This study examines kinship care of orphans throughout China. It finds that in addition to children becoming orphaned if both parents die, some children are treated as orphans when their father dies and rural traditional kinship care obligations restrict the viability of widowed mothers continuing to care for their child. When mothers are forced for socioeconomic reasons to leave the paternal extended family, children effectively become orphans, dependent on ageing grandparents. Girls and disabled children are most at risk. Implementing financial and other support to orphans, widowed mothers and kinship carers could improve the sustainability of these family relationships.

Irish social policy has, since the early 1990s, prioritised debt advice as the primary policy tool for addressing over-indebtedness, targeting low-income households in particular. This article, which draws on secondary analysis of datasets and qualitative interviews, suggests that ‘person-centred’ debt advice plays a major role in alleviating personal over-indebtedness and its effects among this group. However, the government's objective that it should facilitate financial independence is unrealistic. For such debt advice to be effective, complimentary legal and institutional solutions to debt problems are required in Ireland. The dearth of financial options and resources available also needs to be addressed.

Research linking social and penal policy has grown extensively in recent years. Wacquant (2009) suggests that retrenchment of welfare support and expansion of the penal system work together to bear down on marginalised populations in a ‘carceral–assistential net’. Empirical and theoretical examinations of these regimes are often underpinned by gendered assumptions. This article addresses this limitation by foregrounding the experiences of women; qualitative interviews offer an insight into their experiences at the intersection of welfare and criminal justice policy in austerity Britain. Their reflections make visible the complex, heterogeneous raft of social assistance, institutional neglect and intensive intervention that characterises women's experiences of the ‘carceral–assistential net’. The evidence presented suggests that for marginalised women interventions intensify once behaviour becomes problematic or in times of crisis. While some interventions are valued by those engaged there is little significant impact on their socio-economic position.

For older Australians being dependent on the private rental market is usually associated with serious financial hardship and insecurity. The article examines the housing careers of older Australians who are dependent on the private rental market. After sketching the policy context, it uses in-depth interviews and a biographical approach to explore their trajectory into the private rental market. Divorce, separation and widowhood were key factors, especially for women, as were poor employment histories and ill-health. The crucial factor was an inability to access social housing. The neglect of this housing tenure has meant that supply is very limited and it is reserved primarily for people with complex needs.

This article traces the trajectory of UK government social policy since World War Two, with particular reference to the shifts in the past 10 to 15 years towards concepts such as multi-level governance, localism, the Third Way and the Big Society. It describes the shifting relationships between institutional religion and the State during that period, tracking the ‘return of faith’ in government policy and social welfare as it seeks to address a number of intractable social and economic issues related to cohesion and inequality, as well as a perceived absence of moral and ethical norms within public life. The article proposes a set of new analytical concepts (based on recent empirical research from the US and the UK) which seek to describe and evaluate this new ‘post-secular’ relationship between faith and government. The article concludes that the new ‘post-welfare’ landscape will continue to play well to the existing strengths and positionalities of religion, faith and spirituality in the UK as the twenty-first century moves into its second decade.

The article reviews the limited existing social policy literature on taxation and sets out a case for the incorporation of the study of taxation into the accepted remit of social policy. Social policy has historically been concerned with the services and benefits which flow from public expenditure, and people’s experiences of them, rather than with taxation, and the contributions by individual researchers have tended to remain marginal to the main focus of social policy. The article offers a speculative account as to why taxation has remained peripheral to social policy and presents three arguments for the mainstreaming of tax in social policy’s domain of study. These concern the role of taxation in shaping the distribution of resources, a fundamental pre-occupation of social policy; the contribution social policy scholars can make to shaping a new discourse surrounding taxation, foregrounding issues of equity and need; and how social policy’s engagement with taxation can influence the politics of the welfare state.

This article is based on research into early intervention and safeguarding work with young fathers. It draws on a study of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP), a home visitation service in the UK that is offered to vulnerable teenage mothers. The research investigated whether and how such early intervention work was done with the fathers of these babies. Three broad patterns of engagement emerged from the research: (1) where fathers were fully engaged with the service straightaway and the relationship with the family nurse deepened over time; (2) where fathers were partially engaged with the service; and (3) where fathers were resentful at the outset and never stopped being resistant and sometimes hostile towards intervention. Within these broad patterns several nuanced aspects of professional-father relationships are identified, which are the product of the interaction of several factors. Some general implications for early intervention and safeguarding work with fathers and their babies are drawn out.

