Elder abuse can be conceptualised as a social problem, a crime problem and a human rights issue. This article presents the findings from an evaluation of the ‘Access to Justice’ Pilot Project for victims/survivors1 of elder abuse, which was launched in 2010 as part of the Welsh Government's six-year integrated strategy for tackling domestic abuse. It was designed to address the needs of older people in domestic settings and facilitate their access to criminal and civil justice options. Between April and July 2012, case study data were obtained for 131 individuals. A total of thirty-three interviews and a focus group were conducted with service providers, potential service users and practitioners drawn from relevant statutory and third sector groups. The article explores multi-agency responses to elder abuse and addresses the victim‒perpetrator dynamic. Reactive and proactive types of perpetrator2 behaviour are identified and interdependence is described as a feature of the victim‒perpetrator relationship.

Three major emphases in interpretations of the state of contemporary intimate relationships can be broadly characterised. These are (i) breakdown and demoralisation; (ii) individualisation and democratisation; and (iii) a recognition of elements of continuity, particularly around power relations. We consider these three positions, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, relating them to key themes of identities and values, networks and trust and reciprocity, and major theorisations of the concept of social capital. We offer a critique of existing positions and suggestions for the future, cast in the light of potential policy relevance.

The long tradition of parent education and support in German social welfare provision has recently acquired a new importance. As in the recent expansion of public early childhood education and care, the current emphasis on supporting parents highlights altered definitions of childhood, shifting boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in parent‒child relations, and new local welfare mixes in service delivery. The article uses a literature review and qualitative interviews with experts, decision makers and service providers: first, to explicate older policy ideas in the new turn to parenting and the strong role being given to model projects for policy reform in the German institutional setting; second, to present recurrent themes in the interviews with professionals working on the ground, such as the new role of childcare centres in accessing parents, ongoing problems of coordination and cooperation in parenting support and issues of evidence and evaluation.

A major policy plank in health and social care involves rebalancing ‘skillmix’ or occupational grademix to effect cost efficiency savings. In line with this, there has been a large expansion in recent years in the employment of care assistants/support workers. This article focuses on the largest employment area for these occupations – healthcare. It draws upon commissioned research projects to detail the context for the introduction of these new grades, to highlight issues in practice and usage to date, and to analyse tensions between policy objectives around efficiency and equity in the employment of these workers.

Age discrimination has become a topical issue in Britain, and legislation is promised by the year 2006. It is often viewed as a recent problem, caused by the decline in older men's economic activity rates since the 1970s, by concerns over ageing populations in the future and by the need to extend working lives. Yet it has a long history, going back at least to the 1930s, with much research into older workers being conducted in 1950s Britain. Examination of this history helps us understand some of the difficulties inherent in the concepts of ageism and age discrimination.

This article examines how Dutch citizens with long-term care needs have used existing legal opportunities to respond to cuts in publicly financed care. Unexpectedly, most did not make use of their right to appeal the reduction or elimination of their previous entitlements, even when this led to marked problems in daily life. Thirty interviews with disabled and elderly persons and their care-givers revealed that specific social norms on how to feel about the cuts inhibited the lodging of appeals. Given the new policy's stated intention of preserving care for the most needy, many affected clients felt they had no right to be angry. Despite their (often objectively warranted) grievances, they did not appeal as breaking with the new moral code would trigger feelings of shame – of not being autonomous, of demanding too much when others are worse off, and of appearing ungrateful.

This article draws on the authors' experience in conducting a recent qualitative longitudinal study in the evaluation of the Pathways to Work Pilot for incapacity benefits recipients. Findings from the qualitative longitudinal research highlighted issues that might not otherwise have been apparent. This approach to policy-related research provides new perspectives and opportunities for substantive findings. It also presents a number of challenges. Issues arise about how to engage with policy makers when exploring changes over time. Policy makers are often keen to have ‘emerging findings’ from panel data, but an initial cross-sectional analysis to meet such requirements contains views and experiences of people who subsequently drop out of the panel. The full longitudinal perspective then comes from a smaller group, and there may be some surprises in comparison with the ‘emerging findings’. At the same time, the focus of policy interests may shift during the lifetime of the panel, especially during a pilot or trial in a rapidly developing policy area. Researchers may be asked to introduce new topics or abandon some lines of enquiry, and may face ethical issues in deciding how to make best use of the data.

