One way of measuring the deprivation or poverty of persons is to use money-based measures: a person is regarded as ‘poor’ if his/her income (or expenditure) falls below a poverty line value. Such an approach – usually termed poverty analysis – has spawned a large literature embodying several sophisticated measures of poverty. The downside to this is that low income or expenditure may not be very good indicators of deprivation. Another way, usually termed ‘deprivation analysis’, is to define an index whose value, for each person, is the number (or proportion) of items from a prescribed list that he/she possesses: persons are then regarded as ‘deprived’ if their index value is below some threshold. This offers an alternative method of identifying deprived persons. The disadvantage of deprivation analysis is that it measures deprivation exclusively in terms of the proportion of deprived persons within the total number of persons. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap between poverty and deprivation analysis by constructing a wider set of measures of economic inequality and by showing, with data for Northern Ireland, how they might be applied. The result is an analysis sensitive to intra-population heterogeneity.

C.A.R. Crosland (1956) The Future of Socialism, Jonathan Cape, London.

Donald Sassoon (1997), One Hundred Years of Socialism, HarperCollins London. (First published by I.B.Tauris in 1996).

John Callaghan (2000), The Retreat of Social Democracy, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Between them these three books provide an excellent overview of the theory and practice of social democracy as it has twisted and turned over the past century. As Sassoon reminds us in his magisterial review of the West European left, revisionism of one kind or another has been a constant feature of socialist discourse. The key question has always been whether such revisions have helped to bring about the transformation of capitalism (or, perhaps more realistically, its humanisation) or, in contrast, helped to secure its long-term survival. The first, and arguably the most controversial, revisionism of social democratic thought occurred in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.

This study explores issues about securing quality of provision in social care using evidence from research into training in the adult care sector in two English local authorities. It shows that progress towards securing a trained workforce is slow and explores reasons for this. It argues that since the government is making particular efforts to increase training in this sector, these data provide a good test case of the problems about using regulation to raise care standards. It concludes that significant progress is unlikely to be made in respect of training unless the impact of other factors, such as the occupational segregation of the workforce and contracting out, are also taken into account.

This article explores the role of the state in helping households to save. Using the UK as an example of challenges faced in other developed countries, it develops a framework for comparing saving schemes along two dimensions: apparent normative motivation for the scheme and likely impact on savers of varying income levels. Using this framework, our analysis suggests that there is much greater state support for high-income savers than low-income savers, even after the recent introduction of the ‘Help to Save’ scheme. So, while this scheme has provided some support for this group, we propose ways to expand it through providing initial seed funding to each account and greater marketing and accessibility. We note, however, that an important way to help those on low incomes to save is to increase their incomes so they have more capacity to do so.

We provide an overview of transnational non-state actors and their agency that shape today’s out-of-home childcare around the world, specifically institutional residential childcare. Based on existing studies and desktop research, we reveal a broad range of complexly inter-related for-profit and non-profit actors promoting diverse, often conflicting policies and practices – with ambiguous implications for children in care. We focus on secular and faith-based international non-governmental organisations, transnational companies, private regulators, and individuals. Many of them promote family- and community-based care, yet many others support orphanages and other forms of institutional care. The growing number of transnational actors in residential childcare, the emergence of private regulatory frameworks, the advance of market-based, for-profit players, and the involvement of well-resourced religious communities make the future of child institutionalisation uncertain. We discuss how this transnational agency compares with other policy fields and propose directions for future investigations of how transnationalism impacts children in care.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, discussions of social justice in the social science literature focused largely on social class. The implicit assumption of much of the literature was that a more just society would be achieved through the reduction of inequalities in the distribution of economic and social resources. Since then, there has been a growing focus on plural aspects of social justice. Many writers now distinguish between distributive, cultural and associational aspects of social justice. However, the different implications of these facets of social justice for different groups, and potential tensions between them, have rarely been adequately recognised. Given New Labour's focus on social justice, and its belief that attaining greater social justice is compatible with achieving greater efficiency in the public sector, there is a need to examine more closely the understandings of social justice underpinning a range of policy initiatives.

It is a global trend for nations to set forth various social policies to guide and regulate parents in their parenting practices as a form of family governance. In China, this trend is echoed by a number of ‘family education’ policies and guidelines. Drawing upon a critical discourse analysis of three family education documents, this article argues that the ideal Chinese parent is one with high suzhi who is responsible, rational and competent in science-based parenting knowledge and skills, conjoining closely with China’s nation-building agenda to produce high suzhi citizens who could contribute to the building of a strong nation. In reference to international scholarship, these discourses are understood as a form of family governance through parental responsibilisation and professionalisation. The article also calls for more empirical research to understand the implications of these official discourses for parenting and parent-child relations in diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts around China.

Those who grew up in the war, as I did, could not fail to be aware of the lowering of social barriers and of the popular support for social reform. Whether by eating in communal restaurants and sleeping in air raid shelters, accommodating evacuees and the victims of the, blitz, joining in firewatching and civil defence, doing holiday work on farms or serving in the armed forces, people were obliged to meet, and get to know, many others of different class, occupation and background. They had a common interest and a common purpose. One of my most vivid memories is of the shock felt by the middle classes in Black-pool upon the arrival of families evacuated from the Liverpool slums. As in many other places, people came to understand for the first time how the other half lived, and what the years of unemployment had wrought. Here were two nations confronted.