Food bank use in Great Britain has risen substantially over the last decade. The considerable socioeconomic disadvantage of the food bank user population has been documented, but little research has examined whether housing problems intersect with insecure food access. Using data from 598 households accessing assistance from twenty-four food banks operating in Great Britain in 2016–2017, we found that nearly 18 per cent of households were homeless, with more having experienced homelessness in the past twelve months. Renters from both the private and social rented sectors were also overrepresented in the sample. Households in both private and social rented housing reported high rates of rent arrears and poor conditions; those in private housing were also more likely to live in homes with damp, to have moved in past year, and to be worried about a forced move in future. Overall, housing problems are widespread among food bank users; policy interventions are needed.

Increasing and widening participation have been at the heart of New Labour's higher education initiatives since they came to power. This article argues that their 1998 reforms of student financial support were inconsistent with their commitment to widening access and fairness in educational opportunities, and their desire for higher education to contribute to greater social cohesion. The article examines this policy contradiction. It explores how the 1998 reforms came about, and the effects of the reforms. It traces briefly the development of student funding policies under the Conservatives, and under New Labour. Next, is assesses New Labour's policies and policy objectives, drawing upon the findings of a major survey on students' income and expenditure. So, it explores some of the effects and consequences, both intended and unintended, of the 1998 reforms.

Large representative surveys have become a valuable resource to inform public policy in an increasingly complex modern world. They provide authority to policy since they are considered objective, neutral and scientific. In contrast, this article conceives the production of knowledge as an interactive process. We argue that the conduct of large social surveys tends to reinforce existing world views, power relations and a narrow construction of social issues. To illustrate this, we draw on a small exploratory study which examined the experience of responding to selected survey questions of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study (HILDA). We suggest that while more open approaches are required to capture the complexities of everyday life, these are unlikely to be implemented given the dominance of particular forms of knowledge.

This article discusses localised forms of social innovation in social services in relation to social policy and welfare issues. It draws upon research findings from the EU project ‘Welfare Innovations at the local Level in favour of Cohesion’ (WILCO), which takes in social innovations in twenty European cities. First, we argue why there is currently a significant gap between the debate on social innovation and the debate on social welfare reforms. Second, we present attempts that have been made to identify and interpret recurring approaches and instruments in the social innovations studied in relation to various dimensions of the debate on social welfare and services, such as the search for new ways of addressing users and citizens; the emphasis on new risks and related approaches to the issues of rights and responsibilities; and finally the concern with issues of governance. We argue that the features of the local innovations we identified may be significant for welfare systems at large, going beyond the introduction of special new items in special fields. However, the degree to which this will come about in reality will depend on building more bridges of shared understanding between concerns with social innovation on the one hand and welfare reforms on the other hand.

As means-tested benefits have come to occupy a more central place in the UK system of income transfers, so the goal of an individualised system seems to have receded. However, there is also a developing policy interest in the situation and status of the individual in the social welfare system. Individual assessment of labour market circumstances is central to the New Deal programmes, and the ‘partners’ of those receiving social security benefits have become a target group for policy in their own right. This article outlines the policy issues, describes the measures that have been introduced so far, compares these with the Australian moves towards ‘partial individualisation’, and discusses some key issues in the reform agenda.

The application of formal conditionality to address ‘dependence’ on social security has been an important trend since the 1990s. Reforms between 2010 and 2015 saw a renewed interest in this approach. This article will focus on conditionality in disability benefits in that period. It will present findings from a qualitative study of twenty-three disabled people living in the central-belt of Scotland, exploring the operation of surveillance as a form of ‘hidden conditionality’. It will find that this had a significant impact on participants’ daily lives, affecting who they interacted with, and what activities they felt they could take part in. The implications of this for disabled people's ability to realise equal citizenship will be examined.

Domestic abuse policy increasingly uses language which indicates that abuse is patterned according to structural factors. However, practicing according to these structural accounts of abuse is problematic because of the policy and organisational contexts that practitioners work within and, we argue, because the implications of the structured nature of victims’ experiences is not fully understood by all practitioners.

We ask whether women's differential use and experiences of services with a remit to address abuse can be illuminated using two theoretical perspectives – ‘candidacy’ and intersectionality. We report the findings of a literature synthesis that investigates how these improve our understanding of women's help-seeking and service utilisation and of the responses that they receive. Both concepts were highly congruent with the literature and we conclude that, together, candidacy and intersectionality offer a means of enhancing knowledge of how the political becomes enacted in the personal. Embedding such knowledge within practice repertoires offers the potential to develop more nuanced structural understandings of women's experiences and constraints.

