The sale of council dwellings under the right to buy has been a prominent feature of the privatisation policies of the Thatcher governments. The impact of such changes in the ownership and control of dwellings remains a subject of considerable debate. Whilst there is now substantial evidence on the short term effects of council house sales, the longer term impacts on dwellings and households have largely been a matter for speculation. This paper explores some of the central policy and theoretical issues through new research evidence on dwellings sold by local authorities in the late sixties and early seventies. In particular it focuses on what has happened to households and dwellings since privatisation, the political orientation of those households and on attitudes towards and experiences of state provision. In general it presents a picture of continuity and stability rather than dramatic change and transformation following privatisation.

The Australian income support system is often characterised as one of the most selective in the Western industrialised world. This paper examines the sense in which the Australian system is selective, and discusses the distinction between selectivity and targeting in income support provisions. Developments in social security outlays and recipient numbers over the last two decades are compared with those occurring since 1983, in order that the nature and impact of recent policies introduced to increase targeting can be identified. The analysis indicates that increases in recipient numbers have been the dominant factor underlying the past growth in social security expenditure. The distinction between selectivity and targeting of income support provisions is then explained with reference to the concepts of eligibility and entitlement. A framework is developed to illustrate how recent policies have restrained the growth in social security recipient numbers by policies which have increased income support targeting. These moves have not always produced a consistently more selective system of income support, an issue which is explored with the use of an index of the degree of selectivity of social security expenditures developed specifically for this purpose.

Mainsteam poverty analysis is deficient because it ignores important within-household aspects. This point has been made by many, and stressed by feminists especially, yet mainstream poverty measurement practice remains unchanged. Why is this? What should we be doing? This paper examines anew the case for taking within-household factors into account in poverty measurement. The analysis reveals a number of unresolved issues including some problems with recent feminist arguments, but concludes that there is a good case for changing current practice. To demonstrate that this is feasible, four research projects are described. These are my agenda for action.

This article examines the increasing importance of human service corporations within the American welfare state. In particular, the article investigates the historical and philosophical background of the corporatisation of welfare, the expanding social welfare market, and the scope of human service corporations. The consequence of corporatisation, including standardisation, commodification, and the oligarchic nature of human services are also examined. Lastly, the authors explore the implications of corporatisation for the future of the US welfare state.

This paper discusses the various ways in which British Afro Caribbeans are disadvantaged in their encounter with psychiatry. It suggests that far from being monolithic and institutional, racism must be deconstructed and traced to the actions, practices and procedure involved in specific encounters. The procedures of psychiatry are examined through the discourses of psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology. From this analysis it is suggested that psychiatry's relationship to Afro Caribbean populations in Britain arises from the ways in which psychiatry conceptualises notions of ethnicity, race and cultural difference, as well as ways in which it organises and reproduces itself as a form of therapeutic intervention.

This paper considers social security policy and structures in relation to the labour market of the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper begins by describing the labour market of the late 1980s and summarising projective descriptions of labour demand in the 1990s. The second section of the paper reports on recent research examining the labour supply behaviour of long term unemployed people, drawing out the role of social security policy and structures therein. The third section of the paper concludes that the role of social security policy is at present essentially reactive rather than proactive; that it does little to address the likely need for labour of certain kinds in the 1990s; and that efforts to address the problem of long term unemployment through social security policy have been largely misdirected. The final section of the paper briefly considers some of the ways in which social security systems can be more proactive and suggests a number of both short term and longer term policy changes which research indicates would be of benefit in the UK.

