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.

In 2017 the Scottish Government passed the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act with the commitment to significantly reduce the relative child poverty rate from the current prevailing level of around 25% to 10% by 2030/31. In response, the government introduced the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) that provides a direct transfer to households at a fixed rate per eligible child – currently £25 per week. In this paper we explore, using a micro to macro modelling approach, the effectiveness of using the SCP to achieve the Scottish child poverty targets. While we find that the ambitious child poverty targets can technically be met solely using the SCP, the necessary payment of £165 per week amounting to a total government cost of £3 billion per year, makes the political and economy-wide barriers significant. A key issue with only using the SCP is the non-linearity in the response to the payment; as the payment increases, the marginal gain in the reduction of child poverty decreases – this is particularly evident after payments of £80 per week. A ‘policy-mix’ option combining the SCP, targeted cash transfers and other policy levels (such as childcare provision) seems the most promising approach to reaching the child poverty targets.

Previous literature suggests that the gig economy and platform work pose challenges to social policy, including the welfare entitlement issues caused by workers’ ambiguous occupational status. Focusing on the government’s regulatory role, this study investigates platform workers’ occupational welfare (OW) by conducting in-depth interviews with forty-six food delivery workers in Hong Kong. The evidence reveals workers’ occupational risks resulting from platforms’ algorithmic devices and the misclassification of independent contractors. The denied access to private occupational pensions was considered acceptable by workers because of the perceived irrelevance of OW. While interviewees emphasised time-based flexibility as a key intangible benefit, the shifting business costs to self-employed workers was highlighted as a disadvantage. A policy dilemma appears between strengthening state regulation/protection and maintaining workers’ temporal autonomy. Arguably, the platformisation of work is translated into the gigification of OW, disentitling platform workers’ employer-provided welfare and labour protection. Platforms possess monopolising power over workers, the state displays weak regulatory power to monitor platforms, and workers’ occupational citizenship is undermined by the government’s minimal intervention. This study contributes to the literature by linking OW to platform work and revealing how the gig economy reshapes social policy, empirically offering a worker-centred analysis of OW in Hong Kong.

Over the past decade there have been repeated calls for the greater taxation of wealth. These calls have had little impact on policy. There has been a global trend to reduce or abolish taxes on wealth. The contrast suggests that it may be better now to explore how taxes on wealth may be made a reality rather than designing new tax proposals. What are the barriers to tax wealth? This paper addresses this by conducting a case study of a high profile plan for introducing a one-off wealth tax in the UK. It identifies a tyranny of the status quo, framing and the policy process as key barriers to tax reform. It uses thematic analysis to study how the plans for a one-off wealth tax were discussed in the media and the UK Parliament. This paper argues that there were important shortfalls in both the way the case for a wealth tax was framed as well as the engagement with the policy process. It claims that a stronger framing would have discussed wealth inequality in greater depth and there was a need for a less equivocal case to Parliamentarians.

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of ‘COVID exceptionalism’ – with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

This paper examines the dynamics of scandal creation and control involved in the public exposé of conditions and ill treatment at the public mental asylum of Prestwich, Lancashire in 1921. It identifies the groups and interests involved in orchestrating the public and official responses which culminated in a departmental committee of inquiry. It focuses particularly upon the conflicts and divisions within the bureaucratic institutions of the Board of Control, the Ministry of Health and the local asylum authorities, and argues that the Prestwich exposé was used in a strategy which established increased ministerial control of mental health services.

The allocation System whereby students pass from school to university is examined, and empirical evidence reviewed to establish the extent to which it approximates to the rationalistic model predicted by official literature on university admissions. Data from surveys in schools and universities tend to show that decisions are not the outcome of logical evaluations of objective information, but of poorly understood social processes in which institutional constraints and popular stereotypes play a major part. Implications are discussed for the secondary school curriculum, for inequalities in the selection process and for developments in admissions policies in an expanding system of higher education.

There are many calls for greater variety in the provision of higher education combined with greater transferability between courses and institutions – in short, that we should end the present hierarchy of esteem in which institutions and subjects of study are commonly held.

Is this likely to be done easily? Too little consideration has been given to the size and strength of the social forces that create educational elitism. Some idea of this size and strength may be gained by looking, as a revealing example, at some educational history. Elitism has survived in times when the factors usually thought of as decisive have been strongly adverse to it. We should not hope that its virulence is any less now. New approaches are needed, and a concerted effort to decide what these approaches should be is now urgent.

To have much hope of achieving perceived equality of esteem of diverse types of higher education, an intensive study of the causes of elitism in education, and of measures that would have some chance of reducing it, is needed. A single Royal Commission type of inquiry is unlikely to be enough. A structured set of parallel inquiries might offer more hope.

Means-tested housing allowances have played an increasingly important role in housing policies in a number of European countries in recent years. They have also provoked considerable controversy, particularly when associated with neo-liberal reforms. This has happened in West Germany, where a national scheme was introduced in 1965 as part of a reform programme involving widespread rent decontrol and a substantial reduction in ‘social housing’ expenditures. The discussion in this paper suggests that the new scheme was not very successful, either in preventing financial hardship or in providing a stimulus for house-building. Since 1965 there has been growing resistance to the idea of housing allowances as a primary instrument of housing policy, and the present government has favoured a different approach with the allowances complementing other more direct controls over the housing market.

Different interpretations of the role of housing allowances are examined in the section on France, and there is also discussion of controversial issues of a technical character. In an attempt to adapt aid closely to particular needs the French have developed extremely complex arrangements, which clearly create difficulties for administrators as well as potential recipients. There has also been conflict between an endeavour to use the allowances to improve housing standards and the aim of providing help for the poorest sections of the community.

During the past four years, French economic and social policy appears to have differed both from the policies followed previously in France and from those of the other industrialized countries. The difference can be judged from the goals pursued, the means used and the results obtained. One of the goals of the socialist government elected in May 1981 was to reduce income and wealth inequalities and to improve the well-being of the poor through an active social and tax policy. This goal was also a means, since these measures — along with an expansionary fiscal policy — were supposed to precipitate economic recovery and to reduce unemployment by stimulating consumption expenditures. Actual developments, however, led to quite a radical change in French macro-economic policy. The fight against inflation and the reduction of internal and external deficits since June 1982 and the search for industrial investment and competitiveness since 1983 have reoriented both social and tax policies.

This article reports on an attempt to discover the attitudes of members of the public towards a range of personal and family problems, all of which could be seen as relevant to the work of social service departments. The data are drawn from two samples: one of current users of a social services department and the other from the general public.

Our outline findings show that although users seem more aware of the potential of social service departments than other members of the community, there is nevertheless substantial confusion and disagreement over appropriate services for different problem situations. It was equally clear that for several quite important problems many people saw voluntary or neighbourhood involvement as more relevant than intervention by a statutory agency. On the basis of these findings we discuss the following suggestions for social service departments. Firstly, education programmes are necessary to improve general knowledge about the personal social services, but structured in such a way as to avoid stimulating demand which cannot be met – we are critical of the Seebohm report's analogy of personal social services with commerce. Secondly, more attention needs to be paid to relationships between social workers and other professionals who may be intermediaries in contacts between the potential client and the agency. Thirdly, social service departments should assess their own priorities with greater sensitivity towards the community viewpoint, since we found not only a significant willingness for people to get involved in social service but a keenness to participate in policy making.