This paper offers a constructive critique of a recent account, in this journal, of the place of compassion as a virtue within social policy. The critique suggests that the ‘compassion thesis’ collapses into an account of duty rather than virtue, and that compassion as a virtue can only be exercised by individuals, and not by institutions. The paper goes on to suggest an alternative account of the relationship between social policy institutions and the virtue of compassion. It develops a broadly Humean account of ‘sympathy’ triggered by proximity to distress. In this alternative account, social policy is used to create the background conditions in which individuals are moved, and able, to exercise the virtues of sympathy and compassion. Special attention is paid to housing and mixed communities policy as a means of creating the social proximity that may underpin a welfare culture of understanding rather than blame.

Most Western countries have, for some time, provided income support and/or taxation relief to parents with children in their care. The significant amount of research into the costs of children to couple and sole parent households has been important in assessing and developing family support policies. Changing societal expectations about the level of involvement of fathers in child rearing activities has highlighted the need to understand the costs facing usually male non-resident parents in having contact with their children. The budget standards methodology is used in this paper to estimate the costs for non-resident parents exercising regular contact with their children. Costs of contact are found to be high. For contact with one child for 20 per cent of the year, costs of contact represent about 40 per cent of the costs of that same child in an intact couple household with a medium income and more than half of the costs of that child in a household with low income. Household infrastructure and transportation is the reason for high costs. One implication of this finding is that the total cost of children substantially increases when parents separate. The article discusses some policy implications of these findings. This research is of relevance to social security, taxation, family law and child support policies and administration.

The minimum wage is often considered a social policy instrument that can help reduce both poverty and welfare receipt. The introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015 provides an interesting case study to analyse not only the potential but also the limitations of minimum wages as an instrument to achieve socially desirable goals such as reduced welfare receipt or poverty. Based on the results of simulation models, descriptive analyses and causal effects studies of the short-term effects, we argue that minimum wages are a rather badly targeted measure when attempting to reduce poverty and welfare receipt.

Policy driven change is challenging, with a significant gap between theory and practice. A key tension in enacting such change is achieving a balance between bottom-up development of local, context-specific approaches, and top-down, centrally determined policy solutions and their mutual sequencing. Ideal type models of the policy-making process envisage a rational ordered approach, driven by evidence and accompanied by ongoing evaluation of outcomes (Parsons, 1995, p77); however, the reality is far more complex. We examine the implementation and early operation of the New Care Models (NCM) Vanguard programme in England, using Matland’s (1995) ambiguity-conflict model, to explore the aims and expectations of the programme. We consider the relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy development and draw attention to the pressures coming from what was initially perceived as a permissive policy approach of encouraging experimentation, whilst also requiring rapid learning, scale and spread. We suggest that future programmes for large-scale policy implementation initiatives could be crafted differently to take account of the environment of implementation and render ambitions more realistic. Rather than aiming to create a set of definite products and templates, it may be that a set of principles for design and implementation should be developed and spread.

In this article, the authors evaluate whether the provision of good quality social services has the potential to create social cohesion. In addition to examining the relationship between social services and social cohesion, the authors expand institutional theories of social capital by investigating whether this potential for building social solidarity may be resilient to the corrosive effects of economic strain. Multilevel analyses of variations in the perceptions of social cohesion amongst Europeans were conducted for 27 member countries of the EU using the Eurobarometer 74.1 on poverty and social exclusion from 2010. The results suggest that individuals receiving better quality social service provision perceived higher levels of social cohesion within the country in which they live. By contrast, individuals living in households experiencing economic strain perceived lower levels of cohesion. Further analysis revealed that the experience of economic strain does not weaken the positive relationship between social services quality and perceptions of cohesion.

Arguments about the harmful effects of government intervention in welfare issues, which seemed peripheral to the rapid expansion of state welfare in the twentieth century, have recently achieved the status of a new orthodoxy. This article examines the historical development of economic, administrative and ideological criticisms of state welfare in Britain and America, in order to identify the roots of this new orthodoxy. It finds that economic and administrative criticisms are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the rise of this new view, which ultimately rests on specific ideological beliefs about the propriety of state welfare.

Five principles determining movement in the housing market relating to tenure, social class and fertility status were suggested by Payne and Payne (1977) on the basis of a small-scale study in Aberdeen. Analysis of a large-scale nationally-representative survey containing full housing and maternity histories suggests that some of these principles require modification at the national level. For example, movement into and between tenures, although heavily influenced by demographic and socio-economic factors, is not as rigid as the Aberdeen study suggested. The interaction of social class, age at marriage and childbearing patterns is assessed. Finally, changes over time in these relationships and the long-term effects on final family size and tenure are discussed.

