Drawing on interviews with disability and income support beneficiaries, the article examines the encounters of Israeli citizens with the National Insurance Institute. Using the administrative burden conceptualisation, our analysis highlights three known types of costs: compliance, learning and psychological. The current study provides further conceptualisation of these burdens by unfolding the role of three concrete elements involved in generating these burdens: waiting, communication breakdowns, and administrative errors. These elements are discussed in terms of their contribution to a better understanding of bureaucratic procedures that constitute administrative burdens in the context of the benefit claiming process.

This paper explores the impact of the decision to make the Working Tax Credit (WTC) payable via the employer, until March 2006. A unique survey shows the unequal distribution of compliance costs across firms and industries. It also suggests that the arrangement had some unanticipated results, and may have damaged the effectiveness of the WTC. Some employers' compliance costs may have been shifted to employees. So from a social policy perspective administration is policy – the delivery system affects outcomes. However the switch to payments through HMRC from April 2006 does not remove all compliance costs from employers.

Social capital has become a key concept in Government policy-making and in academic circles. Broadly, social capital concerns norms and networks: the values people hold and the resources that they can access, which both result in and are the result of collective and socially negotiated ties and relationships. Where people share a sense of identity, hold similar values, trust each other and reciprocally do things for each other, then this is felt to have an impact on the social, political and economic nature of the society in which we live. Across the political spectrum, there are concerns that levels of social capital are being eroded in contemporary society.

The 2008 recession presents a double challenge to legal aid. Unemployment extends legal aid eligibility. It is also associated with increased vulnerability to problems involving legal rights, feeding demand for legal services. Job loss, as distinct from unemployment, might be expected to increase vulnerability further still. In this paper, we set out findings from a first analysis of the relationship between job loss and the experience of rights problems. In the context of the current recession, we set out the likely scale of the recession's impact on the incidence of rights problems and demand for legal (and legal aid) services.

Given the imperative to redress the education inequalities between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and White students, this contribution explores advances and challenges from within Social Work education (SWE) in relation to the experiences of Black social work students. Drawing on critical race theories and the concept of racial battle fatigue, it explores the impacts of race and racism on students’ academic experience and wellbeing. It proposes the significance of relational wellbeing which has been a constant strand within Social Work education and comprises a valuable approach to the decolonisation process within higher education (HE). Linking this to critical pedagogy, it highlights the role of staff to build safety, confidence and trust to support students to overcome prior education experiences of under-attainment, disadvantage and social marginalisation. Despite the pervasiveness of managerialism within HE, which compromises the teacher-student relationship and emphasises measured changes in student ‘outcomes’, Social Work educators are invited to nurture safe and transformational learning environments.

The intensification of behavioural requirements and punitive measures in unemployment benefits by UK governments has been popular and instrumental to the politics of welfare reform. Yet there is scant research into the politics of extending this approach to working households, known as ‘in-work conditionality’ (IWC), which was introduced in the UK under Universal Credit in 2012. Addressing this gap, we examine the preferences of political parties and voters towards IWC, using data from an online survey of 1,111 adults in 2017, party manifestos and parliamentary debates. While we find evidence of a partisan split between voters and politicians on the left (oppose IWC) and right (support IWC), intra-party divides and the relative infancy of IWC suggests the politics of IWC is not set in stone. This helps to explain the blame avoidance strategies of current and previous Conservative governments responsible for IWC.

This article explores older owner occupiers in lower value properties who, having acquired their home through the Right to Buy (RTB) in the 1980s, are now experiencing housing-related challenges in older age. This article outlines the views and perceptions of older owner occupiers, social landlords, voluntary groups and housing organisations to explore the legacy of the RTB. Current and future policy challenges in the area include the differentiation of home owners, difficulties of selling property with low equity in older age and the relationship between health and housing. This article calls to widen the analysis of the long-term impact of the RTB to owner occupiers in lower value properties and notes that ‘ageing in place’ goes beyond looking at people’s current house to the linked housing choices available to them. We recommend that policy support be extended to older home owners to increase housing choice in older age.

This paper uses the social model of disability to examine visually impaired children's experiences of their housing and neighbourhoods and finds that they did not experience any significant problems with the design of them. The source of their problems was within these environments, and was caused by factors such as the intensity of movement, for example, from flows of traffic. We conclude by discussing the social policy implications of these findings.

In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed in the US, ushering in a series of reforms to the cash assistance programme previously available to poor families. ‘Welfare reform’ included a number of efforts to encourage work among unemployed single parents. More important, the law extended the government's interest in regulating social behaviours such as marriage and reproduction. This paper reviews states' efforts at developing programmes that encourage marriage and discourage child-bearing, then offers a review of the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these approaches to date. Implications for the future of welfare reform are provided.

This article explores the implications of expanding content in undergraduate Social Policy. Although the problem of curriculum content is not unique to Social Policy, particular features exacerbate the issue. These include the relationship of the subject to other disciplines, and to wider political and social issues. Dominance of content is argued to limit the aims of teaching, squeezing out skills development. It also restricts the methods employed. Content dominance also contributes to the development of a deficit model of students. The article is based on data drawn from semi-structured interviews with 46 lecturers working in universities across the UK.

University staff from African, Asian and other Minoritised Groups (AAMG) are not resigned to the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the corridors, classrooms, and lecture theatres of the academy. This article articulates a self-study, where we employ our own narratives and stories, as leaders, teachers, and students on a race-specific initiative. The work presented here attempts to offer a counter-narrative to the colour-evasive discourse and policymaking throughout the English Higher Education sector that perpetuates deficit perspectives for AAMG students. In addition to this, we propose a ‘Progressive Relational Pedagogy’ that provides a strong foundation for meaningful work across the Higher Education sector. In doing so, we provide a way forward in policy and practice to sustain the cultural richness, heritages, and authenticities of AAMG students. The narrative concludes with pragmatic steps towards enhancing organisational alignment, integration and governance through a race inclusion lens, courtesy of leveraging steps from a Race Inclusion Framework that is underpinned by the LEAD Enterprise Ontology (von Rosing and Laurier, 2015; Caine and von Rosing, 2018).