This paper will discuss the applicability of concepts of ‘stress’ and ‘selection’ to which health researchers appealed in their attempts to explain the relationship between health and unemployment, and examine the implications of some of the major studies carried out in Europe and the USA for these competing approaches. The contradictions arising from this evidence will then be addressed with the aid of a technical advance in population statistics which allows us to test hypotheses about whether the associations between socio-demographic characteristics and mortality may be due to selective mobility of seriously ill persons into socially disadvantaged positions. It is concluded that a better understanding of the results of available studies may be reached if we avoid the dichotomy between ‘stress’ and ‘selection’, and explore whether concepts of labour market processes and the reproduction costs of labour power can throw new light on the relationship between health and patterns of labour force participation. The paper aims both to encourage health researchers to consider policy and market variables more closely, and to tempt researchers more specialised in these latter fields to apply recent advances in the understanding of the interaction between labour market and income maintenance policies to the question of how economic conditions and change may affect health.

Data from the authors' qualitative study of decision-making in low income households casts new light on council house sales in a least-favoured housing estate. Under pressure from rising rents and rumours of privatisation, poor tenants are deciding to buy their houses as a way of securing their future in the area and controlling their personal environment, rather than as an escape from a residual ‘ghetto’ of welfare housing. This raises a number of issues in relation to current theories about housing tenure, especially those which distinguish sharply between the material and ideological bases of owner occupation and local authority tenancy. The authors argue that their respondents' reasons for wanting to buy do not constitute a rejection of collectivism as much as an attempt to preserve the endangered advantages of their situation on the estate.

This article looks at the problems of youth homelessness and running away, and analyses how the agencies who deal with these problems define them. Based on extensive research material, it presents three main findings. It illustrates that agencies appear to present the problems with which they deal to an outside audience, externally, in a number of different ways and that these statements do not depend solely on the characteristics of their clients. Instead, they also reflect the structure, purpose and resources of the involved agencies themselves. Additionally, however, agencies also appear to categorise their potential clients internally, in terms of who they can and cannot assist. To help reach these decisions, many of these organisations use a set of classifications linked to whether or not they perceive their potential clients to be deserving or undeserving. The paper concludes with the recognition that these labels are not in any way fixed. Rather, there are identifiable processes involved in these classifications.

This article explores the role of political agents, institutions, circumstances, and ideas in the development of public health policies in Britain. The first part attempts to define public health. The second section of the article looks at the experience of the Victorian public health movement. The final part considers the re-emergence of the public health perspective. The underlying theme of the article is that an awareness of the political dimension, both contemporary and historical, improves our understanding of developments in the field of public health. The main conclusions reached are: first, that given the formidable political obstacles which exist, public health reform will only succeed if the reformers themselves operate with full awareness of the political dimension; second, that the modern public health debate is unlikely to be resolved in the short term.

The authors discuss the development of welfare rights advisory work in Britain, tracing its origins from the Community Development Projects of the late 1960s to services which are funded mainly by local government. Changes in social security legislation in 1980 introduced a largely non-discretionary regulated scheme which was quickly exploited by welfare rights advisers to maximise the take-up of single payments. Advisers and social workers were blamed for generating a deluge of claims by informing claimants of their right to extra benefit. Hence, in 1986, the government restricted entitlement to single payments. It is argued, on the basis of a survey of single payment queries made to welfare rights advisory agencies, that those restrictions foreshadowed the coming of the social fund—with its discretion, cash limit and extremely limited eligibility. The implications for welfare rights work in this changed climate are considered.

This paper examines the growth of housing inheritance in Britain since the late 1960s using Inland Revenue statistics. It also uses survey evidence to examine the uneven distribution of inheritance by housing tenure, class and region, and assesses its implications for consumption cleavage theory. It argues that at present the social distribution of housing inheritance is far from equal, benefiting home owners and the professional and managerial classes, but that, over the next 40 years, it will become much more widespread as the post-war generation of home owners bequeathes property. It is likely, however, that the children of tenants will be generally excluded from housing inheritance which is largely confined to the children of home owners.

A succession of Acts of Parliament passed between 1988 and 1990 mark the most decisive break in British social policy since the period between 1944 and 1948. This paper examines the extent to which common principles underlie this legislation. One of the most important common elements has been the reduction in the powers of local government and in the presumption that local authorities should be the main providers of social welfare outside the social security system. Schools, housing estates and social care services are to be given greater powers to run themselves or to become separate organisations. Local authorities are to use their resources to fund and contract with external agencies. The possible outcomes of this change in governance are discussed.

