Police use of informants is fraught with ethical difficulties, but police services in the United Kingdom, driven by the need to develop quality criminal intelligence, are increasing their reliance on informants as part of a proactive approach to policing. Improved systems of accountability and management are being developed for this area of police work, but there is also a need to develop a framework for ethical practice which may deal constructively with the important and complex ethical issues that informant handling regularly presents. This article reviews the primary issues in this area and considers three philosophical approaches, act and rule utilitarianism and Dworkin's philosophy of rights, in order to assess their value as the basis for an ethical model of informant handling.

The standard of living of children depends on (i) family income; (ii) production within the family; (iii) economies of scale within the family; and (iv) distributions within the family. We use 1976 and 1986 Family Expenditure Survey information on (i), models of housework time based on time-budget surveys to estimate (ii), and equivalence scales to take account of (iii).

This article demonstrates that the making of post-communist social policy in Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union is being influenced by a number of international agencies. The implicit and explicit social policy advice being offered by the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, to the countries of the region, is described and evaluated. The policy thinking of the Bank is given particular emphasis. Brief reference to the role of the International Labour Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, in this regard, is also made. The advice, both at the general level of the broad orientation of social policy and at the specific level of social security and social assistance of the agencies, is compared. It is suggested that the making of post-communist social policy is a testing ground for the future of social policy elsewhere in the industrialised world. This future, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, is being influenced by the global social policy discourse that now exists within and between the global agencies studied here. This discourse is mapped and reflects both existing social policy orientations (liberalism, conservatism, social democracy) and the new post-Fordist social policy orientations of social liberalism, as well as that based on the concept of a citizenship income.

Street children might not be securely lodged in the life-patterns that the middle class impose on young people, but their reward from trying to maintain a minimum standard of living that their parents and governments are unable to provide them is infinitely preferable to living in the absolute poverty that surrounds them. Based on a critique of our current knowledge of the maturation of children, which is informed primarily by Northern mores and ‘scientific’ proofs whose findings derive from this normative framework and feed back into it, this article seeks to explain why we find child streetism so abhorrent and take it for granted that certain norms can, and should, prevail in the South just because they are found in Northern societies.

Justin Davis Smith, Colin Rochester and Rodney Hedley (eds.) (1995), An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector, London, Routledge, 260 pp., £42.50 (hbk), £14.99 (pbk).

Susan Saxon Harrold and Jeremy Kendall (1994), Researching the Voluntary Sector, Tonbridge, Charities Aid Foundation, 218 pp., £45.

Marilyn Taylor, Joan Langan and Paul Hoggett (1995), Encouraging Diversity: Voluntary and Private Organisations in Community Care, Aldershot, Arena, 103 pp. £9.95.

Katherine Gaskin and Justin Davis Smith (1995), A New Civic Europe: A Study of the Extent and Role of Volunteering, London, Volunteer Centre, 128 pp., £20.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health care

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Local government

11 Gender

12 Demography

There has been vociferous criticism of the Child Support Act since it began operation in 1993, but until now this has been conducted by men's groups such as Network against the Child Support Agency, and by the second families of absent parents. This small scale study by Clarke, Craig and Glendinning is a longitudinal evaluation of how the CSA has affected the lives of the lone mothers, and shows that they are equally critical.

This book charts the changing and increasing demands for social welfare and the attempts by governments to contain and restructure social expenditures, focusing on seven EU states. These contradictory pressures are encapsulated in the phrase ‘squaring the welfare circle’, which was also the sub-title of an earlier text on the British welfare state from ‘the Kent School’ (George and Miller, 1994). The latter took a notably downbeat view of the social policy future in Britain, arguing that the Conservative reforms since 1979 had set in train a profound transformation from a liberal, collectivist to a residual, neo-liberal model of social welfare. In the new book, the editors maintain this view.

‘Community Care for the Elderly in Urban China: Myth or Reality’ was the title suggested originally for this book. It should have been chosen, as it would have provided a more accurate reflection of the book's contents. The focus is very much on urban China and there is no attempt to discuss issues of ‘Chinese culture’ in the wider context of Hong Kong, Taiwan, the ethnic Chinese communities of South East Asia, or indeed those of London, Sydney or Vancouver.

The fourth dimension – time – has only recently come on to the agenda in Britain in the study of low income and poverty. Yet as Robert Walker states, ‘without taking time into account ... it is impossible to develop policies that successfully tackle the multiple causes of [poverty]’ (Walker, 1994). In the US studies specifically looking at ‘welfare dynamics’ – following ‘welfare’ recipients in and out of benefit – have a much longer history dating back to the early 1980s (Bane and Ellwood, 1983). Tracking those on low income over time requires access to longitudinal studies which contain appropriate income data. In the US, the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), in particular, goes back to the 1960s. In Britain there was no comparable survey generating longitudinal data until the advent of the British Household Panel Survey with a first wave in 1991.

