This article discusses the experiences of women and children who become homeless as a result of domestic violence and assesses the extent to which their need for housing, both temporary and permanent, is being met within Wales. It explores women's experiences of living in and moving on from refuges. Refuge provision in Wales is not sufficient to meet the demand for refuge spaces. However, for those women and children who are accommodated in refuges, the experience is significant in supporting them through a highly stressful period of their lives. This is related to the communal nature of refuge living and the high levels of support from refuge workers and from other women. The availability of suitable and affordable move-on accommodation for women and children leaving refuges is also insufficient to meet need. This results in long stays in refuges for women and children who have been accepted as officially homeless and are waiting to be rehoused by local authorities and may lead to their returning to violent domestic situations. It also exacerbates the shortage of refuge provision for women and children in need of temporary, crisis accommodation. Women and children who have survived domestic violence need access to housing which is safe and affordable where support is available if wished for. These needs are not being met.

In a context where the employment model of welfare is dominant, family policy has remained an area of limited and indirect competence for the European Community. Comparative analysis of Britain, France and the Federal Republic of Germany as examples of EC member states with different socio-cultural traditions and policy styles shows the limitations of theories about universalism, convergence and harmonisation of family structures and policies. Compared with Britain and Germany, the family policy making style in France is more explicit, visible, coherent and legitimate. Its objectives are overtly pro-natalist and it would seem to have had a stronger direct socio-economic impact.

In a world of nation states, citizenship, or full membership of the social and political community, has a three-fold relationship to the supply and demand of public welfare. First, in the liberal tradition that society exists to serve its members, citizenship offers moral justification for the state's concern for individual citizens (Harris, 1987; Jordan, 1989). Second, since citizenship confers a form of equality of status on members of the community (Marshall, 1963), it must be assumed that the state university applies to these members whatever distributive standards it adopts (Macedo, 1990). Finally, and as a consequence of the other two relationships, citizenship is one of the primary bases for claims on the economic resources of the state (King & Waldron, 1988; Barry, 1990, p. 4).

It is customary to assume that income is redistributed between the sexes within the family. This article investigates alternative assumptions about sharing within the family and their effects on the distribution of income. Using data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey for 1968 and 1986, we contrast two assumptions about sharing within the family; the conventional assumption of equal sharing or ‘pooling’, and an alternative of ‘minimum sharing’. Under each assumption, we examine the composition of extreme quintiles of the income distribution, and compute the numbers of men and women falling below an arbitrary ‘poverty line’. The contribution to inequality of the net transfers between the sexes and other sources of income is also examined. We estimate that resource transfers (other than for housing) between spouses could, if all income is pooled, account for about one third of married couples’ pooled incomes in 1986 and about 56 per cent of the inequality of married women's incomes (in 1968, 56 per cent and 50 per cent respectively). Taking the bottom quintile of pooled income as an arbitrary ‘poverty line’, we calculate that 15 per cent of married people would have been below this line in 1986 if all incomes were pooled. On the minimum sharing assumption, 52 per cent of married women, but only 11 per cent of married men would have been under the line.

The article highlights the discordance between the reality and the perception of women's independence and equality. The changes in legislation and increased female participation in the labour market since the 1960s give the impression of considerable progress. Equal treatment of men and women has been proposed. Evidence from national survey data however, shows that women's income is still lower than men's with no matching increase with age and career. Social security policy has always been based on labour market participation but women's labour market participation is quite different from that of men. Because of childcare responsibilities many women work parttime at some time in their working lives. Equal pay legislation has had little influence on the incomes from part-time work. The failure of real income from part-time work to rise over time has been a major cause along with job segregation and the segmentation of the labour market in maintaining the difference between men's and women's incomes. Women's continued lack of personal income has consequences for the support for women and children, particularly evident in the case of lone mothers. The incomes available to a woman are unlikely to be high enough to provide an adequate independent living standard for herself and any dependent children.

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.

In common with most countries in the world, China is facing an increasing demand for welfare. The free-market economic reforms of the last decade have dramatically transformed social policy in China, which is gradually retreating from an egalitarian and collective approach and moving towards a pluralistic and ‘residual’ orientation. Now, widening income inequalities are accepted as both necessary and inevitable.

The article emphasises the urgent need for a reconsideration of potential sources of income for the National Health Service which could supplement rather than replace those from general taxation. They include local taxation, earmarked taxes, patient charges (hotel, prescription and other charges for non-clinical items), a lottery, income generation, charitable donations and patient ‘opting out’ of the NHS with private insurance. Analysis is set within the position statement provided by the 1989 White Paper Working for Patients and within a more general analytical framework paying attention to equity, accountability, value for money, management incentives and other criteria.

Each funding method is considered in terms of its consistency with the criteria of both the analytical framework and the White Paper. The differences between some of the alternative sources are found to be more apparent than real. Rather than providing a panacea for the perceived funding and rationing problems of the NHS, the danger is that new supplementary sources of finance may simply replace one set of problems with another. The new set may pose even more intractable problems and involve considerable short to medium term disruption of NHS finances. The inescapable fact is that decisions about the levels and quality of public service provision and their financing are ultimately matters of democratic accountability, decisions which cannot and should not be sidestepped by the convenience of income sources.

