This paper examines conflicts in polices in England and Wales pertaining to the demand for alternative, non-medical crisis support for those experiencing ‘psychosis’. We examine the limitations of current treatment, policy and legislative frameworks in supporting these demands. In particular, we focus on the limitations of prevailing conceptualisations of ‘human rights’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘recovery’. These concepts, we argue, are embedded within a broader treatment framework which renders medication as mandatory and all other treatment modalities as inherently subsidiary, and a broader policy framework which is complicit with bio-medical orthodoxies of ‘mental illness’ and prioritises treatment compliance and compulsion. Therefore, in order to advance a ‘human rights’ approach to mental health policy, we argue that reigning orthodoxies inherent within policy and practice must be explicitly challenged to open up spaces for the availability of alternatives.

The UK seems set to follow the increasingly abolitionist trend that is taking hold in Europe in response to the issue of prostitution. While some argue that an abolitionist approach signals a serious attempt to tackle the injustices and gendered aspects of commercial sex, we are less optimistic. Drawing upon the findings of the first study to evaluate Engagement and Support Orders, we argue that any focus on women's needs is distorted by the continued zero tolerance approach to street sex work and the criminal justice setting it takes place in. New revolving doors have been created for those involved in the most visible sectors of the industry and support agencies have been made to take on an increased policing role. This narrow focus individualises the causes of poverty and prostitution, elides the wider structural factors that shape sex work and does little to address the real needs of this vulnerable group. In conclusion, we argue that future policy should engage more productively with the rich cultural study of sex work. This will enable the development of ground-up responses and allow for a more effective role for the criminal law.

This paper explores understandings of gender equality within the context of work/family balance strategies embedded in the European Employment Strategy (EES). The article compares developments in childcare provision with parental leave drawing the conclusion that while increasing childcare provision is a clear priority for the European Employment Strategy, parental leave and other measures aimed at balancing time spent on paid work and unpaid care are not given equal concern. Work/family balance strategies are primarily intended to facilitate the engagement of young mothers in the labour market by offering public childcare provision; this is done at the cost of not exploring other more far-reaching and complex understandings of the work/family conflict.

The article will examine the latest development of China's urban social assistance reform. Under the impact of the dual processes of globalisation and the deepening market transition, China's social security reform is increasingly taking a new safety net approach to assist the urban poor, instead of relying mainly on social insurance provision. The minimum living security project for urban residents is one of the approaches supplementing social insurance in social protection. In 2002, about one-third of social security beneficiaries were supported by the newly developed social assistance project. The changing approach does not mean that the government is withdrawing from its responsibility for social insurance to the urban workers, but reflects the changing goals and means of social policies. This indicates that China's social welfare system is shifting towards a new residual welfare model.

In this article, we highlight some critical matters in the way that an issue is framed as a problem in policymaking and the consequent means of taming that problem, in focussing on the use and implications of neuroscientific discourse of brain claims in early intervention policy and practice. We draw on three sets of analyses: of the contradictory set of motifs framing the state of ‘evidence’ of what works in intervention in the early years; of the (mis)use of neuroscientific discourse to frame deficient parenting as causing inequalities and support particular policy directions; and of the way that early years practitioners adopt brain claims to tame the problem of deficient parenting. We argue that using expedient brain claims as a framing and taming justification is entrenching gendered and classed understandings and inequalities.

This article points to the simple fact that modern welfare systems are neither welfare states nor are they welfare societies. In reality, they are a combination of both. The current interpretation of the supposed dichotomy of these two institutions has inhibited our understanding of reality. Consequently, this has obscured the complicated ways in which the state and the society have worked together to harmonize the needs for social protection and active citizenship. In the present article, the example of a Chinese welfare system has been used to illustrate that even a welfare system usually not regarded as a welfare state can develop strong universal welfare state programmes. In order to demonstrate the significance of this situation, findings related to public attitudes have been cited to reflect the support of both policy assumptions underlying social protection and active citizenship in the welfare system that is under review.

In the last decade, the UK New Labour government has emphasised tenant participation in housing policy. Consequently, those individuals who decide to opt out of participation processes have been problematised as ‘apathetic’, and identified as needing to be ‘empowered’ through professional interventions. Drawing on research about community ownership in Glasgow, this paper argues that tenants' reasons for not getting involved are more than simply lack of interest. Tenants articulated an instrumental approach to participation, and rejected the conflation of tenant participation with tenant management. Practical barriers also obstructed their latent motivation.

Qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has grown in prominence and popularity since the 2007 themed section on the subject in this journal. This new themed section reflects on how QLR has been mobilised and made sense of in recent times. This article showcases QLR’s distinctive way of knowing and understanding the social world and how it can illuminate the processes through which policy can enhance, or indeed inhibit, the well-being of individuals and groups within society. This state of the art article focuses on QLR as a valuable but tricky approach. It argues that QLR can enhance qualitative research in social policy by fostering sustained policy engagement and development, and that this is especially useful for policy-making in relation to socioeconomic disadvantage. It also explores cross-cutting methodological dimensions pertinent to QLR’s distinct approach, such as its enhanced ethical considerations, which are also integral to research with people at high risk of socioeconomic disadvantage. The article concludes with possible future directions and developments for QLR as a methodology.

In this article we explore the potential of the capability approach as a normative basis for eco-social policies. While the capability approach is often interpreted as a productivist or maximalist perspective, assuming the desirability of economic growth, we suggest another understanding, which explicitly problematises the suitability of economic growth and productive employment as means for enhancing capabilities. We argue that the capability approach allows rejecting the identification of social progress with economic growth and that it calls for democratically debating the meaning of wellbeing and quality of life. We analyse the implications of this conceptualisation for the design of welfare states.

Many long-term care systems in economically developed countries are reliant on informal care. However, in the context of population ageing, there are concerns about the future supply of informal care. This article reports on projections of informal care receipt by older people with disabilities from spouses and (adult) children to 2032 in England. The projections show that the proportions of older people with disabilities who have a child will fall by 2032 and that the extent of informal care in future may be lower than previously estimated. The policy implications, in the context of the Dilnot Commission's report, are explored.

Drawing on data collected as part of a qualitative study on parent abuse, this article explores how child to parent violence is constructed by professionals working within the three related domains of youth justice, domestic violence and child protection. The article, a discussion piece, charts the continuities and contradictions contained within practitioners’ understandings of this form of family violence, focusing on how the problem emerges, the causal explanations employed and their impact on practice responses.

UK policy promotes third sector organisations as providers of NHS funded health and social care. We examine the evidence for this policy through a systematic literature review. Our results highlight several problems of studies comparing non-profits with other provider forms, questioning their usefulness for drawing lessons outside the place of study. Most studies deem contextual factors and the regulatory framework in which providers operate as much more important than ownership form. We conclude that the literature does not support the policy of a larger role for the third sector in healthcare, let alone a switch to a market-based system.

UK public services are characterised by a tension between a model of the service user as a customer of public services and a model which envisages the user as a citizen. Drawing on empirical work in one local authority, we argue that in this tension the model of the customer is bolstered by the availability of ‘shrink wrapped’ or ‘black boxed’ IT-based ‘solutions’, available under the rubric of Customer Relationship Management. We argue that those who advocate the citizen perspective need to engage at this material and technological level if they are to be effective.

In this article, qualitative longitudinal (QL) research is presented as a powerful form of fluid enquiry. The combination of its real-world and real-time features enables this methodology to ‘follow reality in all its windings’, and, thereby, to produce useful knowledge for policy and professional practice. The main focus is on the power of QL methodology to illuminate complex causal processes by teasing out their multiple, fluid and relational elements. The article goes on to consider new ways to broker the interface between research endeavours and policy processes, based on collaborative modes of knowledge co-production that unfold in real-time. QL enquiry emerges here as more than an added option, a ‘niche’ approach. It has potential as a valuable ‘impact’ tool for discerning causality in new ways and reformulating insights into ‘what works?’, with scope to play a pivotal role in shaping and facilitating change in policy and practice settings.