This article reviews the design and delivery features of individualised budgets for disabled and older adults to understand the mechanisms for disaggregation and collaboration in the way support is organised and delivered. Individualised funding is often assumed to be a fragmenting force, breaking down mass provision into personalised and tailored support and stimulating diverse provider markets. However, disability campaigners and policy makers are keen that it also be an integrative force, to stimulate collaboration such that a person receives a ‘seamless’ service. The article brings out these tensions within the individualisation of funding and support for older and disabled people in the United Kingdom and Australia, and considers whether there is scope for reconciling these dual forces.

The focus of this themed section is on identifying gaps in anti-poverty policy towards children and young people. The idea to address this question originated at the conference ‘A Fairer Society? A Review of Policies for Vulnerable Groups’ organised by the Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP) at Loughborough University in September 2006. The section offers a combination of papers from the conference (Bradshaw and Richardson; Smith; Sutton) and papers commissioned specifically to deal with gaps in anti-poverty policy towards children and young people (Lloyd; France; Phung). An overview of some useful sources has also been included (Davis and Sandu).

This article maps how inclusive discourses aimed at addressing systemic racism and anti-Black racism circulate and operate within youth social policy in Ontario, Canada. Numerous reports and programmes attempt to understand systemic racism and propose new approaches to youth work in addressing youth violence, underemployment, underachievement, etc. This article demonstrates how efforts to counter state violence and systemic racism are pulled into the economic and political framework of racial neoliberal and colonial standards. Employing a Foucauldian genealogy of policy discourses (1992-2019) and semi-structured interviews with youth sector members, it traces how anti-racism discourses are altered by a colonial aphasia (Stoler, 2016) that in turn supports circuits of Whiteness, which continue to target, measure, train, and surveil racialised youth, limiting alternative ways of being.

This paper compares social policy responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. In seeking to protect citizens from an inflationary shock, a series of fundamental social policy questions arise. What would the aims of support packages be? To what extent should support be universal or targeted? If targeted, did existing policy architectures facilitate or frustrate the targeting of support? As the scale and persistence of the inflationary shock became evident, smaller and near-universal responses gave way to larger support packages with a greater reliance on targeting. Social security systems played an important role in policy responses, though often by passporting one-off payments rather than a strengthening of these core programmes. Passporting led both to improved distributional outcomes vis-à-vis the more universal elements but created new administrative challenges and led to rough justice in some circumstances. The reliance on one-off payments underlined the temporary nature of policy responses.

In the last two decades, the Chinese government has made serious attempts to enhance social provision by contracting out social services. Empirical evidence suggests that openness and flexibility of resource allocation gradually decrease from Guangzhou in southern China to Beijing in northern China, amongst China’s three first-tier cities. This study further reveals that state–non-governmental organisation (NGO) relations vary not only across geographical locations but also amongst service sectors governed by government departments and mass organisations. The varied state–NGO relations across geographical locations and service sectors manifest the complexity of the state–NGO collaboration under China’s fragmented authoritarian governance system. Different local circumstances and diverse considerations of local officials involving vertical and horizontal lines of authority accounted for the variations and complexity from the eyes of NGO practitioners.

In constructing this edition in the role as ‘guest editors’ Alan Aldridge and I believe that the theme of consumerism to be both stimulating and timely for social policy. The implications of consumerism – as a political ideology, as a set of social movements, and as the values of a consumer society – are being felt in a wide range of policy areas. Within social policy analysis, consumerism, along with welfarism, clientism and privatism has been advanced as one of the four key elements in the provision of and public orientation towards welfare services. Within sociology, there has been a rapid growth of books and journal articles addressing consumption as a key concept in the analysis of contemporary culture. One manifestation of this is the recent launch of the international Journal of Consumer Culture.

In 1996, the USA became the first major democracy to eliminate individual entitlement to the social safety net. The reforms introduced in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act are briefly outlined in this editorial article, which, drawing on the papers assembled in this themed section, considers the consequences of the legislation, both positive and negative, and seeks to explain why the new policy regime seems likely to prove resilient.

This article reports on a study exploring the accommodation experiences of older Gypsies and Travellers and how specialist Supporting People services can enhance their wellbeing and social inclusion. The findings suggest that through development of pro-active, culturally appropriate services, flexible, tailored support and joint working, these services have contributed to their users’ wellbeing. Cuts to Supporting People funding pose a serious threat, especially in the context of loss of other services and changes to accommodation policy under the banner of localism. Targeted funding to sustain these specialist services could be important to redress risks of further marginalisation of Gypsy/Traveller communities.

Public service pensions have been a fundamental component of the British pension system in the post-war period and recent reform initiatives have caused political controversy. This article assesses the impact of the Conservative/Liberal government's public sector pension reform plans of 2011 for different public sector workers. It simulates their projected pension outcomes, assuming people contribute to the new system throughout their working lives. In particular, we examine the government's claim that the move away from final to average salary schemes will make pensions fairer for women and lower paid workers. The article shows that the reforms are indeed fair, if measured by the government's standards: retirement is delayed for all, but the lowest skilled and women lose least and some even gain higher pensions without paying proportionately more. Despite austerity, recent British pension reforms reflect a greater awareness of social inequality than many would expect and they have been built on more cross-party agreement than apparent at first sight.