Time Credits are a form of community currency based upon the reciprocal exchange of time and represent an interpretation of ‘time banking’ by a UK social enterprise, Spice. This article sets out the contribution made by research on Time Credits to the theory and practice of co-production in public services. Time Credits are intended to improve wellbeing through volunteering and ultimately increase economic participation. There is a focus on communities exhibiting high levels of deprivation within a small Cambridgeshire town (Wisbech, UK) which is geographically isolated and characterised by low-skilled, agri-food based employment opportunities that attracted high levels of inward migration from the A8 EU accession countries. In separating the rhetoric from the reality of co-production, the research aims to shed some light upon the extent to which such initiatives can realistically engender a shift towards a more reciprocal economy in the context of an ongoing programme of fiscal austerity.

The promotion of extended working life has created a period of uncertainty between the ending of work and the beginning of retirement. This period of the life course is now ‘open-ended’ in respect of whether older workers decide to remain in employment or leave working. However, the choices available are framed within public policy and organisational contexts as well as personal circumstances. The study reviews the organisation of ‘work-ending’, the construction of age within organisations, and the influences on provision of support in late working life. The article concludes with a discussion on the range of pressures that might limit control over pathways through middle and late working careers.

Not enough is known in the UK about how economic phenomena and policy changes have impacted families’ ability to feed themselves. This article employs a novel way of identifying the types of UK families at risk of food poverty over time. Applying a relative deprivation approach, it asks what counts in the UK as a socially acceptable diet that meets needs for health and social participation and how much this costs. Comparing this to actual food expenditure by different family types, between 2005 and 2013, it identifies which are spending less than expected and may be at risk of food poverty. The analysis finds the proportion has increased over time for most family types and for lone parents and large families in particular. The discussion considers findings in light of changing economic and policy contexts and the implications for policy responses of how food poverty is defined and measured.

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.

In England and Wales less than half of the adult population report that they have a will, with similarly low numbers found in other jurisdictions. Dying intestate can have profound implications on the family relationships, housing security, finances, employment, health and welfare of those who are left behind. Social policy initiatives designed to educate the public on the implications of intestacy offer a potential solution but remain difficult to evaluate. This article explores the results of a public legal education experiment embedded in a longitudinal panel survey. The experiment was designed to explore: (1) the impact of information provision on will creation; and, (2) how ‘opportunistic experiments’ embedded in longitudinal surveys might support public legal education (PLE) evaluation. Whilst the impact of the information intervention in this study was not found to be statistically significant, the methodology points to the possibility of testing more bespoke and substantial initiatives in the future.

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is a highly effective model of employment support for individuals with severe mental health conditions. Its potential modification for new settings and larger cohorts is of keen interest across advanced economies given shared health-related (un)employment challenges. Despite mushrooming policy interest and activity around modified IPS a significant barrier and risk at present is the absence of a well-considered analytical framework to enable structured critical reflection about the effective translation of IPS principles and fidelity into modified IPS services. This article fills this void through the presentation for the first time in the literature of such an analytical framework, unpacking as it does so a set of key original analytical distinctions that are unhelpfully homogenised in current literature and policy thinking and highlighting the wider potential of IPS principles and models to the nature of good employment support for other individuals with health conditions and disabilities.

Recently, in the United States (US) there has been increasing interest in and advocacy for developing research and policies that identify and address what has, in the European context, been called child and forced marriage, in which migrant parents, typically from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) impose marital choices on their Western-raised children, through coercion, psychological pressure, or the threat of violence. Despite widespread international concern, there remains little research-based empirical knowledge about the problem in the United States. Drawing on interviews with 100 City University of New York students from MENASA families, this study documents significant intergenerational conflict over honour, sexuality, and marital choice and suggests a high likelihood that coercive marital situations are present in the US. However, the different socio-political environment encountered by migrant families in the US may not effectively accommodate European style anti-forced marriage policy constructions and criminal justice responses.

