Japan's implementation of the Long Term Care Insurance Act in 2000 provides a good example with which to examine the restructuring process of care services for older people, as these have come to be commodified by the welfare state. By focusing on Welfare Non-Profit Organisations provision, this article explores the significance of gender in the restructuring process. It reveals that care services are stratified with institutional care placed at the top of hierarchy of care services costs, and domestic task services at the bottom. There is an unequal distribution of gender and organisational type for each type of care work.

Social Policy and Society is now in its tenth year of publication, following the successful editorships, initially of Tony Maltby, and then Pete Dwyer and Sharon Wright. As has been the case since its inception, the journal seeks to publish high-quality original material that makes a contribution to the understanding of social policy in a concise and focused format. It does that through the open section, with articles of up to 5,000 words, and through the guest-edited themed section in each issue. The former allows for the publication of work from any area of social policy, while the latter provides the opportunity for a set of articles around a particular theme.

Access to and engagement with information and communications technologies (ICTs) are increasingly important aspects of social inclusion. This paper draws upon analyses of UK survey data and a review of research on communications and social exclusion published in the UK between 2001 and 2006 to examine the social distribution of access to and uptake of ICTs and to explore key factors restricting the digital engagement of young people from lower income households and communities. It argues that effective strategies to bridge digital divisions in the UK must pay more attention to the social rather than technological barriers which inhibit communications inclusion.

Luxembourg introduced a parental leave scheme in 1999 as a policy effort to stimulate equality between men and women with regard to bringing up children and to allow for reconciliation of family and professional life, so that the caring parents do not have to withdraw from the labour market after having a child. The analysis presented in this paper is one of the first systematic attempts to assess the parental leave take up of women in Luxembourg and to analyze it in light of micro-level characteristics of potential beneficiaries. The paper aims to explore the acceptance of parental leave provisions by the population of young women residing in Luxembourg and to examine which of their socio-demographic and labour market characteristics determine hypothetical parental leave take up. Attention is also paid to anticipated labour market strategies of women after parental leave.

Northern Ireland has witnessed significant political progress with devolution and a power sharing Executive in place since May 2007. These political achievements, however, conceal a highly polarised society characterised by sectarianism and community divisions, the legacy of a protracted conflict. This paper is located in the theoretical discourse between consociationalists who argue that antithetical identities cannot be integrated and advocates of social transformation who support greater cross-community peace-building initiatives through the involvement of civil society. This theoretical debate is taking place in a policy vacuum. The Northern Ireland Executive has abandoned its commitment to the previous (direct rule) administration's A Shared Future policy and is now considering alternatives broadly described as community cohesion, sharing and integration. Using a case study of a Protestant/Catholic interface community, this paper offers empirical evidence of the effectiveness of one social transformation initiative involving community groups in a highly segregated area of West Belfast.

This article explores the dynamic field of children's participation and provides fresh insight into its construction within professional frameworks as well as within the social policy process. Protectionism, developmentalism, rights and managerialism are identified as significant discourses and this article explores their articulation and negotiation through policies. The argument is that the settlement reached represents a new configuration within policy frameworks relating to children where a version of children's rights is appropriated and mainstreamed. The interaction between children's rights, managerialism and professional discourses are illustrated with reference to policy and legislation.

As from the beginning of the 1990s, almost all European countries have introduced wide-reaching social changes, among others in eligibility, entitlement, benefits structures and in the sources of financing. In this article, we propose that a consequence of those reforms may have been a repositioning of some countries in the welfare clusters. To test this hypothesis, we apply the two bi-dimensional classifications of Bonoli (1997) and Kautto (2002) to ten countries as representative of different welfare regimes. Our results reveal an interesting repositioning of some countries, especially Portugal, the UK and Sweden that represents evidence of welfare state reforms.

A defining feature of UK welfare reform has been concerted moves towards greater conditionality and sanctioning which has stimulated much academic debate. However, few policy articles have sought to examine how welfare reforms are actually implemented. Lipsky (1980) has shown that the intentions of policy makers may be frustrated by the behaviour of public service workers operating in a ‘corrupted world of service’. This article draws upon the findings of the evaluation of the Jobseekers Mandatory Activity to discuss how key welfare reforms are likely to be implemented. It argues that that discretion remains a significant feature of front-line practice with potentially profound implications for severely disadvantaged groups.

As in other countries, improving collaboration between health and social care services is a long-established objective of English social policy. A more recent priority has been the personalisation of social care for adults and older people through the introduction of individualised funding arrangements. Individual budgets (IBs) were piloted in 13 English local authorities from 2005 to 2007, but they explicitly excluded NHS resources and services. This article draws on interviews with lead officers responsible for implementing IBs. It shows how the contexts of local collaboration created problems for the implementation of the personalisation pilots, jeopardised inter-sectoral relationships and threatened some of the collaborative arrangements that had developed over the previous decade. Personal budgets for some health services have subsequently also been piloted. These will need to build upon the experiences of the social care IB pilots, so that policy objectives of personalisation do not undermine previous collaborative achievements.