The early twentieth century has been seen as a crucial period in the development of British social policy. However, attention has been concentrated almost entirely on the increased role of the state, and in particular on the Liberal ‘welfare reforms’ after 1906. These developments have tended to mask the significant changes that were taking place in the field of voluntary charitable effort. One organization which emerged out of the ferment surrounding social policy in late Victorian and Edwardian England was the Guild of Help movement.

The first guild was formed in Bradford in 1904 and embodied a new approach to the organization of charity. It rapidly expanded from Bradford throughout England and Wales and was in 1919 the leading organization which took part in the merger which created the National Council for Social Service. In this article the creation of the guild will be examined within the context of the changing economic situation, the growth of the labour movement and the nature of existing charitable provision in an attempt to give a critical assessment of the nature and role of this new body.

Rough sleeping in Britain has a long history, and interventions have alternated between legal sanctions and humanitarian concern. This paper critically examines recent changes in homeless policies and services, with particular reference to the needs of older people who sleep rough. The characteristics and problems of the group are first described. Single homeless people were formerly accommodated in direct-access hostels but, from the 1970s, individualised rehabilitation and resettlement have spread. Most recently, services dedicated to older people have begun (although remain few and are unevenly provided). Their achievements are reviewed and drawn upon in formulating normative proposals of the appropriate service mix. The 1990s ‘Rough Sleepers Initiative’ and related programmes promoted a ‘social care market’ of not-for-profit organisations that compete for increased (but short-term) funds to provide services, and the new Labour government will build upon these changes and increase funds. Low tolerance towards the ‘social exclusion’ of homelessness is promised but unerringly constructed as exclusion from work; while rough sleeping is dubbed as anti-social, coercive approaches to achieve a two-thirds reduction are foreseen. The proposed target might stall the development of diverse and effective services, or reduce providers' capacity to combat the perversities of resource allocation. The overall prospects for the improvement and expansion of services to provide significant help to single older homeless people are uncertain.

This paper aims to discuss current attempts to understand the housing crisis, in particular what are categorized as managerial and reformist approaches, and to examine the prescriptions for solution that such approaches produce. These concerns are illustrated by a description of the institutional allocation of credit for house purchase in a particular town. This description attempts to link the nature of the housing crisis to the structure of the housing market. It is suggested that neither the managerial nor the reformist approach to housing questions is sufficient to explain the nature of the housing market, and that any possible solution to the housing question lies outside the realms of ‘housing’ itself.

The onset of the economic crisis more than a decade ago posed extreme challenges to health care systems that may now be repeated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting policies produced a wide range of (in some cases, even opposite) outcomes: increased or decreased public expenditures for health care. Curiously, however, countries that were considered particularly hard hit by the economic crisis showed different extremes of policy outcomes. Investigating these developments requires a dynamic view and identifying explanations for government action in one direction or the other. Using the lenses of several theoretical perspectives in public policy research, this article analyses the conditions under which public health expenditures changed in European Union member states after the financial crisis. Why did certain countries, at first sight similarly affected, show opposite outcomes? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) confirms that left-wing governments and coordinated market economies, in combination and alone, tended to increase public health expenditures in the short term, whereas countries where neither of these conditions was present decreased public health expenditures.

Insights from experimental research in the behavioural sciences offer a powerful impetus to reject the new paternalist approach to social policy. The findings from psychology, behavioural economics and behavioural finance, concerning decision-making by people experiencing poverty, point to the importance of alleviating material hardship by improving the social safety net, rather than trying to remedy the character of individuals through welfare conditionality. Thus far, the behavioural sciences’ usefulness as an intellectual weapon against punitive welfare reform has been underappreciated. This is partly due to underappreciation of the considerable contrast between the libertarian paternalism advocated by some behavioural scientists, which provides a rationale for governments to nudge citizens, and Lawrence Mead's new paternalism, which emphasises the personal responsibility of the poor for their circumstances. More importantly the disproportionate attention given to nudge has inhibited recognition that the behavioural research on poverty can be used to argue for more ambitious policy approaches which seek to transform behaviour in more ethical ways.

This article proposes a novel way of measuring cross-national changes over time in the outputs of social security systems. Traditional approaches to the comparative analysis of social security systems use expenditure levels, regime types or poverty and inequality rates to rank countries and map change over time. All these approaches encounter the problem of determining how much of the observed change is due to internal developments within the social security system, and how much due to exogenous social and economic factors. Taking the example of public pensions in five European countries since 1950, this article demonstrates how formal social security rules can be used in a simulation model to evaluate changes in public pension payments for a variety of hypothetical individuals characterised by different levels of lifetime income. This procedure produces direct measures of the impact of changes in social security systems which are entirely independent of exogenous developments in social and economic structures. This new method reveals the ‘pure’ effect of internal social security system development over time.