This article focuses on experiences of welfare recipients summoned to do volunteer work. Proponents of ‘workfare volunteerism’ argue that it leads to empowerment and employability while critics dismiss it as disempowering, stigmatising, and disciplining. Our longitudinal qualitative inquiry into experiences of sixty-six ‘workfare volunteers’ in the Netherlands shows how experiences of disempowerment or empowerment are dependent on caseworker approaches as well as on time. Disempowerment can turn into empowerment when an individual's past is considered, but can revert to disempowerment if changing needs go unrecognised. These findings have broader implications for debates on activating policies. They point to the need for diachronic approaches, which reflect the changing experiences of target groups over time and adaption of policies and caseworker approaches that respond to their clients’ changing needs and self-understanding.

Household food insecurity (HFI) impacts over 1.7 million households in Canada with adverse effects upon health. As a signatory to numerous international covenants asserting that access to food is a human right, Canadian governments are obliged to reduce HFI, yet Canadian governments have done remarkably little to assure that Canadians are food secure. In the absence of government action, HFI has spawned numerous non-governmental means of managing the problem such as food banks, feeding programs, and community gardens and kitchens. These efforts have depoliticized the problem of HFI, making its solution more difficult. Solving HFI is also complicated by the presence of five competing discourses of HFI in Canada: nutrition and dietetics, charitable food distribution, community development, social determinants of health, and political economy which offer differing causes and means of responding to HFI. We argue that the least considered discourse – the critical materialist political economy discourse – best accounts for the presence of HFI in a liberal welfare state such as Canada and provides the most effective means of responding to its presence.

Financial inclusion has arisen as an important social policy agenda over the past twenty years. A scholarly literature has emerged that is very critical of financial inclusion, seeing it as part of the financialisation of the everyday. Often, this theoretical literature makes little reference to how financial inclusion was developing in practice. Conversely, much of the policy literature does not refer to theoretical controversies about financial inclusion. The result is that the theoretical and policy literatures are developing in isolation from one another. This article suggests that it would be much better if there were greater mixing between these different literatures. The scholarly literature can inform the direction of policy and the applied literature can develop more nuanced versions of financialisation.

This article explores links made between teenage mothers and isolation: in particular, the notion of ‘relational exclusion’ (Kidger, 2004). Political conceptualisations of social exclusion often ignore this aspect and instead focus on the economic dynamics of exclusion. As a consequence, policies aimed at addressing the exclusion of teenage parents often focus on education and employment as solutions. This article argues that friendships are overlooked as a source of potential support. It therefore builds on work that has observed teenage mothers’ isolation and loneliness to examine how a teenage pregnancy affects a young woman's friendship networks. It then goes on to expand understanding of how new friendships are formed and the types of support they provide. The article concludes by proposing that social policy has a role in facilitating friendship support through investment, integrating group support with one-to-one methods and tackling stigma.

In the context of increasing need for long-term care, the reconciliation of employment and caring is an important social issue. In England, the annual public expenditure costs of unpaid carers leaving employment are approximately £2.9 billion. Previous research shows that provision of paid services to people cared for by working carers, sometimes known as ‘replacement care’, is effective in helping unpaid carers to remain in employment. This study makes an estimate of the public expenditure costs of ‘replacement care’ for working carers in England. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and 2015–16 costs data, the study finds that the public expenditure costs of ‘replacement care’ for working carers are approximately £2.5 billion a year, which is considerably lower than the costs of carers leaving employment. The study concludes that greater public investment in ‘replacement care’ to support working carers in England would represent good value for money.

