In the past the House of Lords has generally, and arguably for good reasons, been ignored in discussions of the making and scrutiny of welfare. However, it has always played some role in this field, particularly in the scrutiny and passage of legislation, and since the removal of the bulk of hereditary Peers in 1999, some writers have argued that the House has become more assertive. This article examines the attitudes of Peers, including a comparison with the views of Members of Parliament, and draws a number of conclusions about the role of the upper House in relation to social policy.

This article explores the impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown policies on young fathers and their families. We present analyses from a larger programme of qualitative longitudinal research examining young fatherhood in the UK and Sweden to develop a unique international comparative and empirical contribution. The views and experiences of young fathers are examined in the context of two ostensibly different policy approaches during the pandemic. Organised thematically to enable comparison, our findings demonstrate myriad impacts, illustrating heightened precarity in young fathers’ transitions into and through fatherhood linked to restrictions on their engagement and changes to their education and employment trajectories and relational contexts, especially in the UK. We observe how differences in policy approaches before and during the first wave of the pandemic shaped the experiences of young fathers in the respective countries.

This article reports on a longitudinal study that explores the changing motivations to enter paid work of a sample of thirty homeless and vulnerably housed people. A pathways approach is proposed to offer insights into the complex relationships between promoting employability and the pursuit of other resettlement outcomes, such as the achievement of sustainable accommodation and recovery from long-term ill-health issues. The four pathways constructed following in-depth interviews suggest that individuals were at various stages of moving towards employment. Movement within and between pathways was affected by personal and structural issues, including access to resources, housing situations and support needs.

Relatively little work on adoption focuses on the role of social workers. This article gives an account of the conflict between social workers and prospective adoptive parents which developed in Australia in the 1970s, taking as a case study the conflicting roles of adoptive parent advocates and professional social workers within the Standing Committee on Adoption in the Australian state of Victoria. Its overarching concern lies with the historical attitudes of the social work profession towards adoption, both domestic and intercountry, as these have changed from an embrace of both adoption and adoptive parents to mutual alienation. It concludes that the inclusive practice of radical social work could only briefly contain contesting client groups.

Relative poverty, a concept developed by left-wing social scientists, categorises as ‘poor’ those who fall seriously behind normal nationwide material standards. This article argues that the widespread view that the word ‘poverty’ means ‘relative poverty’, which in left-dominated social policy academia often extends to implying that those who do not define poverty this way are necessarily misguided, has led to an incomplete portrayal of poorer British people's lived experience. The article examines published empirical work, before presenting findings from British Social Attitudes surveys and interviews with forty unemployed Jobseeker's Allowance claimants and thirty employed people. Both the existing and new findings exposed aspects of public attitudes and experience which resonate with unanswered academic criticisms of defining poverty as relative poverty. These public contributions have tended to be glossed over or treated dismissively by social policy authors, despite them attaching importance to Left-friendly aspects of poorer people's experience and attitudes.

This paper addresses the incentives and impediments to alliance formation in the UK health consumer group sector. Research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council shows that links between groups are extensive and highly valued. However, they take place in the context of competition for resources and influence within New Labour's reform agenda. Drawing on theories from sociology and political science this paper shows how in recent years the working environment of groups has shaped cooperation. However, alliance working carries opportunity costs and doubts remain about their ability to survive once these external stimuli disappear.

OECD data suggest a significant gap between desired fertility rates and the total fertility rate achieved in developed industrial nations. In a qualitative study conducted in Australia in 2002 and 2003, people were asked how family policies influenced their decisions to have children. Participants did not clearly associate their fertility choices and prevailing policy settings. But their decision-making was grounded in commonplace accounts of incompatibility in balancing work and family. This article considers how individual choices may be shaped by such social and policy discourses and what implications this has for our understanding of the relationship between fertility choices and policy settings.