As publication number two in a series of introductory student texts entitled ‘Contemporary Social Policy’, this volume might come as something of a surprise. Set alongside housing, health, education and today's inevitable themes of the mixed economy of welfare and community care, surely the title ‘Understanding Equal Opportunities’ is a cuckoo in the nest? Just what is it that a course on social policy needs to do with the theme of equal opportunities (employment opportunities, not service delivery opportunities) and how does it fit within the intellectual frameworks of the field?

Based on contributions to the Conference of the Institute for Research in the Social Services at York in 1994, this volume provides commentaries on the influence and effectiveness of recent policy measures and seeks to illuminate future agendas for policy and research. It is divided into two sections. Under the unprepossessing title of ‘Old Agendas’, the first covers the progress of internal market reforms in the NHS; the effectiveness of policies on alcohol taxation, and of measures for dealing with homelessness and drug abuse; an international overview of means testing for social assistance; and the financing and philosophical underpinnings of community care. The second section, on ‘New Issues’, contains discussions of market testing in social security; accountability in the public services; ethnicity and community care; future prospects for social policy in the EU; and a ‘critical agenda’ for future welfare debates.

In recent years ‘needs assessment’ has become an overused phrase, joining terms such as ‘community care’ in having such a proliferation of meanings and uses as to be meaningless when used without explanation and qualification. It can be used at the policy level to inform resource allocation decisions; in commissioning and planning to guide service development; and to allocate service to individuals. The first two levels are often interlinked.

Traditionally, when government wants to stall on a difficult but politically pressing issue, it establishes a Royal Commission (a technique little used by the bulldozer governments of the Thatcher era). However, despite the widely acknowledged (albeit with differing emphases) political significance of the voluntary sector, there has been no recent government incursion of this kind into the world of the voluntary sector. The only recent public government commentary has been The Individual and the Community which, in 1992, appeared both as part of the Majorite broad push on the Citizen's Charter and a flagging up of his government's desire (during the review of charity law, and the introduction of the community care reforms) to pull the voluntary sector further into the welfare market dominated by the three Es; as Barry Knight has put it, to encompass the ‘delivery of state objectives through voluntary means’.

This book makes a number of interesting points. Historically, Greaves shows how, throughout the twentieth century, cigarette smoking has moved in and out of phase with liberationist imagery, variously associated with the feminine ideal and defiant assertiveness. She does not spare the tobacco industry in their unconcern for women's health: her most valuable point is that the gathering assault on Third World markets, especially in Asia, is only just starting to reproduce on a larger scale the damage left in the West by the post-war smoking epidemic.

Books on family policy are always welcome for it is the Cinderella of welfare state research. And comparative works on family policy are even more welcome, given that the study of social policy has now turned strongly comparative. Gauthier's comparative aim is daunting: she researches 22 countries over a time span of 100 years.

This is an edited collection of papers which originated in a conference of the same title in 1993. The editors provide an opening chapter outlining the major themes and approach of the book, and there follow a further eight chapters from a range of contributors. In their opening chapter the editors write that the volume is concerned with ‘the exploration of a number of themes, including the gendered allocation of welfare resources in society and the role of family and state in influencing this division; the effect of gender in the creation and adoption of policies concerning health and welfare by pressure groups, political parties, and government at both local and national levels; and the extent to which the balance of voluntary and statutory bodies alters the nature of welfare, not least because of the differential involvement of men and women’ (p. 1).

This book is a welcome addition to the series Public Policy and Management, which should be familiar to social policy specialists. It seeks to ‘make sense of the unprecedented amount of change in ... the world of local government’ and provide ‘an overview of where local government as an institution is going’. At first it seems an impossible quest as the principal change-driver, the central government, operates by a process of ‘policy drift, opportunism and inconsistency’. And yet within the twists and turns of government policy, it is possible to discern a number of rational visions or strategic roles for local government which may (perhaps unconsciously) inform official and others' thinking about local government. It is these various perceptions about the role and purpose of local government which are the essential focus of this book (though the analysis does not go so far as to consider the neo-Marxist models of local government).

These volumes from the Danish National Institute of Social Research complete the first phase of a project on social security in Europe, dealing with cash benefits in the Nordic countries, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. Volumes 2–4 of the series (including Recent Trends in Cash Benefits in Europe) contain a large amount of the raw material generated by the project, while volume 1, Social Security in Europe, Development or Dismantlement?, presents some findings in a relatively digested form.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when policies could be understood as instrumental attempts, influenced no doubt by ideology, at practical problem solving. Recently, however, it has frequently been more to the point to see policies as expressions of ideology which create as many (if not more) problems than they solve. The habitual residence test, which restricts eligibility for income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit to those who are deemed to be ‘habitually resident’ in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, is a case in point not least because it embodies no less than three components of Conservative Party ideology: scepticism towards Europe, disdain for the so-called ‘dependency culture’ and enthusiasm for further public expenditure cuts.