As a result of the new licensing regime introduced in England and Wales in November 2005, the nature of the town/city centre night-time economy and its future development has become a particularly pressing policy issue for local authorities. Among local authorities and local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, continental-style ‘diversity’ – in the sense of a broader mix of participants and forms of entertainment – has emerged as an ideal to be strived for. This article examines the problems faced by those attempting to create diversity and with it the ‘continentalisation’ of the night-time economy in this country.

This article focuses on the use of anti-social behavior powers in relation to a group of vulnerable women – street sex workers. It illustrates how the use of legal tools – anti-social behavior orders and public nuisance injunctions – against sex workers has been both misplaced and ineffective. The article also considers the use of anti-social powers in light of the government's leaning towards the coercive (or some might argue the compulsory) rehabilitation of sex workers. In doing so, it draws attention to the lack of research on the impact of both exclusion orders and rehabilitation orders for sex workers. Whilst it is important to fill this knowledge gap, it is argued that future investigations in this area would benefit from social network research approaches.

Irish social policy has, since the early 1990s, prioritised debt advice as the primary policy tool for addressing over-indebtedness, targeting low-income households in particular. This article, which draws on secondary analysis of datasets and qualitative interviews, suggests that ‘person-centred’ debt advice plays a major role in alleviating personal over-indebtedness and its effects among this group. However, the government's objective that it should facilitate financial independence is unrealistic. For such debt advice to be effective, complimentary legal and institutional solutions to debt problems are required in Ireland. The dearth of financial options and resources available also needs to be addressed.

Research linking social and penal policy has grown extensively in recent years. Wacquant (2009) suggests that retrenchment of welfare support and expansion of the penal system work together to bear down on marginalised populations in a ‘carceral–assistential net’. Empirical and theoretical examinations of these regimes are often underpinned by gendered assumptions. This article addresses this limitation by foregrounding the experiences of women; qualitative interviews offer an insight into their experiences at the intersection of welfare and criminal justice policy in austerity Britain. Their reflections make visible the complex, heterogeneous raft of social assistance, institutional neglect and intensive intervention that characterises women's experiences of the ‘carceral–assistential net’. The evidence presented suggests that for marginalised women interventions intensify once behaviour becomes problematic or in times of crisis. While some interventions are valued by those engaged there is little significant impact on their socio-economic position.

In times of labour market insecurity and retrenchment of state support, low income families rely on friends and relatives as a safety net. This article explores the enhanced role of this ‘third source of welfare’ in light of these developments. It draws on qualitative longitudinal research to demonstrate how families’ situations fluctuate over two years and the importance of social support networks in hard times and periods of crisis. The research illustrates how social support is not necessarily a stable structure that families facing insecurity can fall back on, but rather a variable resource, and fluid over time, as those who provide such support experience changing capabilities and needs. A policy challenge is to help reinforce and not undermine the conditions that enable valuable social support to be offered and sustained, while ensuring sufficient reliable state support to avoid families having no choice but to depend on this potentially fragile resource as a safety net.

This article traces the trajectory of UK government social policy since World War Two, with particular reference to the shifts in the past 10 to 15 years towards concepts such as multi-level governance, localism, the Third Way and the Big Society. It describes the shifting relationships between institutional religion and the State during that period, tracking the ‘return of faith’ in government policy and social welfare as it seeks to address a number of intractable social and economic issues related to cohesion and inequality, as well as a perceived absence of moral and ethical norms within public life. The article proposes a set of new analytical concepts (based on recent empirical research from the US and the UK) which seek to describe and evaluate this new ‘post-secular’ relationship between faith and government. The article concludes that the new ‘post-welfare’ landscape will continue to play well to the existing strengths and positionalities of religion, faith and spirituality in the UK as the twenty-first century moves into its second decade.