In Turkey, Early Childcare and Education (ECCE) policy has never been prioritised in the social policy agenda and was even further pushed back with the welfare state’s weakening role in the 2000s. The private sector, inaccessible for many, particularly low-income households, has tried to fill the significant gap in the supply side of these services. Municipalities and the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PoRA) have also recently become new actors in the provision of low-cost ‘care services’. This article compares the quality of these services by examining the number of students served, regulations, infrastructure, curricula, cost, and staff. Although neoliberalism has had an impact on welfare regimes in the European Union (EU) context, more established welfare and gender equality regimes have modified those impacts, resulting in a new institutionalisation, based on non-institutionalisation, of childcare services in Turkey’s national policy frame.

The transformation of the sex industry since 2000 has meant that the image of the ‘street prostitute’ touting for business on dark street corners is less representative of sex work or sex workers than it has ever been. Much of our knowledge about the sex industry, and about wider transformations of economic, intimate and cultural life, is out of date (Bernstein, 2007a), and policy processes are taking place within the context of limited or outdated knowledge. The growth in visibility, consumption and diversity of sexual commerce is now well recognised (Weitzer, 2000; Agustín, 2005; Scoular and Sanders, 2010) and commercial sex industries are known to operate across a variety of locations, and within specific modes of production and consumption, which are historically, contextually and culturally contingent and where ‘the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same’ (Agustín, 2005: 619).

This article reviews the research on Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) services for older workers in England. It sets out the arguments for targeting IAG services at older people in the context of extended working lives. It reviews the evidence on how to provide services which meet the specific needs of older workers, whilst recognising the diversity of the 50+ age group, and provides a case study of an age-sensitive IAG project. It concludes that demand for IAG from older workers needs to be stimulated and that the role of IAG in helping older adults to work and learn deserves greater recognition.

This article sheds light on a policy area where the notion of the active citizen has gained prominence as part of the transformation of the welfare state: purchasing private health services and private health insurance for children in Finland. Although the country’s universal health care system offers free primary health care for children, 40 per cent of children now have private insurance. Drawing on interviews with parents who seek private solutions, we examine what they perceive to be good health care. Our analysis reveals that parents are looking for certain practices – in Finland available only in the private sector – that they see as signs of good care. The unavailability of these practices in public health care calls into question the access, quality and efficiency of the public system. Based on these findings, we discuss the possible consequences of the disparity between parents’ expectations and the universal health care system.

This article examines the construction of policy problems through the exploration of the theoretical space opened up by the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach developed by Bacchi (2009). It proposes a critical analysis of current policies governing teenage pregnancy in France through the deconstruction of the structures that have participated in shaping the ‘problem’ today. Focusing on discursive practices, the analysis unveils the political essence of the knowledge that constitutes the problem of ‘teen pregnancy’, and points to the constant flux characterising it, which is captured and stabilised in policymaking through problematisation. It is argued that these conclusions call for greater self-reflexivity in research and policymaking and prompt critical and feminist researchers to engage with disrupting current policymaking rationality.

This case study examines the role of a university and academics in improving the learning experiences of BAME students, drawing on student-led participatory action research with Social Sciences BAME students at Bournemouth University (BU henceforth) between 2018-2020. The paper seeks to illuminate the critical role of the university by focusing on three inter-related facets at macro, meso and micro levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979): financial and temporal/spatial support for students; collaboration between academic staff at departmental and faculty levels to address any issues that arose from student meetings; and its consequential impact on student wellbeing, self-worth and their overall engagement in their learning. I argue that to achieve the utmost improvement in BAME students’ learning experiences, these different levels of the support system need to work together. I further argue that maximising the potentiality of ‘ethnic capital’ (Modood, 2004) could be a powerful resource that could bring significant changes to the experiences of BAME students and subsequent outcomes of their learning during and after university.

