The research literature is characterized by a fundamental controversy about what parenting support is and what it aims to be: A health-promotion measure that supports child development or a “totalizing tendency […] of defining the relation between parents and children in technical terms” (Smeyers, 2010). This paper presents a study from Norway, where parenting support is offered as a “universal”, publicly funded service. It presents and discusses findings based on in-depth interviews with 45 parents from different social (educational, economic) and cultural (migration) backgrounds, focusing on how they perceived the purpose and outcomes of parenting support programs in which they participated. A key finding is that parents with majority backgrounds are less enamoured with the quality and usefulness of provision, and tend instead towards other sources for advice on parenting (primarily their social and familial networks). Many also express scepticism of broad approaches to parenting support provision. In contrast, minority parents lacking “Norwegian” social and familial networks genuinely find the courses valuable, both for their own integration and self-confidence and also the development of their children. The findings help address the need for further research into the effectiveness of parenting support and its potential role in reducing social inequality.

Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis response. This paper draws upon 49 semi-structured interviews with local authorities (LAs) and VCS organisations across England, Scotland and Wales, to explore how the pandemic has reshaped LA-VCS collaboration. Examining the evolution of a range of local collaborative frameworks during the Covid-19 crisis, the article examines what enabled these collaborations to develop, how they operated and what insights can be derived regarding both the conditions for collaboration to flourish and the capacity to sustain this going forward. The findings offer insights into what more progressive forms of collaboration might look like during the transition from crisis and into recovery. It contributes to broader debates about whether the models deployed during Covid-19 represent a pathway to more consensus-based collaboration after a decade of antagonism between civil society and the state.

This paper examines the current model of sheltered housing and explores a central contradiction in that model: namely that if only those people who most need and appreciate the unique features of sheltered housing were allocated places in schemes, the existing model ultimately could not provide sufficient support. This central contradiction leads to a fundamental lack of clarity in the role of sheltered housing. This is reflected in the ambiguities apparent in allocation practices, where judgements are typically made not only in relation to the tenants' needs and demands but also in relation to the impact on schemes. Evidence is presented from a recent study of sheltered and amenity housing in Scotland, which exposes these issues and suggestions are made as to how the traditional model of sheltered housing can be made more flexible and more suited to those who need and value it most.

The passing of the Workmen's Compensation Act 1897 did not affect an injured worker's rights to sue for damages at common law or under the Employers' Liability Act 1880. However, the evidence suggests that these alternative remedies declined in importance until the 1930s when certain court decisions and acts of Parliament gave them renewed significance. For several reasons Beveridge was antipathetic towards unmodified retention of the alternative remedy, but he proposed the establishment of an official committee for the purpose of making a full inquiry. As a result, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, appointed the Monckton Committee on Alternative Remedies. The Committee's majority report largely endorsed the TUC's viewpoint in recommending maintenance of the alternative remedy. Subsequent legislation, the Law Reform (Personal Injuries) Act, permitted reduction of damages where industrial injuries benefit was secured; otherwise injured workers' rights to sue were perpetuated, albeit with questionable results. Down to the present day the costly alternative remedy survives, despite lack of evidence that it achieves either of its supposed objectives, namely, the compensation of personal injury victims or the deterrence of carelessness.

The statutory functions of the Supplementary Benefits Commission are described, together with the Secretary of State's invitation to the Commission to play a more active and public part in reformulating the problems of social assistance and proposing policies for dealing with them. Next the Commission's Chairman considers how he and his colleagues should respond to this invitation and which issues they should concentrate upon, focusing particularly on the growing use of discretion in a service originally intended to confer clearly understood rights, the bewildering complexity which results from this trend, and the ‘frontier’ problems arising between their service and other social services. In conclusion he considers the implications of the Commission's extended role for other bodies and the Commission's relations with them – particularly Ministers and their advisers, the academic community, the communications media, and the pressure groups. Ultimately, he asks, should the Commission itself be abolished?

The present paper aims to examine the effect of the transition from a state socialist regime to democracy and a liberal economy on women's perceptions of the consequences of employment breaks due to childcare on their further careers in seven post-socialist Eastern and Central European countries. The paper uses data from the 2004 European Social Survey to explore whether women who interrupted their careers to look after young children were more likely to suffer negative consequences for their careers after the transition from socialism to a market-based economy than before the lifting of the Iron Curtain. The paper does this by comparing the consequences perceived by women whose children were born before 1987 with those of women with at least one child born later. It begins by grouping together women from across the region, and then looks at the differences by country of the consequences as perceived by these women. It concludes that women across the region were more likely to experience negative consequences after the transition than before. However, the effect of transition is not found to differ across countries using the ESS data.

Decades of commitment to the basic principles of the Danish welfare state have been discarded with a new social policy reducing the benefits for people already at the bottom of the income ladder. The political intention is to increase job search via economic incentives that increase the gap between benefit income and market income. Using a panel dataset with benefit recipients, we show that the intended job search effect did not materialise to any significant extent; rather, the affected people became poorer because the vast majority of individuals could not respond to the economic incentives in the intended manner. Joblessness was not due to lack of incentives. This study confirms the importance of employability and self-efficacy, but it shows that health is an underlying variable that explains both of these factors and the recipients’ difficulties in getting a job. The results have two major social policy implications. Access to early retirement schemes should be easier for recipients who have serious health problems and therefore cannot respond to economic incentives, and there should be an increased focus on how to help the recipients without major health problems to develop self-efficacy.