For older Australians being dependent on the private rental market is usually associated with serious financial hardship and insecurity. The article examines the housing careers of older Australians who are dependent on the private rental market. After sketching the policy context, it uses in-depth interviews and a biographical approach to explore their trajectory into the private rental market. Divorce, separation and widowhood were key factors, especially for women, as were poor employment histories and ill-health. The crucial factor was an inability to access social housing. The neglect of this housing tenure has meant that supply is very limited and it is reserved primarily for people with complex needs.

This article is based on research into early intervention and safeguarding work with young fathers. It draws on a study of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP), a home visitation service in the UK that is offered to vulnerable teenage mothers. The research investigated whether and how such early intervention work was done with the fathers of these babies. Three broad patterns of engagement emerged from the research: (1) where fathers were fully engaged with the service straightaway and the relationship with the family nurse deepened over time; (2) where fathers were partially engaged with the service; and (3) where fathers were resentful at the outset and never stopped being resistant and sometimes hostile towards intervention. Within these broad patterns several nuanced aspects of professional-father relationships are identified, which are the product of the interaction of several factors. Some general implications for early intervention and safeguarding work with fathers and their babies are drawn out.

The article reviews the limited existing social policy literature on taxation and sets out a case for the incorporation of the study of taxation into the accepted remit of social policy. Social policy has historically been concerned with the services and benefits which flow from public expenditure, and people’s experiences of them, rather than with taxation, and the contributions by individual researchers have tended to remain marginal to the main focus of social policy. The article offers a speculative account as to why taxation has remained peripheral to social policy and presents three arguments for the mainstreaming of tax in social policy’s domain of study. These concern the role of taxation in shaping the distribution of resources, a fundamental pre-occupation of social policy; the contribution social policy scholars can make to shaping a new discourse surrounding taxation, foregrounding issues of equity and need; and how social policy’s engagement with taxation can influence the politics of the welfare state.

One of the central lessons taken from the work of Michael Lipsky on street level bureaucracies is that street level bureaucrats make policy. Two resulting broad public policy concerns are the impact of street level decision making on public policy and the impact on citizens’ access to public services. This article reports on a study of the views of Ontario Works’ case managers on the nature of bureaucratic discretion in the setting of a highly rule bound provincial income assistance programme in Canada. The focus of this article is on case managers’ interaction with contradictory and complex policy directives. An argument is developed that in such a restrictive policy setting, meeting the goals of unswerving policy implementation and citizen access to public services may work at cross purposes.

Food bank use in Great Britain has risen substantially over the last decade. The considerable socioeconomic disadvantage of the food bank user population has been documented, but little research has examined whether housing problems intersect with insecure food access. Using data from 598 households accessing assistance from twenty-four food banks operating in Great Britain in 2016–2017, we found that nearly 18 per cent of households were homeless, with more having experienced homelessness in the past twelve months. Renters from both the private and social rented sectors were also overrepresented in the sample. Households in both private and social rented housing reported high rates of rent arrears and poor conditions; those in private housing were also more likely to live in homes with damp, to have moved in past year, and to be worried about a forced move in future. Overall, housing problems are widespread among food bank users; policy interventions are needed.

Increasing and widening participation have been at the heart of New Labour's higher education initiatives since they came to power. This article argues that their 1998 reforms of student financial support were inconsistent with their commitment to widening access and fairness in educational opportunities, and their desire for higher education to contribute to greater social cohesion. The article examines this policy contradiction. It explores how the 1998 reforms came about, and the effects of the reforms. It traces briefly the development of student funding policies under the Conservatives, and under New Labour. Next, is assesses New Labour's policies and policy objectives, drawing upon the findings of a major survey on students' income and expenditure. So, it explores some of the effects and consequences, both intended and unintended, of the 1998 reforms.

Large representative surveys have become a valuable resource to inform public policy in an increasingly complex modern world. They provide authority to policy since they are considered objective, neutral and scientific. In contrast, this article conceives the production of knowledge as an interactive process. We argue that the conduct of large social surveys tends to reinforce existing world views, power relations and a narrow construction of social issues. To illustrate this, we draw on a small exploratory study which examined the experience of responding to selected survey questions of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study (HILDA). We suggest that while more open approaches are required to capture the complexities of everyday life, these are unlikely to be implemented given the dominance of particular forms of knowledge.