The current austerity in government spending has far reaching implications, not only for individuals but for the context in which a welfare state is perceived. The position has been reached at the same time as equality legislation makes some groups more visible. This article is an early attempt at drawing out the relationship between lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people and welfare spending cuts, made observable because of legislation requiring impact assessment. This article draws on research into impact prepared by the author, in affiliation with the Bradford LGBT Strategic Partnership, and considers LGB claims to welfare and to citizenship.

A key characteristic of the English and Welsh system of care provision is that the supply function is divided between two types of organisation: the National Health Service (NHS) and local authorities. These inter-organisational and the related inter-professional divides have long been recognised as problematic from a user and carer viewpoint; and various policy changes have attempted to address them. This paper draws on three different research projects to describe practical experiences of user and carer involvement in this context (a) the Evaluation of the 1999 Health Act Section 31 flexibilities encouraging more effective service delivery partnerships between the NHS and local authorities in England; (b) a Baseline Study of Partnership Working and Flexibilities Use in Wales; and (c) the Evaluation of the NHS Changing Workforce Programme, which implemented new ways of working to improve patient care across health and social care in England. In synthesising the studies' findings, the paper also begins to explore relationships between involvement effectiveness and different types of NHS–local authority partnership as they seek to introduce change and deliver more effective services.

In the context of increasing need for long-term care, the reconciliation of employment and caring is an important social issue. In England, the annual public expenditure costs of unpaid carers leaving employment are approximately £2.9 billion. Previous research shows that provision of paid services to people cared for by working carers, sometimes known as ‘replacement care’, is effective in helping unpaid carers to remain in employment. This study makes an estimate of the public expenditure costs of ‘replacement care’ for working carers in England. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and 2015–16 costs data, the study finds that the public expenditure costs of ‘replacement care’ for working carers are approximately £2.5 billion a year, which is considerably lower than the costs of carers leaving employment. The study concludes that greater public investment in ‘replacement care’ to support working carers in England would represent good value for money.

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political discourse on ALMP reforms. We investigate how the individual unemployed person is portrayed in ALMP reforms via a comparative coding analysis of parliamentary debates on labour market reforms that took place in Germany in 2003 (workfare) and in 2016 (enabling). Our results indicate that compared to enabling reforms the individual unemployed is less important in the framing of workfare reforms but more often blamed. Party characteristics matter: parties on the left more often point to the deservingness of the unemployed. However, when the social democratic party in government introduced a workfare reform they used blaming of unemployed persons as a framing strategy.

Disabled parents can experience difficulties when trying to access services to support their parenting role, and this is exacerbated wherever disability continues to be articulated as if it were impairment and associated with a need for ‘care’. Disabled parents and their families experiences of services demonstrate that, for a family approach to be positively developed within social policy, individuals should be kept in sharp focus by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. Failure to do so can result in the problematisation of parents who have support requirements, itself a barrier to the development of appropriate services for parents and families.

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study on the impact of community-based research within the South Yorkshire Objective 1 Programme. Based upon semi-structured interviews with participants who conducted community-based research, the study highlights the social capital impacts arising from the use of such research within development practice particularly in terms of the formation of networks and the development of trust. Although community-based research can enhance social capital, the study demonstrates that this is a complex process and as such is not an easy tool to harness and use within the policy-making process.

This article suggests how notions of replacing, supplementing and valuing care by the family can be linked with policy instruments of childcare services, leave provisions, and cash for care by family, to influence care arrangements at collective and individual levels. It analyses care arrangements in Japan and Korea, estimating their changes over approximately ten years using the care time mix approach. The findings suggest that at the beginning of the new millennium, care arrangements in both countries were configured as female>non-state>male>state. A decade later, Japan remains the same, whereas Korea has become a paid care economy configured as non-state>female>male>state. Unpaid care economy remains gendered, but over time, Japanese men's contribution has marginally increased, with the opposite being true in Korea. The article discusses what the transformation of the paid care economy in Korea, and its expansion in Japan, imply for social structures in the respective countries.