The policy rhetoric of the UK Coalition government's ‘Troubled Families’ initiative, and that of New Labour's earlier Respect Agenda, share an emphasis on families’ responsibilities, or rather their irresponsibility, and their financial costs to society. Giving children a chance of a better life coincides, in this framing, with reducing costs for the taxpayer. The research reported here was based on a national study of Family Intervention Projects (FIPs), funded by the UK government between 2009 and 2012, beginning under New Labour, continuing over a period when the FIP programme was discontinued, and ending after the Troubled Families programme had begun. The research involved over 100 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, including service managers, family key workers, and caregivers and children in twenty families, to consider critical questions about the kinds of trouble that families experience in their lives, and how they are recognised in the policy and practice of intensive family intervention.

In the space of a mere five years, basic income has become something of a global policy phenomenon. The proposal to grant all permanent residents of a political territory a regular cash transfer on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement (Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017) is actively discussed at the highest levels of policy-making across the world, including by international institutions such as OECD, IMF or the World Bank. At the same time, several country surveys indicate the basic income idea is gaining considerable traction amongst the general public, with support for basic income in the latest wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) averaging slightly above 50 per cent (Lee, 2018). This suggests basic income has now firmly moved away from a mere ‘philosophical pipe dream’ to being considered as a serious alternative to conditional income assistance (Van Parijs, 2013; Haagh, 2017).

This paper argues that the study of social policy can be enriched by a greater focus on the dynamics of the policy process itself. Such a focus needs to transcend the usual descriptive accounts of institutions and implementation methods. The paper draws on a range of theoretical approaches that illuminate the shaping and delivery of policy, from classic theories of power and the state to analyses of the micro-dynamics of the policy–action relationship. The paper explores the contribution of recent developments in governance theory, and assesses contemporary debates about the ‘modernisation’ of the policy process and the focus on evaluating ‘what works’ in social policy.

This article examines the policy process in Wales prior to the introduction of a National Assembly for Wales and uses this as a framework for assessing the potential impact of devolution. Health and social services form the largest part of the budget of the National Assembly for Wales and the article focuses on health policy as a key area of interest for Assembly Members. The period 1992 to 1997 demonstrates an emphasis on managing both demand and finances thereby promoting the continued dominance, in terms of both resource allocation and prioritisation, of the acute hospital sector. The article then explores how far this has changed and what potential there is for changing this assumptive reality in a New Labour and devolved NHS.

The long tradition of parent education and support in German social welfare provision has recently acquired a new importance. As in the recent expansion of public early childhood education and care, the current emphasis on supporting parents highlights altered definitions of childhood, shifting boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in parent‒child relations, and new local welfare mixes in service delivery. The article uses a literature review and qualitative interviews with experts, decision makers and service providers: first, to explicate older policy ideas in the new turn to parenting and the strong role being given to model projects for policy reform in the German institutional setting; second, to present recurrent themes in the interviews with professionals working on the ground, such as the new role of childcare centres in accessing parents, ongoing problems of coordination and cooperation in parenting support and issues of evidence and evaluation.

For a long time, the discussion about the impact of economic globalisation on the full employment/generous welfare state policies pursued by social democratic governments was characterised by doom and gloom. Glib neo-liberal arguments about the impossibility of maintaining social democratic policies, that were presumably hindering competitiveness through excessive wages and taxes in the new international environment were difficult to counter, because social democrats could not resort to an equally elaborate and internally consistent economic doctrine that could substitute for evidence, and the evidence was not yet in to counter these arguments on empirical grounds. Recently, careful and comprehensive comparative studies have provided evidence that, despite undeniable problems posed by economic internationalisation, social democratic welfare states and employment regimes have proven to be highly resilient (Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Huber and Stephens, 2001). Indeed, some kinds of traditional social democratic policy, such as an emphasis on labour mobilisation through active labour market policy and social services that make it possible to combine labour force participation with raising children, and an emphasis on human capital formation have facilitated adaptation to the new economic conditions. Moreover, newly available data on skill distribution (OECD/HRDC, 2000) and income distribution (LIS) suggest that the egalitarian thrust characteristic of social democratic policy has made an important contribution to raising literacy skills at the bottom, which in turn facilitates the integration of the entire labour force into productive activities that are competitive in high-quality markets.