Despite promotion of evidence-based policy responses, there remains a knowledge gap between policy-makers and academia particularly in transport policy making, which is steeped in positivist traditions. A number of social policy academics have conceptualised research utilisation in relation to particular elements of social policy, but less attention has been paid to the integration of deliberative and interpretative research into transport policy. This article explores this through a study of the journey to school that used mobile and visual methods in an in-depth exploration of this element of everyday life.

Children's policy has emerged from the shadows of family and education policy over the last decade throughout the UK. The decade has also seen political and policy transformation, with the change of government from Conservatives to New Labour in 1997 and the latter's delivery on its promise of devolved administrations. Devolution has accompanied claims and attempts to move from ‘government to governance’, to recognise and support partnerships and encourage greater civic engagement.

Scottish children's policy is a prism to review key questions of devolution and its impact on policy change. The article traces and considers policy trends, to conclude that distinctive government structures have interacted with other influences to shape change, allowing more and ‘new’ room for community interests, political parties and distinctive policies.

This article outlines the reasons for the recruitment of migrant workers by the adult care sector in England, as revealed by participants in a multi-method study. The background to the study is the changing socio-demographic profile of the social care workforce, notably the employment of non-UK citizens in large numbers from outside traditional recruitment sources within the British Commonwealth. The article reports on 136 individual interviews with different stakeholders from the English social care sector undertaken in 2008–2009. Drawing on a theoretical framework developed during the first phase of the study, the analysis revealed a two-fold explanation of the demand for migrant workers in the English care sector. First, to fill specific staff vacancies, either through direct recruitment of workers from outside the UK or among those already in the UK; and, second, a more strategic, but less common, decision to recruit migrants with specific characteristics. The implications for social policy are set in the context of political concerns about migration and concurrent political aspirations to improve social care through resolving recruitment difficulties.

Information, advice and advocacy agencies are important providers of information and support to older people in the community. This study explored the role of Age Concern staff across North London in providing timely information and advice relating to advance decision-making should capacity become impaired for a variety of reasons, particularly in relation to the newly implemented Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005. Findings suggest that staff had varied knowledge of the MCA and most lacked confidence in providing detailed advice. Given the wide-reaching scope of the MCA, differentiating between information, advice and advocacy may be necessary.

Faced with a changing economic and demographic outlook, this article will suggest the adoption of a proactive and preventative approach to the quality of work and ‘worklife’ for the UK's ‘older workers’. Ultimately, it seeks to explore the possibilities for the implementation of the Finnish concept of Work Ability (Illmarinen, 2005) in the context of the UK policy agenda. It will be suggest that this approach provides a policy framework that addresses recessionary pressures whilst maximising quality of life and the active ageing of individuals.

The treatment of housing in the definition of income used to measure poverty makes a big difference to who is counted as poor. Both the Before Housing Costs (BHC) and After Housing Costs (AHC) measures in current use in the UK pose problems. BHC income does not capture the advantages of living in owner-occupied housing and AHC income might not account for the benefits of living in higher-quality accommodation. We explore the potential of including in income the difference between the estimated value of housing consumed and housing costs, which we refer to as net imputed rent. We investigate whether findings about child and pensioner poverty, and judgements about the effectiveness of poverty-reducing policies, are affected by accounting for housing in this way.

Measurements of income at the household level have traditionally only recorded income received by household members. This has generally been reflected in qualitative research. However, using interview data from two studies of British mothers and children on low incomes, we find that for some, cash and in-kind transfers from family and friends outside the household form a significant proportion of household income. In some cases, income is doubled once gifts are included. Thus, gifts make a substantial contribution to living standards, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The implications of this finding for income measurement are discussed, and further research is recommended.

Recent discussion in the UK has focused on proportionate dispute resolution to deal with people's problems with public services. Complaints procedures, which are seen to be user-friendly and informal, have been held up as good examples of proportionate dispute resolution mechanisms. Most complaints procedures include an informal first stage where, it is argued, most complaints should be resolved but there is little research evidence about what happens at this stage. This article looks at the informal stage of complaints procedures from the perspective of social care service users and considers some of the issues raised by informality.

This article considers the defensibility of the extension of conditionality to disabled people through a qualitative investigation of welfare service users’ opinions on the applicability of conditionality for disabled people. Three focus groups took place, with participants segmented according to whether or not they were disabled, to enable a comparison between the attitudes of those who would and would not be directly affected by the extension of conditionality analysed. The qualitative research undertaken demonstrates how much more the government must do before it can justifiably make disability benefit receipt conditional on participating in work-related activities.

Consideration of welfare regimes in Hong Kong has generally neglected gender and care work issues, focusing instead on welfare ideologies relating to production and the market orientation of social policies. In addition, traditional Chinese values place a high priority on motherhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lone mothers and social workers, this article considers welfare reform in Hong Kong from the late 1990s and the shift to welfare to work, examining these from the perspectives of gender. It suggests that as a result of the reforms there is a danger that lone mothers become double failures, as carers and workers.

Drawing on two studies in England, this paper explores the workforce-related impacts that social care providers envisage, and have so far experienced, from an increase in the number of people using personal budgets. It presents findings in relation to financial and workforce planning, recruitment and retention, workforce training and service user/provider relations. The discussion considers the implications not only for providers but also care workers, service users and local authorities.