The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of social policy issues - including links to source materials and related commentaries. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of social policy issues - including links to source materials and related commentaries. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of social policy issues - including links to source materials and related commentaries. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of social policy issues - including links to source materials and related commentaries. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

Reform of the tax-benefit system is on the political agenda in the UK, following the election of a coalition government in May 2010. The proposals for a partial integration of the two systems, set out by the Centre for Social Justice in 2009, and endorsed by the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, have some features of a basic income scheme. This article explores some of the common origins of the basic income principle and the ideas informing the ‘Big Society’, and examines how both traditions opposed the social insurance approach to income maintenance. It asks whether this new reform initiative will discredit basic income, or usher in the principle by the back door.

The distribution of wealth is widening in many countries and with it the growing importance of inherited wealth. In 1974, a Labour Government came to power in the United Kingdom committed to introducing an annual wealth tax. It left office without doing so. Using the official archives of the time and those of a key advisor this paper traces both the origins of the policy and its fate at the hands of the civil service. It explores two related questions. What does this experience tell us about the role of the civil service in the policy process in the UK and what lessons might be learned by those wishing to tackle the issue of widening wealth disparities today?

The ‘welfare modelling business’ has been at the heart of comparative social policy analysis but debate has largely proceeded on the basis that coherent national welfare states exist. This assumption was always problematic but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate. In particular, geographers and sociologists have pointed to the increasing power of global cities that act as co-ordinating hubs for the global economy. Though residing in nation states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy. Little attempt has been made to explore the implications of these cities for welfare regimes and welfare regime analysis. This paper addresses this under explored issue and suggests there are strong overlaps between global city types and welfare types.

In this article, we discuss some of the new tensions that are emerging between the different foundations of the welfare state. Several developments have led to the advent of the social investment state, in which people are being activated and empowered instead of passively protected. We argue that this social policy shift has been accompanied by a normative shift towards a more stringent interpretation of social protection in which individual responsibility and quid pro quo have become the primordial focus. Using the Belgian (Flemish) disciplinary policy on truancy and school allowances as a case in point, we demonstrate that this social policy paradigm may have detrimental consequences for society's weakest: they will not always be able to meet the newly emerged standard of reciprocity. This implies an erosion of the ideal of social protection and encourages new forms of social exclusion. As these changes in the social policy framework are not confined to the Belgian case alone, our analysis bears relevance for all European welfare states.

European welfare states are cutting back their responsibilities for long-term care, emphasising ‘self-reliance’ and replacing care as an entitlement of citizenship with targeted services. But we do not know how former long-term care recipients cope with retrenchment and if they are able to negotiate support from their family and friends. Through an analysis of 500 telephone interviews and thirty face-to-face interviews with long-term care recipients facing reduced care rights in the Netherlands, we found that disabled and elderly persons resist increased dependence on their personal networks. Most clients who face reduced access to public long-term care do not seek alternative help despite their perceived need for it, and feel trapped between the policy definition of self-reliance and their own ideals of autonomy.

Recent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much discussed. This article argues that if it comes to preventing and alleviating poverty among workers, both the policy options and constraints facing Continental European policymakers are fundamentally different from those facing Anglo-Saxon policymakers. Consequently, policies that work in one setting cannot be simply emulated elsewhere. We present microsimulation derived results for Belgium to illustrate some of these points. Policy options discussed and simulated include: higher minimum wages, reductions in employee social security contributions, tax relief for low-paid workers and the implementation of a stylised version of the British Working Tax Credit. The latter measure has the strongest impact on in-work poverty, but in settings where wages are compressed, as in Belgium, a severe trade-off between coverage and budgetary cost presents itself. The article concludes that looking beyond targeted measures to universal benefits and support for employment of carers may be important components of an overall policy package to tackle in-work poverty.

Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the ‘social investment strategy’. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality.

Current academic debate in the social sciences and humanities is revisiting the role of virtue in civic life. This debate is relevant to social policy. We argue that virtue is already an implicit component of policy debates, but that the virtue of compassion has not received sufficient emphasis. To support our argument we review classical and contemporary arguments regarding virtue and its linkage to the ‘good society’; articulate the necessity of compassion and its application to specific policies areas (e.g., domestic violence, welfare, emergency care); and assess how compassion intersects with other virtues in the policy environment. Policy implications are identified including: recognition of the realities of suffering, the need for sufficient administrative infrastructure and trained professionals and an often long-term commitment to work in community settings. Weighing the risks, and the overall challenges of virtuous action, our analysis suggests compassion remains a compelling, yet under-utilised, basis for constructing and implementing policies.