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 current debates about citizenship, three approaches to social rights can be detected. Three models of access to social rights mirror these accounts. The institutionalised rights model, based on the post-war welfare state, stresses education and information. The market efficiency model, stressing the need for consumer information, stems from contemporary neo-liberal, consumerist approaches to welfare provision. The radical model challenges the assumption of a level playing field for all citizens. As the state's role in housing has been transformed and governments have stressed the market efficiency model, housing advice services have expanded in both state and voluntary sectors. The objectives and work of these services is examined and shown as providing a close fit with the institutionalised rights model in the local authority sector, while in the voluntary sector the radical rights model dominates. In addition, the campaigning work of voluntary organisations is shown to promote a radical view of citizenship rights.

This article explores why some of the arrangements for the employment of disabled people are so resistant to change despite their evident shortcomings. From historical data it is argued that the negotiations which shaped the Disabled Persons Employment Act 1944 were motivated by sectional concerns which were detrimental to the interests of disabled people but that the legislation subsequently became symbolic of deeply felt and widely shared values. The implications of this for current policy options are discussed. An attempt is made to show how an analysis of the relationships between motives, actions and values in the policy-formation process can help to explain why some policies are both more ineffective and more persistent than others.

Public discourse on migrant interactions with state welfare systems has often assumed exploitative motivations on the part of migrants, with charges of welfare tourism a recurring theme among segments of the political spectrum. Academic research has also tended to characterise migrant welfare utilisation in simple dichotomous terms where migrants are either ‘welfare dependent’ or not. This article argues for the analytic utility of disaggregating the concept of welfare utilisation into distinct component parts, denoting usage, participation and dependency with regard to state-provided cash welfare benefits. Using EU survey data, these distinct components of welfare utilisation among migrants are assessed in comparative cross-national context, comparing welfare and labour market outcomes for similar cohorts of migrants faced with dissimilar incentive structures. The results have direct implications for policy-makers, and for migrant experiences of social citizenship, in so far as they show little support for the moral hazard view of migrant interactions with welfare systems. Migrants in Ireland's relatively more generous welfare system are seen to have no greater likelihood of welfare dependency, and in fact show a lower usage of welfare (as a proportion of total income) than similar migrants in Britain, controlling for characteristics. Intriguingly, however, the likelihood of forming a partial labour market attachment is seen to respond to increasing levels of welfare usage in Ireland, but not in Britain, suggesting that migrants may be taking an active role in how they define their position in the work-welfare nexus in response to welfare system incentives.

Canada, like all industrialised countries, has become concerned over health care costs. Canada has reason to be concerned, with the most expensive system, on a per capita basis, of any country with national health insurance. This paper briefly reviews Canada's health care system, examines the rhetoric being adopted throughout the country at the current time, and discusses the changes which are now occurring. An assessment of whether change will lead to a more cost efficient and appropriate system for an aging society is then presented. It is concluded that there are profound changes taking place in the health care system in all provinces in Canada. Most of the changes to date reflect a restricting of current medical care by making ineligible previously eligible procedures, introducing user fees where there were none before, and in some instances including means testing where there was none before. In addition, hospital budgets are being cut and beds are being closed. However, a corresponding expansion of community programmes, while evident in the rhetoric, is less evident within current actions.

International social security systems increasingly place work-related conditions on individuals claiming out-of-work benefits, and enforce requirements through the use of benefit sanctions. The literature on the impacts of benefit sanctions considers both labour market and wider social effects, which this study contributes to through a focus on mental health. It considers the period of Coalition government (2010–15) in the UK, which imposed a comparatively high number of benefit sanctions and increased their severity through the Welfare Reform Act 2012. A longitudinal dataset is constructed using quarterly local authority-level data on Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) sanctions and antidepressant prescriptions in England. Results from fixed effects analyses indicate that, in the post-reform period, every 10 additional sanctions are associated with 4.57 additional antidepressant prescribing items (95% CI: 2.14 to 6.99), which translates to approximately one additional person receiving treatment. Importantly, this finding indicates that sanctions are associated with both adverse mental health impacts and wider public expenditure implications, which motivates further investigation at the individual-level. In addition, punitive sanctions form a core part of the new Universal Credit (UC) and so the results suggest the need to reassess the use of sanctions within the contemporary social security system.

Considerable debate has taken place as to the nature of social need and ways in which it can best be identified in individual people, but little attention has focussed on the way assessments of need are used in the process of policy formation. The article takes Jonathan Bradshaw's commonly quoted taxonomy of social need and assesses its strengths and weaknesses for use in a practical policy making setting, that of assessment of need for sheltered housing for elderly people by a district housing authority. Some fundamental problems associated with Bradshaw's approach are then discussed, together with those arising from use of a term such as need in the process of policy formation.