This review assesses a law and criminal justice based approach to domestic violence from the vantage of recent reports from the advocacy movement in the United States (DasGupta, ‘Safety and justice for all’) and Amnesty International (It's in your hands: stop violence against women) and the work of legal scholar Linda Mills. The US movement is hardly alone in wrestling with how to reconcile the state's indispensable role in securing safety, support and liberty for victims with its equally undeniable role in perpetuating the patterns of sex, race and class inequality and privilege from which woman abuse stems and from which it continues to derive legitimacy.

The role of religion in social welfare provision, and more broadly in shaping the development of state social policy in the UK, has become an issue of increasing prominence in the last decade raising both new challenges and opportunities. This article brings together new and existing research in the field of religion and social action/welfare in the British context to present a preliminary discussion of how and why religion, as a source of social identity and moral values, matters for social policy. The key argument is that religious welfare provision goes beyond the mixed economy of welfare paradigm and has the capacity to challenge the Utilitarian underpinnings of mainstream social policy thinking by giving more relative importance to ethical issues such as self-knowledge and morality, in addition to the more conventional concepts of wellbeing or happiness. The article proposes the concept of ways of being in order to bring together these moral ideational factors that underpin social welfare.

The previous administration introduced several measures to prevent mortgage possessions, some of which were modestly effective. However, these hastily introduced initiatives were insufficient to bridge the gap between a fragmented policy framework and borrowers’ circumstances and experiences of managing mortgage debt. The present restructuring of welfare and regulation represents a unique window to address these long-standing policy omissions in relation to sustainable homeownership in the UK. However, in the context of weakening state support, it is uncertain how or indeed whether, the opportunity to reform mortgage safety nets will be grasped. This article reflects upon the continuing misalignment of policy with borrowers’ circumstances and experiences of mortgage arrears using new evidence from this downturn.

Client and patient-centred care have become watchwords in policies to transform social and health care systems in both Australia and the UK. In this article we argue that much of the success of moves towards client-centred social care will rest on the creation of appropriate informational environments to support new conversations between clients and those who commission and provide care services. We draw upon original research within an existing state-level insurance-based scheme covering citizens who acquire a disability in transport accidents to illustrate the problems faced by the absence of such a framework. We highlight some of the insights emerging from our work concerning the challenge of developing appropriate informational environments to support client-centred care and indicate the potential of co-design when focused on new conversations of care.

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of a social pension programme for older adults in South Korea, Basic Pension Scheme (BPS) on material hardship and subjective well-being. We apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of the BPS on the material hardship and life satisfaction of older people between the ages of sixty-one and sixty-eight. Data come from Korea Welfare Panel Study (KOWEPS) wave 12 survey (2017, N = 3,932). The BPS benefit reduces the risks of housing hardship, bill payment delay and food insecurity. Interestingly, while the effect sizes of the BPS on mitigating the material hardship increase as income decreases, the lower-income groups were less satisfied with the pension provision than middle- and upper-income groups. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on material hardship for older adults in an Asian country facing persistent old-age poverty and immature public pensions.

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

This paper, the first of a new series of ‘Briefing’ papers, describes the challenges encountered by the transition from state-socialism to what may be broadly described as a capitalist social democracy in one Central and Easter European country, Hungary. It considers the policy responses to a variety of challenges in the social security, employment and social welfare fields faced with a wave of impoverishment that followed the disintegration of state socialism from the late 1980s.

In this article – a review article preceding a series of articles in this themed section considering specific aspects of the impacts and implementation processes of the Welsh legislation – we contextualise the introduction of the prevention agenda in Wales by defining homelessness and highlighting the shift towards prevention policy in an international context. We consider the nature of prevention, and examine related theoretical debates, critiques and the cost/benefits of prevention. We conclude by offering some reflections on the progress of homelessness prevention since the Act’s implementation drawing on data from the longitudinal post-implementation evaluation of the Housing Act (Wales) 2014.

In September 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld a judgment of the Hague Court of Appeal that the eviction from basic shelter of a mother and her minor children, who did not have legal residence in the Netherlands, was unlawful. This ruling was instigated by a radically new interpretation of the European Social Charter’s personal scope and caused a major shift in Dutch policy.

This article provides a case study into the legal reasoning adopted by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. It argues that, instead of relying on legal doctrinal reasoning for justifying the outcome, both courts referred to factors that the general public relies on to assess people’s deservingness of welfare. This finding raises fundamental questions about the relationship between human rights law and deservingness; and calls, therefore, for further research into the relevance of deservingness criteria in judicial discourse.

Knowledge of ‘what works’ in early-intervention family services has prompted moves away from approaches which see varied services working autonomously with individual family members, towards provision of multi-agency cross-sector programmes working at a family level. Latterly, some such programmes have adopted Restorative Approach in the belief that delivering services using a more participatory relationship-based framework will support families more effectively. To consider this shift towards use of a Restorative Approach this article explores the concepts and theory that underpin the approach, reflects on how these relate to recommended UK early-intervention family service practice, and constructs a model of family service provision based on the approach. The aim of this article is to consider whether adoption of Restorative Approach has the potential to improve early-intervention family service effectiveness and ultimately have a positive outcome on families.