During the Second World War, a German economist, Marie Dessauer, later Marie Meinhardt, worked with the British welfare state scholar and policy analyst Richard Titmuss on pioneering studies of social factors and health. Titmuss is remembered today for his role in establishing social policy as an academic discipline, and for his internationally-renowned works on welfare, health and public policy. Meinhardt's career as an economist has been largely forgotten. This was an unusual alliance with far-reaching consequences, as Meinhardt later bequeathed a large sum of money to the London School of Economics, where Titmuss worked, to help fund social policy students and research. This article documents the story of the Titmuss-Meinhardt collaboration, locating it in the context of Titmuss's last and probably best-known work, The Gift Relationship, which analyses the function of altruistic giving in promoting healthy and democratic social relations.

This article examines the relationship between tax credits and in-work poverty, drawing on the findings from a major national study on in-work poverty. We present an analysis of (i) the income packages of working families and (ii) the performance of tax credits in relation to anti-poverty objectives, drawing on data from the Households Below Average Income survey between 2004/5 and 2014/15. Our study generates five novel findings, including that tax credits reduce the poverty gap of recipient households by two-thirds; that tax credit cuts post-2010/11 have served to focus payments on single parent families and households with greater numbers of children; and that tax credits make up just one third of the social security income of working households. We argue that understanding in greater depth the interaction between tax credits and income adequacy amongst working families is necessary to provide a firmer foundation for an effective assault on in-work poverty.

Neoliberal metaphors of students often describe students as consumers, managers and even as commodities, but this analysis often disregards the discursive complexity of education. We argue that frame merging is essential to understand the hybrid modalities of neoliberal images of students in the Swedish context, where the image of the student is suspended between a social democratic welfare service model, academic capitalism, new public management and welfare nationalism. We demonstrate this through the case study of introducing student fees for non-EU students in Swedish higher education, and how the merging of universal tax financing with a more individualised fee paying solution creates variegated and complex metaphors of students and higher education. These metaphors are infused with social democratic social citizenship, neoliberal reform of welfare services, academic capitalism and nationalist welfare chauvinism. This implies that, in practice, it is nigh on impossible to disentangle the neoliberal consumer metaphor from that of social citizenship; instead they merge to generate multiple contextually relevant metaphors to fit the local debates in higher education.

Responsibilisation is commonly associated with a neoliberal transfer of responsibilities from state to social actors. However, it also covers the construction of responsibility where it does not exist yet – where citizens need socialisation to manufacture responsibility so they become economically and socially active, healthy, and productive subjects. This article aims to bring more conceptual clarity in these practices. Based on an analysis of literature on contemporary welfare state policies, three different techniques are discerned: reciprocal governance in welfare state services; training and treatment of vulnerable citizens through support and structure; and choice engineering by working upon the unconscious and psychological triggers underlying decision making. These techniques of behavioural power seek responsibilisation by working upon people's understanding of responsibility as a moral imperative and upon the rational or psychological mechanisms that constitute the choices they make and the attitudes they have.

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).

As public policies are focusing on retaining the ageing workforce, flexible working time arrangements in late career have gained visibility over the past decades. However, given the institutional nature of these arrangements, little is known about the extent to which older workers reduce working hours at a cross-country level. Using data from the 2012 Labour Force Survey ad hoc module, the article aims to provide estimates about the number of workers aged fifty-five to sixty-nine reducing working time in a move towards retirement (before and after the first old-age pension) and assessing, using a multilevel modelling, whether these arrangements play a role in explaining the decision to work beyond the pension age in thirty European countries. Descriptive results show important variations among countries and between genders. The multilevel model shows that the impact of working time reductions in late career varies from one country to another.

This article provides quantitative analysis of a self-reported measure of food bank use in the UK, adding to a sparse evidence base. Evidence from fifteen deprived communities in Glasgow is used to examine the scale of food bank use and to consider its relationship with socio-demographic, health, and financial variables. Being affected by welfare reforms was found to increase the likelihood of food bank use. Young men and those with mental health problems were found to be more likely than others to have used a food bank. Food banks appear to be used by groups who are being under-served by the welfare state and suffering the most acute impacts of austerity. The very low prevalence of food bank use among those who struggle to afford food points to their inadequacy as a response to food insecurity.