Eleven years after the publication of Richard Titmuss's essay on Income Distribution and Social Change, the official statisticians are still drawing optimistic conclusions about the tendency of income inequality to decline in Britain. This article re-examines some of the critical questions raised by Titmuss concerning the accuracy and interpretation of the official statistics. It considers the definition of income, the implications of capital gains, fringe benefits and the benefits from owner-occupation, the role of life-cycle factors, and the measurement of inequality. It concludes with an assessment of the impact of Titmuss's study on the quality of statistical information and on attitudes and beliefs.

This article looks at income maintenance pressure groups in Britain (the ‘poverty lobby’) and provides an assessment of their impact on policy in the 1970s. It is based on focused interviews with the leaders of 42 national pressure groups, MPs, Ministers, and senior civil servants. There is a discussion of conceptual and methodological problems involved in measuring effectiveness and a review of the theoretical literature on the role of pressure groups in the British political system. The study adopts a reputational approach to measuring effectiveness rather than a series of case studies. A number of specific successes are highlighted as well as examples of ‘agenda changing’ by groups. An explanation is provided in terms of the environment within which groups were operating, the strategies they adopted, and the resources they had available. The state of the economy was a particularly important factor in the 1970s as was the ability of groups to undertake joint action and form alliances with producer interests. The article concludes that the groups in the 1970s were influential rather than powerful and had more effect in the first part of the decade than at the end.

The article considers the implications for family policy of the proposed new changes to the registration of births, marriages and deaths, contained in the British government White Paper Civil Registration: Vital Change (2002). It asks whether, and to what extent, the changes proposed are ‘facilitative’ or ‘persuasive’. It is argued that, whilst the changes are in part designed to facilitate more diverse patterns of partnering and parenting now evident in the population there are limitations, for example in respect of same sex partnerships. There are also clearly ‘persuasive’ elements. These are consistent with changes in family policy which focus more on the individuals than on the nuclear family as the focus of policy, which are tolerant of different forms of partnering, but which place supporting parenthood as the highest priority. Changes in civil registration are seen as an essential condition for implementing other types of changes in the family policy arena.

This paper examines paternalism as a justification for welfare reforms making benefits conditional on participation in activation programs. We clarify different types of what we denote ‘throffer paternalism’ – a paternalism conjoining an offer with a threat – and ask whether there is a good case for any of them. We argue that hard but non-perfectionistic paternalism provides the most promising defense for mandatory activation but conclude that it does not give a convincing justification for this type of welfare policy.

NHS Foundation Trust (FT) hospitals in England have complex internal governance arrangements. They may be considered to exhibit meta-regulatory characteristics to the extent that governors are able to promote deliberative values and steer internal governance processes towards wider regulatory goals. Yet, while recent studies of NHS FT hospital governance have explored FT governors and examined FT hospital boards to consider executive oversight, there is currently no detailed investigation of interactions between these two groups. Drawing on observational and interview data from four case-study sites, we trace interactions between the actors involved; explore their understandings of events; and consider the extent to which the proposed benefits of meta-regulation were realised in practice. Findings show that while governors provided both a conscience and contribution to internal and external governance arrangements, the meta-regulatory role was largely symbolic and limited to compliance and legitimation of executive actions. Thus while the meta-regulatory ‘architecture’ for governor involvement may be considered effective, the soft intelligence gleaned and operationalised may be obscured by ‘hard’ performance metrics which dominate resource-allocation processes and priority-setting. Governors were involved in practices that symbolised deliberative involvement but resulted in further opportunities for legitimising executive decisions.

At the nexus of the social and penal policy fields, problem-solving justice promises to punish offenders while working to address the complex issues that drive their law-breaking behaviour. Appealing to the left and right due to its dual focus on pragmatism and welfarism, the concept has floated in and out of political fashion for the past two decades. Recent years have heralded a renewed political interest in the approach, closely aligned to the Conservative government’s commitment to ‘transforming justice’. With a focus on empowerment and collaboration, the problem-solving model has much to offer women offenders in particular. Drawing on data from a large-scale study into the sentencing and punishment of women under the new probation arrangements, this article reveals a divergence of views on gender-specific courts among sentencers, probation officers and third sector workers. Moral concerns about up-tariffing sit alongside the practical barriers of government bureaucracy and hindering legislation. With data pertaining to effectiveness (rather than potential) still required, this article argues that specialist problem-solving courts for women present a risky strategy, however seductive their promise.

The authors suggest that the importance of the dissemination of research findings in social policy has been greatly underestimated. The nature of the different agencies involved and the relationship between those who sponsor and those who ‘receive’ research are examined. This shows that the problems of dissemination are of two classes – those of principle and those of practice. Having discussed the principles, the authors suggest changes needed to improve practice so that more effective use may be made of research findings. Most of the examples are chosen from the field of housing but, where relevant, other fields of social policy are compared and contrasted.

The principal aim of law centres is to service the claims of poor and low income people in the field of social welfare law. Their successes and limitations in realising this aim constitute the major part of this paper. Levels of demand, the satisfaction of unmet legal needs and the role played by law centres in the spectrum of advice services are important factors in assessing their mission. No assessment can be complete, however, without taking into account the internal problems faced by law centres—such as, funding, caseload levels, and rationing procedures. This paper argues that the formation of a national network of law centres would help to solve many of their operational difficulties and to position them more effectively within the spectrum of legal advice services.