This paper presents qualitative evidence about managers' perceptions of retrenchment in the National Health Service in England. It outlines the financial situation of six case-study district health authorities during the expenditure crisis of 1987/8, and presents the results of an interview survey of district general managers and directors of finance about the implementation of cutbacks. Similar policies of cost-containment and service reduction are mirrored by similarity in the views held by managers and treasurers. Key concerns included the need for a reconstruction of local priorities in service provision, and the advocacy of an extension of managerial control over hospital consultants. These issues are discussed briefly in the context of the recent government proposals to introduce market mechanisms into the NHS, and wider arguments about medical dominance and bureaucratic/professional conflicts.

This paper reviews recent research on take-up with a view to identifying the most promising lines of further enquiry. In the late 1970s take-up research seemed to be foundering in the face of the complexity of the factors affecting claiming decisions. Progress came via the development of models of the claiming process. The most influential postulated a series of thresholds which claimants must pass in a set sequence on the way to claiming a benefit. One question for future research is whether this model is still the best starting point or whether there are others which capture the key factors and their interaction more fully and accurately. Another approach is to look at claiming decisions indirectly by applying multivariate techniques to continuous survey data to examine the relationship between variables such as age, income and housing tenure and differing probabilities of claiming. A second question is what the two approaches can offer each other. Overhanging all the issues facing take-up research is the problem of sampling a population—eligible non-recipients—for which, almost by definition, no suitable sampling frame exists. The paper concludes by examining various options for identifying this elusive group.

This paper highlights the development of the welfare state in Canada to its peak in the mid-1960s, and then traces the retreat from that height. While federalism and the complex relations between Ottawa and the provinces clearly represent a complicating factor, the paper argues that the fiscal crisis of the state has been the primary influence in the decline. As a major trading economy, Canada could not be immune from the onset of worldwide monetarism, though its effects were felt relatively late. Canadian monetarism has been marked by high taxes, an unwillingness/inability to cut government spending, and a singular absence of the anti-welfare state rhetoric of Reaganomics or Thatcherism. Neo-liberal outcomes are still likely to emerge, however, though they will be couched in market language and the need to be competitive internationally, particularly after the 1988 Free Trade Agreement with the United States.

The study reported on in this paper used existing data to create a broad measure of living standards as advocated by Townsend (1979) in developing his concept of relative deprivation. Linked data from the General Household Survey and the Family Expenditure Survey was used to compare the living standards of households at different income levels. A particular focus of the study was the living standards of households on supplementary benefit (as it was at the time of the surveys). Analyses showed that in general they score less well on individual indicators of living standards than other households of the same type on low incomes. A summary index was developed which indicated the similarity of standards of living for households on supplementary benefit (SB) irrespective of household type. The specific indices constructed for each of the family types investigated suggested that families on SB with children have a relatively lower standard of living than other families with children whereas elderly households on supplementary benefit are not so deprived in comparison with other elderly households.

Invalidity benefit is the main form of state-provided long term sickness benefit in Great Britain, and the number of claims for the benefit have increased beyond all expectations since its introduction in 1971. This paper summarises the results of a project on the issue, analysing data over the period 1975/6 and 1983/4. The numbers claiming the benefit are viewed in terms of the outcome of the inflow and the duration of claims. The determination of both inflows and durations were found to be dominated by demographic effects in terms of age and health, but other factors were also found to be relevant at the margin. These included local housing and labour market conditions, as well as pay prior to entry and rates of benefit. Inflows were found to fall over the period, however, as a result of changes in the population ‘at risk’ of entry. The main cause of growth in the number of claims lay in increased durations, in relation to which it was observed that the percentage of new claimants with characteristics associated with longer claim durations increased over the period.