This paper examines the neglected area of health support work in the United Kingdom in the context of recent social policy and studies of professionalisation. A variety of socio-economic trends have led policy makers to give greater consideration to this section of the healthcare workforce. Professional regulatory issues and recent reviews in the health field have provided the leverage to alter existing healthcare boundaries, as well as to enhance public protection. Drawing on commissioned research, it is argued that health support workers are not only an important area of study in their own right, but also raise interesting questions about the broader process of health policy making and professionalisation.

This article develops an analytic framework for parenting support, treating it as both a form of social policy and a measure that intervenes more broadly in politics and society. It is suggested that, as a form of social policy, parenting support can be examined through analytical categories that are classic to social policy, such as: the nature of the offer or ‘good’ to parents, the modality of provision, conditions of access and operation, the policy setting and linkages to other policies, the unfolding of the policy over time and historical roots, philosophical underpinnings and dominant professional influences. In a second layer, the social and political roots and orientations of parenting support have to be investigated. When one does this by, for example, identifying the main actors involved in parenting support and the rationales and claims made for parenting support as a policy response, it becomes obvious that parenting support can be either a benign project of support or part of a more controlling educative or retraining exercise.

Parenting education has been given an increasingly important role in government policies to address social exclusion. This paper examines the basis for investing in parenting programmes and reviews the various different types of parenting education provision. It discusses the evidence on the effectiveness of multi-component and group parenting programmes in modifying parent–child relationships and the outcomes for children and young people. The paper concludes that while such programmes appear to produce beneficial outcomes, it is important that they remain linked to a strategy that does not individualise the causes of social exclusion.

The voluntary sector has been mainstreamed into public policy with consequences that include more reliance upon the time, commitment and skills of volunteers. In many policy initiatives to combat social exclusion, volunteering is cast as a form of self-improvement and re-training for the workforce. Qualitative research in a disadvantaged community, however, uncovered the persistence of more traditional forms of volunteering associated with mutual support and identification with the needs of others. Policies intended to broaden the base of the volunteer workforce need to recognise and nurture the intrinsic rewards of volunteering.

Exploring evidence utilisation in a heavily politicised policy area, this paper suggests that established models of research utilisation provide inadequate grounds to conceptualise the evidence and policy relationship in this context. This is because they operate at too high a level of abstraction and have a narrow understanding of the association. Using recent developments in UK drug classification policy as a case study, a newer ‘processual model’ is (tentatively) advocated. This highlights the complexity and nuance of the policy process and its accompanying use of evidence which, it is claimed, more accurately depicts the evidence and policy relationship in this particular scenario.

The idea of participation has been central to many policy developments in recent years. Both Conservative and Labour governments have used notions of participation and involvement in attempts to justify and implement their social policies. Yet, despite a plethora of initiatives and guidance around ‘participation’ emerging from all levels of government, and a substantial academic literature, there remains a major, and potentially damaging, lack of clarity over many aspects of participation, while the secret of achieving ‘real’ participation appears to continue to remain elusive.

There has been much concern about people not saving enough for retirement in the UK and how to encourage further saving. This has led to pension policy developments, including the introduction of auto-enrolment, a form of ‘soft’ compulsion, to ‘nudge’ people to save. Given that young working age cohorts have longest to contribute to pensions and have traditionally been least likely to save for retirement, it is important to investigate their attitudes and expectations in relation to pensions and the potential effects of auto-enrolment on their future retirement income. This study utilises the findings of thirty interviews with young people aged eighteen to thirty about their opportunities and attitudes towards pensions, and identifies a variety of factors which affect pension contributions, including knowledge and advice, trust and myopia. It then focuses explicitly on auto-enrolment before concluding that if auto-enrolment is to succeed, people need to be reassured beyond doubt that it ‘pays to save’.

This article draws on preliminary findings from a two-year exploratory study to describe how different agencies and professionals work together to identify and manage the intersections between homelessness and other facets of deep social exclusion. We assess the extent to which current practice is informed by policy frameworks for ‘personalised and integrated care planning’ focusing in particular on the ‘coordinating’ and ‘sign-posting’ role of the housing support worker. We conclude with some initial thoughts as to how policy and practice might be strengthened in this area to ensure more ‘joined-up’ and continuous support for people with experience of multiple exclusion homelessness.

