The Social Policy Digest went online in 2002, and since then has developed into a major web-based resource on UK social policy issues. By the end of 2008 it contained over 22,000 entries, covering policy developments and research findings across the whole range of social policy fields.

Gordon Brown has eagerly lauded his fellow Kirkcaldy citizen, Adam Smith, as his main policy inspiration. This article tests the rigour of such a claim by matching Brown's promotion of Smithian ‘sympathy’ as the centrepiece of his programme for government with the changes introduced by his Treasury to the British welfare model. In the 1970s, Thomas Wilson showed that the traditions of the post-war British welfare state were compatible with a modified form of Smithian sympathy socialised at the level of the state. New Labour has set about reforming the welfare model with respect to both its underlying institutions and the basic subjectivities of its recipients. I show that Brown's substantive preference for an asset-based system of welfare moves those subjectivities away from the ‘relational self’ of Smithian sympathy and towards a much more ‘autonomous self’. Consequently, I conclude that it is stretching Smith's concept of sympathy too far, even in a modified socialised form, to associate it with New Labour's asset-based system of welfare.

Nowadays many more young children experience non-maternal childcare than in the past. From a theoretical perspective, the effect this may have on their cognitive and behavioural development is unclear. This paper uses data from the UK for a sample of children in the Millennium Cohort Study, whose mothers were working when they were nine months old, to test how different forms of childcare at an early age play a role in the production of cognitive skills and the behavioural development of young children (measured at age three). The results show that formal group care is positively associated with school readiness test scores. But, unlike previous research, we find no association between formal group care and problem behaviour. Grandparent care, which has received negative attention in the past, is shown to be positively associated with vocabulary test scores, but also positively related to problem behavioural scores.

This article explores support services for teenage mothers. It draws upon empirical evidence from a wider study into the experiences of teenage mothers in the Midlands area of the UK, in which 20 young women who had given birth as teenagers participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of support services. The findings are used to make suggestions as to policy regarding support for teenage mothers, arguing that the diverse nature of support needs must be taken into account when designing support services. The article concludes that more attention should be paid to the possibilities of the group mode of support, rather than focusing on support delivered on a one-to-one basis, and, in addition, the functions of support services, beyond encouraging re-engagement in education, employment and training, need to be valued more significantly.

The vetting and barring scheme known as the POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) List established in England and Wales by the Care Standards Act (2000) was intended to provide greater assurance about the quality of social care for adults. This article discusses referrals to the POVA List in the period 21 May 2004 to 17 November 2006, details of which were made available to the researchers. These comprised 5,294 cases. Further data relating to the investigation process were provided through drawing on all material supplied in a purposively selected sample of 298 referrals. These have been analysed and findings are reported here in respect of referrals and prior disciplinary action, interactions with local and national agencies and the involvement of the police. What happened to the referrals and the length of time for decisions about Listing are also reported. The article concludes with some policy recommendations for the future of the scheme and sets this in the context of regulation.

In the last decade, UK public agencies have increasingly been required to collaborate with non-state providers to deliver welfare services. Third sector organisations are now providers of services from early years to old age, taking a growing role in children and young people's services in socially deprived neighbourhoods. National policy has recognised third sector expertise in working with marginal groups of people. However, changing relationships with the state have drawn community organisations into new, often uncomfortable, organisational arrangements, affecting their work and their roles in relation to service users and community stakeholders.

This article examines recent changes from a third sector perspective, drawing on data from a study of community-based organisations providing children and young people's services in deprived localities. It considers the changing environment of ‘new localism’ affecting these organisations, focusing on recent plans for local area commissioning of services.

The article identifies some progress in supporting community services in deprived areas but illustrates how the continuing emphasis on competitive contracts and centrally driven frameworks undermines collaborative work and community trust. It argues that such mechanisms may serve short-term state interests but devalue the very community-level work, which is increasingly being promoted to address challenging social problems.

Voluntarism has moved to the centre of most western neo-liberal governments' focus in terms of welfare delivery. At the same time, very little of the social policy literature has identified specific historical, cultural and political contexts of place in shaping the particular form of voluntarism and the scale at which it takes place in a country. In order to address policy-related issues of the voluntary sector, a geographical perspective focusing on these local contexts can be very useful in unpacking how the sector can exist across regional and local scales. This article explores the rise of voluntarism in adult learning disability services in Ireland. Ireland experienced the ‘community turn’ much earlier than most Western states, in that the state advocated a ‘hands-off’ approach in learning disability services from the outset. It uses data from 40 interviews with local health agencies, voluntary organisations and informal carers. It critically examines the complex geographical factors that have contributed to the particular form of voluntarism that has evolved, thus demonstrating that understanding levels of voluntary activity requires attention to local circumstances.

Individuals' donations to overseas charities are an important source of funding for development assistance from rich industrialised countries. But little is known about the nature of these charitable donations. The literature on giving focuses on total donations to all causes and does not identify separately the pattern or the determinants of giving to any particular cause. We investigate giving to overseas causes using UK survey microdata that record individuals' donations to different types of charity. We establish a picture of overseas giving, comparing this with giving to other causes. Socio-economic correlates of both types of giving are analysed, including gender, marital status, occupation, education and, especially, income. We also investigate the relationship between individuals' overseas giving and their attitudes towards poverty in developing countries.

This article explores how proponents of a public health model of alcohol policy have, for more than a quarter of a century, argued consistently but unsuccessfully for an integrated national alcohol policy in the Republic of Ireland. It looks in particular at the past decade, a time when increases in alcohol consumption and related problems strengthened the case for such an integrated policy, and when managerial innovations in the sphere of cross-cutting management appeared to provide a template for its implementation. A number of explanations are offered for the refusal of successive governments to respond to what its advocates see as the only rational, evidence-based approach to the prevention of alcohol problems. It is argued that, unlike the Nordic countries, the political culture of independent Ireland has never been one in which the state could unilaterally impose strict alcohol control policies as a feature of its broader vision of the welfare state. It is also argued that during the recent period of economic prosperity (the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ era) the country was characterised by a neo-liberal policy climate, which was specifically antipathetic to the idea that the state should interfere directly in the alcohol market with a view to preventing related problems. It is suggested that the social partnership model of governance, to which many people attributed the country's economic success, created an atmosphere of consensualism within which the state as mediator between the two main protagonists (the public health lobby and the drinks industry) was unwilling to challenge the drinks industry. It is also concluded that this failure to create a national alcohol policy based on public health principles demonstrates the limitations of the cross-cutting, or ‘joined-up’, approach to public management in those areas of social policy characterised by clashing value systems or fundamental conflicts of economic interest. Finally, it is acknowledged that in Ireland, as elsewhere, neo-liberal certitudes have been effectively dethroned by the economic recession and banking crisis of late 2008; whether these more straitened economic circumstances will provide a better fit for the ‘nanny state’ ideals of the public health perspective on alcohol remains to be seen.