Welfare initiatives introduced by New Labour have emphasised the integration of service provision by sponsoring the creation of new professional roles and by promoting closer interagency links. The Connexions service exemplifies these two levels of integration. This article argues that the process of integration in Connexions was limited and it offers two main types of explanations. The first set concentrates on the changes brought to the professional role of Connexions workers. The second uses the example provided by interagency links between schools and the Connexions service in order to explore the role played by power relations to explain limitations to integration. The article concludes with a consideration of some of the effects brought about by Youth Matters and by the introduction of Children's Trusts on the provision of services for young people in the future.

Data on the sex industry is notably hard to obtain. Existing evidence points towards an increase in the number of people selling sex, particularly through the online industry. The growing and increasingly diverse population poses challenges to service provision, as new groups are less visible and less likely to be in contact with specialist services. Simultaneously, there are increased calls for policies regulating the sex industry to be grounded in evidence. Relying on systematic literature and data reviews, this article provides a synthesis of the evidence on the prevalence of sex work and prostitution in England and Wales. It shows that no existing source allows producing reliable estimates of the size and characteristics of sex markets. As a result, policy is informed by partial pictures. The article proposes local mapping, an underused approach, to inform both policy development and service provision.

Making a success of welfare reform has as much to do with implementation as with policy design. The experience in Wisconsin and New York generalises too much of the US, with states divided into those successfully implementing work-based reform, those incapacitated by partisan divisions and those that have never seriously framed welfare policy. Three decisions are key: the degree of toughness, the amount of programme integration; and the locus of administrative control which are shaped by long standing differences in political culture, moralistic, individualistic and traditionalistic. States adopting a moralistic approach to policy administration generally achieve most success.

In addition to the references listed at the end of each article, there are a range of further sources that may be of relevance to those interested in social capital, social networks, and resilience, and their relation to child and family policy. Whilst the articles in this journal relate to a number of empirical issues, the references given here are intentionally broad in focus. These sources are in addition to those discussed in detail by Barnes and Prior in this edition.

Japan's implementation of the Long Term Care Insurance Act in 2000 provides a good example with which to examine the restructuring process of care services for older people, as these have come to be commodified by the welfare state. By focusing on Welfare Non-Profit Organisations provision, this article explores the significance of gender in the restructuring process. It reveals that care services are stratified with institutional care placed at the top of hierarchy of care services costs, and domestic task services at the bottom. There is an unequal distribution of gender and organisational type for each type of care work.

This paper uses a unique national dataset to examine the attitudes and living standards of older people (aged 60 and over) living in urban areas of China, including their living arrangements and income levels, and their attitudes to family-based and other forms of support. The results indicate that although there have been substantial improvements in the overall living conditions of the majority of older people in China, marked differences remain in the economic circumstances of sub-groups classified by age and, more particularly, gender. Many of today's older people are also wedded to traditional attitudes and patterns of behaviour, and informal family support remains important – for men and women, as well as for younger and older groups among those aged 60 and over.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, governments were mainly relaying on pre-pandemic policies when introducing changes to social policies. However, the crisis did lead to transformative action as well. In this article, we explored the novel direct payments, delivered beyond existing social risk categories such as unemployment or sickness. Our exploration demonstrates that most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries did not introduce novel payments. Exceptions were Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seven countries also continued and modified payments while the crisis continued. All the novel direct payments met some of the characteristics of universal basic income (UBI). The idea of universality was realised in Japan and South Korea. The key findings of this study suggest that the COVID-19-related novel direct payments were primarily emergency benefits for people affected by the pandemic and interpreted as quasi-basic income in times of crisis.

Countries adopted a variety of social policy responses to reduce the social risks exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which in some cases took the form of institutional reforms. The study of the institutionalisation of emergency responses is relevant to understanding if and how a critical juncture, like the one opened by the pandemic, can generate path dependencies or changes that expand or retrench social protection. This state-of-the-art article offers an overview of how social policy responses to the pandemic have translated to institutional reform across the globe under various types of welfare systems. By conducting a systematic literature review of thirty-nine peer-reviewed journal articles in two leading bibliographic databases (Scopus and Web of Science), this article reviews the available evidence on the responses to the pandemic and their institutional consequences. We find four underlying research clusters regarding the degree of institutionalisation of the social policy responses implemented during the pandemic.

While there has been much research on welfare exit and entry into employment, less research has looked at return to government assistance. Applying survival analysis on data from a national government assistance programme in Singapore, we found two important factors of welfare return to which activation programmes need to pay greater attention. First, return was more likely if former beneficiaries accumulated a higher number of types of arrears rather than higher dollar values of arrears. This new finding contributes to the emerging literature on bandwidth tax, and suggests the importance of designing programmes that relieve mental accounting due to debt and poverty. Second, return was more likely if respondents had an infant or toddler child. This points to the importance of a range of support policies including affordable and accessible childcare, exemption from work requirement in receipt of welfare, and family leave for low-wage workers.

Established theories of social policy development, such as industrialisation and power resources, have been extensively used to explain the expansion of social policy, predominantly in developed economies. We argue that they may not always be applicable in the Global South. Our article examines multiple factors at play in Indonesia’s healthcare policy expansion using qualitative content analysis of historical sources, literature, and nine interviews with key policy architects. Using the pull-and-push factor model, we examined the interactions between policy entrepreneurs and centre-right political parties in creating national healthcare policy architecture and expansion. Our findings confirm that the window of opportunity for expansion was augmented when the political party of the ruling government experienced a decline in public trust, while clientelistic motives among elites facilitated the reform process. Drawing the lesson from Indonesia, we contend push prevails over the pull factors (labour movement and cross-class alliances) in social policy development.