This article focuses on the design of frontline work in public agencies involved in the delivery of activation programmes and services. More specifically, it raises the following questions: should we think of activation work as an administrative function or as a form of professional service provision? And does the design of activation work matter in terms of the effectiveness of activation services? In answering these questions, the article provides a meta-analysis of two strands of literature. First, we analyse the available literature reporting on studies of activation frontline work and its organisation and management in public agencies responsible for delivering activation programmes. Secondly, we look at those studies of the effectiveness of activation that focus on the impact of characteristics of frontline work and its organisation and management on activation policy outcomes. We conclude that although the desirability of a professional design of activation work meets relatively wide support among scholars, the feasibility of this professionalisation project is highly contested. In addition, the debate on the nature of the activation profession has only just started. Finally, evaluation studies show that activation work characteristics do affect the outcomes of activation programmes. Against this background, we conclude that a more prominent place of activation work on the research agenda of social policy scholars is recommendable.

The politics of parenthood is a major battleground in disputes about gender equality. In contemporary debates on parental leave reform, notions about ‘equal’ parenthood and parental ‘choice’ compete. Earmarked leave for fathers, the so-called ‘daddy quota’ – a hallmark of Nordic welfare states, is increasingly being discussed in other types of welfare state. Further increases in earmarked leave is thus of interest to the policy debate in other countries, too. This article examines the reception among political actors in Norway of a proposal in 2008 to divide the existing parental leave into three equal parts – one for the father, one for the mother and one shared at the discretion of both parents. Three rival ideational policy paradigms are identified: fathers’ right to care and mothers’ right to breastfeed compete among quota protagonists, while ‘choice’ is advocated by quota antagonists. So far, quota protagonists guided by the mothers’ rights paradigm have been the most successful, but persistent, ideational tensions are rendering future developments uncertain.

The employment of migrant workers in long-term care is increasingly evident across western welfare states. This article examines the ways in which immigration controls shape the exercising of choice and control by migrant care workers over their labour. It draws on the findings of in-depth interviews with migrant care workers employed by residential and home care providers and by older people and their families in the UK. It is argued that the differential rights accorded to migrants on the basis of citizenship and immigration status shape, first, entry into particular types of care work, second, powers of ‘exit’ within work, and, third, ‘voice’ regarding the conditions under which care labour is provided.

This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how ‘readings’ of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N = 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000–09. Following the identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis – with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also ‘see’ how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data.

The concept of systematic inequalities in social and health outcomes has come to form part of contemporary policy discourse. This rhetoric is deployed even in the face of policy decisions widely viewed as iniquitous. Moreover, there is a widespread view, expressed across the political spectrum, that those in more deprived circumstances are less likely than their more affluent counterparts to be in receipt of optimal public services. Such individuals and communities are variously described as excluded, disadvantaged, underserved or hard to reach. Across countries and policy domains the term ‘hard to reach’ is used to refer to those deemed not to be in optimal receipt of public sector services which are intended to increase some aspect of material, social or physical wellbeing. It is increasingly used in health policy documents which aim to address health inequalities. However, it is an ill-defined and contested term. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it offers a critical commentary on the concept of hard-to-reachness and asks: who are viewed as hard to reach and why? Second, using a case-study of a Scottish health improvement programme that explicitly aims to reach and engage the ‘hard to reach’ in preventive approaches to cardiovascular disease, it tests the policy and practice implications of the concept. It finds that a lack of conceptual clarity leads to ambiguous policy and practice and argues for possible theoretical refinements.

This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl's most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial.

In 2009, the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales was closed down and its functions subsumed in separate organisations in the two countries. Its final biennial report, issued that year, focused on coercion and consent. This article uses some aspects of the report to discuss the implications of lawful psychiatric coercion being predicted by social group membership (correlated with race, age and gender). The work of the Commission furnished useful information in this regard, but its framework for data collection could not, and so did not, illuminate a more established picture of the class gradient in mental health problems. With the latter literature in mind, material adversity may explain the racial patterning of psychiatric populations coercively detained. However, normative aspects of risk-taking in the community and in hospital may better predict the findings on age and gender. The article concludes by querying the ameliorative impact of government appointed ‘visitorial’ bodies. Legalism-plus-safeguards is a questionable basis for meaningfully bringing discriminatory powers to book, or for reversing the differential impact of pathogenic social forces.

The concepts of poverty, social exclusion and deprivation are widely employed but often problematic. This paper discusses some problems with prominent interpretations of these concepts and how Amartya Sen's capability approach can provide a conceptual framework that can overcome these problems. It is argued that the capability approach can reflect the many ways that human lives are blighted and that it thus offers a promising framework for poverty analysis. Six insights for poverty analysis provided by the capability approach are discussed.