence of the transfer cuts. This would imply second-round distributional effects mitigating the increase in overall inequality by one-third.

The objective of this paper is to take the published Mental Health Service objectives of the British Government and to assess the extent to which these objectives had been attained by 1970. Our measures are those of input and the criteria by which we judge the services are those which were set forth in the White papers, the Hospital Plan for England and Wales (1962), and Health and Welfare (1963). By and large we find that the objectives were not met. Simple linear extrapolation of some of the trends in the data make us pessimistic about their attainment prior to 1980. These lessons should condition any optimism about the inevitability of more recent objectives (Department of Health and Social Security [1971] - the Keith Joseph proposals) being attained in the prescribed time period.

Recent changes in the law have made it possible to pay adopters in certain circumstances for the upkeep of their children. This is a policy change which has been controversial since it challenges values concerning not only the nature of adoption but also the boundaries between State and parental responsibility. It also represents a significant extension of local authority powers with regard to income maintenance. This raises issues of equity in relation to central government benefits for the maintenance of children and other forms of help available to disadvantaged families.

For the last ten years, the Australian system of services for frail elderly people has been undergoing significant reforms. Prior to that time, a series of government reviews and inquiries had repeatedly identified the same problems, including the dominance of institutional care, the inadequate supply of home and community based services, the lack of co-ordination, the inefficiency, and the unequal distribution of services by geographical area. Changes since the implementation of the Aged Care Reform Strategy in 1985 have been considerable, particularly with regard to the residential care sector. This article is concerned with the policy responses which emerged under the Strategy, and their impact on aged care service delivery in Australia.

Over the years during which Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian economy has become heavily dependent on wages earned in Israel. Yet Israel has done relatively little to modernise these territories' social security arrangements, or to enable Palestinian frontier workers to benefit from its own social security system. This article compares the occupational welfare, public assistance and health insurance programmes in the three entities, and suggests how they could be better organised to protect Palestinian workers and their families against daily contingencies which can decimate their economic security.

Unemployment strongly influences a person’s economic resources and life chances. Especially for unemployed individuals who have to rely on means-tested benefits, episodes of unemployment often go along with substantial material restrictions. Therefore, from a policy perspective, measures or regulations that might shorten unemployment episodes and reduce overall unemployment are particularly important.

In this paper, we analyse whether concessions regarding the characteristics of the job searched for influence an individual’s unemployment duration. In doing so, we focus on a particular aspect of availability requirements in Germany. This is the fact that for unemployed recipients of means-tested benefits almost all types of jobs count as suitable employment and, therefore, recipients are obliged to make job-related concessions if offered a job requiring such concessions.

The results indicate that there is no positive effect of making concessions regarding qualification requirements or status on employment chances. In contrast, there are positive effects of wage concessions. However, searching for a job in a different occupation (that does not necessarily imply a concession) has a comparable, positive effect on finding employment. Thus, it appears that being generally flexible regarding one’s future occupation might be at least as important for employment chances as making concessions.

Leaving the European Union (so-called ‘Brexit’) is a ‘critical moment’ for health policy reform which can pave the way to different pathways, including, a ‘critical juncture’. Given that Brexit cannot be undone without a second referendum, it opens up opportunities to elude European constraints for reform along the lines of equity, employment rights and patient choice. Brexit deepens the financial crisis of the National Health Service (NHS) by increasing hiring costs and imposing new transaction costs to accommodate patient cross-border mobility and international public health needs. Given the weak sustainability of the NHS, it could lead to major system reform.

Understanding the historical policy pathways that have led to the constellation of policies that both reflect and shape the current gender order can reveal reasons for the persistence of gender inequality in paid work and unpaid family care. Bringing together existing research and policy critique with Carol Bacchi’s framework of policy as ‘gendering practices’, this paper focuses on the role of policy as a process that constructs and upholds an unequal gender order. The discussion traces how UK social policies have since the establishment of the post-war welfare state articulated and positioned gendered possibilities for combining paid work and childrearing, shaping gendered and classed work-family life courses. The analysis illustrates that British social policy has not been consistently committed to a more equal gender regime but instead maintained a heteronormative family ideal and thus, despite various policy changes, the gendering of ‘the worker’ and ‘the parent’ as conceptualised in UK policy has persisted over the last several decades.