The Troubled Families Programme has provided an impetus for interventions with families with multiple disadvantages. This article identifies the prevalence of a government discourse of ‘empowerment’ around such interventions, which fails to reflect the contested nature of the term. Qualitative interviews with families supported by the programme and their keyworkers offer an insight into their experiences and a valuable alternative to government rhetoric. It is argued that government discourses equate ‘family empowerment’ with responsibilisation, seeking to reduce the resources deployed in supporting families whilst strengthening state power to define acceptable forms of family life. By contrast, family and keyworker discourses of ‘empowerment’ are founded in the redistribution of resources towards such families, advocacy strategies, psychological support and an understanding of power relations within and beyond families, which enable families to resist specific attempts at the exercise of professional power, albeit remaining subject to a more general exercise of state control.

Since 2000, the New South Wales (NSW) Government in Australia has pursued major child welfare reforms. Responding to the ‘crisis in child protection’ and informed by a public health approach, key aims were to prevent child maltreatment and promote child welfare by ‘expanding and enhancing early intervention and family services’. This article critically reviews the aims, approach and main developments in NSW. The article argues that in several respects the reforms extended and enhanced early intervention and family services in cost-effective ways but suffered from implementation problems, limitations in service developments and major reform challenges which inhibited their scope and impacts. These limitations raise critical issues about the reform framework, resource constraints and ideological influences.

Growing concerns and hostility towards continuing large-scale flows of immigrants following the two rounds of EU enlargement and high levels of net migration played a major part in the Brexit referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. So too had welfare chauvinism, or the belief that welfare benefits should be restricted to citizens, come to the fore in negative attitudes to EU immigration, reflecting a rejection of EU migrants as fellow citizens. As the article shows, proposals as of summer 2017 for the status of current EU citizens in the UK indicate a desire by the UK government to incorporate current EU citizens within the far more restrictive British immigration rules, thereby curtailing some of their basic free movement rights, especially in relation to future family members. Leaked proposals for future EU citizens post-Brexit are to bring them within a single overall immigration system covering EU and non-EU migrants and applying differential rights of residence to skilled and less skilled, thereby stratifying EU migrants according to educational level and labour market sector. This would represent a return to the status of mobile workers with conditional rights of residence and social entitlements similar to those faced by non-EU migrants.

Increasingly, the construct of resilience has been used by social scientists and (social) policy makers in relation to individual resilience to economic hardship. There are a number of issues within the literature on the subject that are unresolved including: whether it is an attribute or a process; the extent to which resilience is a positive phenomenon; the extent to which individuals living in economic hardship have agency; and whether it is finite. The article unpacks these issues, drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study in Northern Ireland. It found resilience to be a negative experience for study participants, although they did exhibit a number of attributes that may be described as being positive. They were often unable to exercise ‘positive’, transformative agency, because the choices available were limited and pernicious in nature. The article concludes that as an analytical tool for exploring the experiences of people living in economic hardship, the construct of resilience is not helpful.

The commitment of the appointed Director General of the Troubled Families Unit, Louise Casey, that the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) was ‘an opportunity not to repeat the failed attempts of the past’ masks several enduring continuities (Casey, 2012: 3). This review article argues that the TFP should be seen as part of a wider spectrum of policies which locates ‘troubles’ or ‘problems’ in the family itself and emphasises behaviour as the target of action without regard to wider social or economic considerations. This policy process must be understood within a wider context of not only historical efforts ‘to constrain the redistributive potential of state welfare’ (Macnicol, 1987: 316) but also of contemporary forms of neoliberal governance of ‘the family’ (Butler, 2014; Crossley, 2016a; Gillies, 2014).

During the early 2000s governments in Russia, Poland and Hungary declared demographic crises and adopted pro-natalist programmes to increase fertility, as well as policies to support families with children. Our article compares their ‘flagship’ pro-natalist programmes: Russia’s Maternity Capital, Poland’s Family 500+, and Hungary’s enhanced earned income tax credit, all framed by governments’ neo-familialist discourses. We confirm these policies had limited impacts on fertility, finding that their most significant and disparate effects were instead on childhood poverty. Provision of preschool public childcare and parental leaves with levels of mothers’ employment across the cases were compared. We find no relationship between coverage of childcare institutions and employment rates of mothers with young children. Data show a weak relationship between length and compensation for parental leaves and maternal employment. We conclude that post-communist governments’ flagship pro-natalist incentives, family policies and traditionalist rhetoric have had limited effects in reversing demographic decline or in re-traditionalising contemporary women’s lives.