Poverty research has increasingly focused on persistent income poverty, both as a crucial social indicator and as a target for policy intervention. Such an approach can lead to an identification of a sub-set of poor individuals facing particularly adverse circumstances and/or distinctive problems in escaping from poverty. Here we seek to establish whether, in comparison with cross-sectional measures, persistent poverty measures also provide a better measure of exclusion from a minimally acceptable way of life and relate with other important variables in a logical fashion. Our analysis draws upon the first three waves of the ECHP and shows that a persistent poverty measure does constitute a significant improvement over its cross-sectional counterpart in the explanation of levels of deprivation. Persistent poverty is related to life-style deprivation in a manner that comes close to being uniform across countries. The measure of persistence also conforms to our expectations of how a poverty measure should behave in that, unlike relative income poverty lines, defining the threshold level more stringently enables us to identify progressively groups of increasingly deprived respondents. Overall the persistent poverty measure constitutes a significant advance on cross-sectional income measures. However, there is clearly a great deal relating to the process of accumulation and of erosion of resources, which is not fully captured in the persistent poverty measure. In the absence of such information, there is a great deal to be said for making use of both types of indictors in formulating and evaluating policies while we continue to improve our understanding of longer-term processes.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 was a landmark in American social policy. There were a number of objectives, but the primary purpose was to end the Aid to Families with Dependent Children programme which was a cash benefit paid to poor, very largely single-parent, families. The underlying theme was that AFDC had constituted a ‘something for nothing’ programme which had violated the primacy of work. The Act acknowledged that government had an initial duty to aid those falling on hard times, but also stated that there comes a time when government's obligation diminishes. This legislation has generated much interest in the UK, but there is a danger of important elements of the American story being overlooked. In order to understand, therefore, just what is going on this paper looks at the US welfare-to-work experiment on its own terms. The article looks at the movement behind reform and at why, despite evidence of increased hardship for some, five years on from passage the conventional wisdom is that PRWORA has been a success.

In Austria, the provision of long-term care is strongly based on unpaid female work within family networks and is characterised by a highly unequal division of informal long-term care-giving. In 1993, a major reform has been introduced in the Austrian long-term care system with a payments for care programme and a state–provinces treaty regarding service development at its heart. The objective of this article is to investigate the implications of the 1993 programme on gender divisions and on whether and in what ways the programme and processes set in train by the programme influence the role of women as carers. The question is approached by applying and broadening the concept of defamilisation in a process oriented way. The analysis suggests that from the informal carers' perspective long-term care allowances in the Austrian context mean some financial relief via ‘symbolic payments’. At the same time, the overall long-term care system prolongs existing gender divisions and sets in train new stratification processes among women as main carers with gender, class and space as dimensions reinforcing each other.

This paper is concerned with tracking the shifts in media discourses surrounding issues of race and social policy interventions through an examination of the newspaper media responses to the Brixton Inquiry and Scarman Report in 1982 and the Lawrence Inquiry and Macpherson Report that appeared eighteen years later in 1999. Brought about by two very different sets of historical events, albeit events which shared certain common features, this paper argues that the Scarman and Macpherson Reports have framed the changing story of ‘race relations’ in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While there have, inevitably, been comparisons between the content of the two Reports there has not been a comparative focus on the media reception of the findings and recommendations of the Inquiries. Using written and visual media text from five newspapers the paper seeks to map the extent to which media narratives around both race and race related policy-making have shifted during the course of almost two decades. The paper questions the boundaries of any such changes and examines what remains unchanged.

This article examines the activities of the Children's Committee of the London County Council (LCC) and what a contemporary newspaper referred to as a ‘daring experiment’: its efforts to discharge children from public care to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Archival evidence reveals how Irish children were identified and separated from English children in care and, in many instances, sent to Ireland. It is maintained the dominant constructions of ‘Ireland’ played a role in the scheme. In addition, the LCC policy is examined and viewed in the context of other exclusionary practices centred on Irish people in Britain in the mid-twentieth century.

After two decades of growing expectations that the UK voluntary (or ‘third’) sector will expand its social policy role, the spotlight is now focusing on specific types of voluntary organisations including community groups, black and minority ethnic associations and ‘faith-based organisations’. This article notes the growing cross-party interest in the UK in religious organisations and then presents findings from two recent empirical studies of the UK Jewish voluntary sector; one on financial resources and the other on governance. We discuss the implications of our findings for a possible expanded social policy role for faith-based organisations in the UK.

Governance is now quite widely used as a frame of analysis, although not in social policy. This article elaborates some of the different roots and usages of governance and interrogates the utility of the concept for the discipline and study of social policy. Having traced the concept's diverse origins and contemporary usages, the article goes on to develop from them a framework for the analysis of developments in public policy in the UK under New Labour. This is then applied to consider in turn the nature of the public sphere, policy-making, policy implementation and societal incorporation. This leads to a discussion of the various strengths and weaknesses of governance. The former include its direct interest in policy-making, its focus on power and the state and the fact that it can connect different levels of action and analysis. On the negative side, though, one must question to what extent a governance perspective finds social policy interesting in its own right and whether its over-riding focus on state and government leads it to residualise both social policy and society.

In 2003 the Social Policy Digest is being relaunched as a web-based publication. The aims of the Digest remain the same – to provide comprehensive coverage of events and publications across the whole social policy field. However, we hope the new website format will enable us to provide a greatly enhanced service to all Journal of Social Policy subscribers.