The distribution of clean syringes to intravenous drug users has been accepted by many European countries as a necessary measure to prevent the spread of HIV. In Sweden however an official report recommending the widespread adoption of syringe exchange schemes was rejected after considerable debate in the press, at public meetings, in parliament and government. The medical consensus in favour of syringe exchange schemes was rejected by a much wider consensus of drug agency workers, militant pressure groups and the political establishment. It was felt that syringe exchange schemes would not only condone drug misuse but encourage it. The success of the restrictive line in this debate can only partially be explained through a pluralistic analysis of the principal actors involved. To understand why drug misuse in Sweden has come to symbolise a much greater threat to social stability and national values, a deeper analysis of Swedish institutions and culture is required.

Recent government policy in the UK National Health Service (NHS) has carried with it an implicit assumption that greater consumer involvement in health care is both desirable and beneficial. This may be the case in theory, but in practice there are substantial barriers to consumers becoming more involved in health care. Following a consideration of the role the government envisages for consumers in the NHS, the extent to which it is possible for consumers to fulfil this role, and more fundamentally whether they want to fulfil it, are discussed. It is argued that because of the extent of the breakdown of consumer sovereignty in health care, the doctor–patient (agency) relationship assumes a particularly important role. The theory of agency and its application to health care is then discussed and a number of important issues highlighted. A review of the literature on the extent of consumer involvement in health care precedes the conclusion in which the key issues raised in the article are brought together.

The subject of this article is NHS staff accommodation, about which, as with other comparable forms of shared peer group housing, little is known. It is noted that there is no obvious reason why privileges, such as the provision of subsidised staff housing, should continue to be accorded to the professions by government, especially given the contemporary concern of the latter that state agencies should not be landlords on a large scale. NHS recruitment difficulties, and possibly also the need for mutual support felt by those in stressful ‘care’ occupations provide some grounds for staff accommodation to be provided. But it is argued in this article that it is rather the onset of citizenship and displacement of corporatism which implies a civic obligation on residents to take control of developing this sector of housing.

During the 1980s, about 30 per cent of the council housing stock of Great Britain was sold to sitting tenants. The popular areas for purchase and the popular types of property were semi-detached and terraced houses rather than flats or maisonettes, away from the large conurbations. The types of household most likely to buy were married couples with adult children in skilled occupations. This large scale selling of council housing led to the fear of a residual poor population, living in flats in inner cities. Since nearly half of Afro Caribbean households were living in council housing and since their pattern of housing was the obverse of the types that sold in large numbers, it was thought that they would be among the residualised households. The paper reports on field survey and special GHS data which show that Afro Caribbeans are more rather than less willing to buy their council homes, once property type has been controlled for. It also argues that, in some circumstances, the right to buy may act against residualisation. However, a particularly residualised group appears to be Caribbean single mothers in high rise blocks.

This article provides an assessment of the Community Ownership programme in Scotland, which involved the transfer of council housing to par-value co-operatives and community-based housing associations. The evaluation is considered under four headings: resident involvement; the effectiveness of housing management; neighbourhood impacts; and financial appraisal. The findings lend support to the government's programme of breaking up council housing, but lead to criticisms of the emphasis on large-scale voluntary transfers and the neglect of ownership co-operatives in England. In Scotland, the lack of support for the formation of tenant management co-operatives is also criticised.

Affirmative action and preferential treatment are group policies. Their desired effects will be on groups of people rather than on individuals. The two main purposes for such race conscious practice are to compensate for past harm and to promote greater equality of opportunity, and arguments in the debate about such practice have often marshalled ideas about group rights to compensation and equality of opportunity. Most rights-talk on the other hand is about individual rights and the idea of group rights sits uneasily with individual liberalism. This article discusses the nature of group rights and whether they can easily co-exist with individual rights in the pursuit of compensation and equality of opportunity.

Postmodernism claims that the universalist themes of modern society (society-wide political ideologies, the nation-state, the theme of rational planning in government policy, the large-scale public or private sector bureaucracy) are obsolete, to be replaced by a plural interest in diversity and choice. These ideas have strong implications for both the theory of social policy, which typically stresses universal themes of inequality and privilege, and the practice of social policy, which relies on rational analysis to inform society-wide government provision. This article suggests that such an approach ignores the significance of market liberalism and the associated trends to inequality, privatisation, retrenchment and the regulation of the poorest groups. From this perspective, postmodernism functions as an ideological smokescreen, preventing us from recognising some of the most important trends in modern social policy. It is unfortunate if, at a time when the results of increasing inequality are everywhere apparent, one of the dominant approaches in social science obscures the issue.

This article highlights some of the issues raised by incomplete coverage of the 1991 census in Britain, illustrating how far-reaching are its implications across the spectrum of social statistics. The origins and the current state-of-play of the debate over the distribution of the non-response are summarised and the implications then assessed. For many census variables, non-response reduces the observed variation between areas, with consequences for the distribution of resources for local services. The implications for the reliability of the most basic of health statistics are raised through mortality rates. A rough estimate is made, and supporting evidence presented, of the possible numbers of households which were missed by the census. Some implications for housing needs assessments are illustrated along with the effect of the sudden upwards revision of official estimates of the dwelling stock and the resulting overall great uncertainty over the number of vacant dwellings in the country. Finally, recent research on the electoral implications of people's choice not to be registered is discussed as this may well help to understand census non-response. Such a pervasive degree of uncertainty across almost all figures concerning people has not been experienced in Britain since the last century. There is little reason to expect this uncertainty and the importance of its social policy implications to diminish in the future, without significant changes to census procedures and to the relationship between government and governed.