The on-going rise in demand experienced by voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) providing emergency food aid has been described as a sign of a social and public health crisis in the UK (Loopstra, 2018; Lambie-Mumford, 2019), compounded since 2020 by the impact of (and responses to) Covid 19 (Power et al., 2020). In this article we adopted a social practice approach to understanding the work of food bank volunteering. We identify how ‘helping others’, ‘deploying coping strategies’ and ‘creating atmospheres’ are key specific (and connected) forms of shared social practice. Further, these practices are sometimes suffused by faith-based practice. The analysis offers insights into how such spaces of care and encounter (Williams et al., 2016; Cloke et al., 2017) function, considers the implications for these distinctive organisational forms (the growth of which has been subject to justified critique) and suggests avenues for future research.

That domestic abuse is a human rights infringement has become recognised at policy, practice, and legislative level globally. Homelessness services are critical in averting and mitigating harm to those who have experienced domestic abuse. The British homelessness system achieves this, in part, through offering a legal right to housing in some circumstances. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 integrates a human-rights based understanding of domestic abuse yet reduces legal rights to assistance. Based on analysis of interviews with fifty-two homelessness workers and twenty-four applicants I argue that moral commitments cannot compensate for legal rights; rather, they deresponsibilise homelessness services for addressing domestic abuse. I show (1) that workers saw cases where homelessness arose from domestic abuse as functionally beyond the remit of homelessness services (2) that empowered women were understood as undeserving by the system and (3) that workers saw domestic abuse cases as a broad and undefined threat to resources.

There has been an increasing focus in the UK on the support provided to the Armed Forces community, with the publication of the Armed Forces Covenant (2011), the Strategy for our Veterans (2018) and the first ever Office for Veterans’ Affairs (2019). There is also an important body of research – including longitudinal research – focusing on transitions from military to civilian life, much of which is quantitative. At the same time, the UK has witnessed a period of unprecedented welfare reform. However, research focused on veterans’ interactions with the social security system has been largely absent. This article draws on the authors’ experiences of undertaking qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) to address this knowledge gap. We reflect on how QLR was essential in engaging policy makers enabling the research to bridge the two parallel policy worlds of veterans’ support and welfare reform, leading to significant policy and practice impact.

In 2000, the European Union established three principles that should guide Member State pension systems and their reforms: the financial sustainability of pension systems; adequacy of pensions; and the modernisation of systems. The latter included the achievement of greater gender equality and sought to respond to the significant gender gaps in public pension systems. This article demonstrates how the reforms carried out over the period 2000–2017 have focused on strengthening the financial sustainability of systems but may also have contributed to even greater gender inequality in old age protection. To this end, we examine the major legislative amendments concerning eligibility criteria and entitlement conditions in six countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain), as representative of the social insurance scheme.

This paper uses the living standards method to estimate the extra costs for older people with functional disabilities in urban areas in Northern China. The research finds that the cost for older people who live alone is higher than those who live with other family members, and their living standard is lower. The costs increase with the age, especially for the oldest old people who live alone. The cost for older women is higher than their male counterparts. The extra costs of support for people with functional disabilities decrease the overall living standard of the household.

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of a social pension programme for older adults in South Korea, Basic Pension Scheme (BPS) on material hardship and subjective well-being. We apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of the BPS on the material hardship and life satisfaction of older people between the ages of sixty-one and sixty-eight. Data come from Korea Welfare Panel Study (KOWEPS) wave 12 survey (2017, N = 3,932). The BPS benefit reduces the risks of housing hardship, bill payment delay and food insecurity. Interestingly, while the effect sizes of the BPS on mitigating the material hardship increase as income decreases, the lower-income groups were less satisfied with the pension provision than middle- and upper-income groups. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on material hardship for older adults in an Asian country facing persistent old-age poverty and immature public pensions.

This article presents a case study of income redistribution in South Korea. By analysing the most comprehensive household income survey (National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure), it identifies a growing sign of change regarding the extent to which social security is beginning to play an important role in reducing income inequality. Nonetheless, it argues that its impact is yet to be sizeable enough to make a significant difference and, still further, that social security is of little use in terms of mitigating increasing inequality of original incomes which comprise the largest part of gross income.

This article provides a reflection on the period since the May 2004 Central and Eastern European (CEE) accession and subsequent migration to the UK, and on shifting perspectives of and towards CEE migrants in this period. The authors have been researching this phenomenon in the North of England since 2005 through a series of studies as well as ongoing engagement with regional respondents. CEE migration is analysed through the perspectives of government, employers and trade union interests. A central argument is that attitudes to CEE migrants changed following the 2008 financial crisis as funding for local authorities was reduced, obscuring evidence-based arguments for their value to the UK labour market.

The following article is dedicated to the empirical case study from Ukraine and focuses on the work of Ukrainian courts resolving the cases of internally displaced persons in the realm of social policy. Based on interviews and secondary sources in terms of data, it explains the problem area of the legal regulations and administrative practices applicable to internally displaced Ukrainians in the sphere of social rights, and it analyses selected decisions of the courts in the cases brought by them, including the courts’ approaches, motivations and limitations, all while doing so from the combined perspective of security, law and internal migrants’ agency.