This article discusses recent research into engagement and partnership work between Muslim communities and police for the purposes of counter-terrorism. It is argued that asserting a notion of ‘shared values’ as a foundational criterion for choosing which individuals/groups to engage in countering terrorism is strategically flawed. Not only is the notion of ‘values’ overly diffuse and conceptually ill-defined, it is dangerous in its potential to construct even the most normative Muslim practices and beliefs as ‘anti-social’ and ‘extreme’. This is likely to further alienate Muslim communities in general and to exclude those groups with whom the State has so far successfully engaged to counter terrorism. The article further reflects upon engagement and partnership work between police and Muslim minorities perceived as ‘radical’, highlighting how the goal of terror crime prevention can be – and is – shared between police and communities, despite negative and stigmatizing impacts of the ‘War on Terror’.

This ‘state-of-the art’ article on the role of deservingness in governing migrants’ access to social services situates our themed section’s contribution to the literature at the intersection between the study of street-level bureaucracy and practices of internal bordering through social policy. Considering the increasing relevance of migration control post-entry, we review the considerations that guide the local delivery of social services. Among others, moral ideas about a claimant’s worthiness to receive social benefits and services guide policy implementation. But while ideas of deservingness help to understand how perceptions of migrants’ claiming play out in practice, we observe limited use of the concept in street-level bureaucracy research. Drawing on theorisations from welfare attitudinal research, we demonstrate the salience of deservingness attitudes in understanding the dynamics of local social service delivery to migrant clients.

This paper outlines the development EU policy discourse on ‘the reconciliation of work and family life’. This imposes a policy disjuncture on New Labour, for, while the British government may be ideologically more attracted to the liberal US model of ‘flexible’ labour, it is bound by EU law to implement a more corporatist gender equality model. The paper notes how themes of economic competition, democratisation, and protecting gender contracts emerged at the foundation EU gender policy. It traces these themes into an ‘equal opportunities at work’ discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and, with the increasing importance of the ‘demographic time bomb’ discourse and of Scandinavian style gender equality, into discourses stressing the ‘reconciliation of paid work with family life’ and gender mainstreaming. The paper ends by addressing the ‘half-empty or half-full’ assessments of EU gender policy.

The purpose of this review is to examine agency in the worldwide literature on children's perspectives on poverty. By definition, asking children about their lives and responses to living in poverty assumes that they are competent actors – this is one of the positive features of the new and burgeoning literature on children's perspectives. Findings from research in poorer and richer countries are summarised and compared, and children's agency is categorised using frameworks proposed by Ruth Lister and John Micklewright into a number of different types, including self-exclusion, exclusion of children by other children, ‘getting by’, ‘getting (back) at’, ‘getting out’, and ‘getting organised’. The review concludes with suggestions on where more research is needed on children's agency in the context of poverty.

In Finland, food banks and bread lines emerged for the first time during the deep recession in the mid-1990s and, since then, have become permanent. This was partly an outcome of cutting or freezing social security costs during the economic slump, but there has also been an increasingly explicit transformation in national social policy. However, the emergence and persistence of food aid cannot be explained purely as a social and poverty policy issue. This article examines charity food aid as a solution to the hunger problem within the Nordic welfare regime and traces connections linking the establishment of food charity to the prevailing food system. This article focuses on different policy actions and economic developments that took place independently during the 1990s, producing, apparently accidently and without conscious co-ordination, entrenchment of charitable food aid in Finland.

This article sets out to critically explore the expanding and contested vocabulary of ‘responsible citizenship’ as it relates to homeless people in a small market town in rural Dorset. Taking as its reference point the controversial decision to introduce a payment system for hot food at a day-centre for rough sleepers, I offer a concrete illustration of how the desire to cultivate ‘active’ and ‘responsible’ citizens is experienced and perceived by people who are affected by homelessness and other dimensions of ‘deep’ social exclusion. My concern here is to show that the logic of ‘responsibilisation’, which I suggest aims to ensure that difficult and troublesome individuals are made to accept prevailing social norms, draws its sustenance from a more fundamental concern with refashioning the meaning of contemporary citizenship. In so doing, I focus on the particular problems with this approach, using an alternative approach that argues that the problems and vulnerabilities associated with entrenched and chronic homelessness remain a significant obstacle to social inclusion and meaningful participation in community life.

This paper explores New Labour's desire to refurbish the physical and social fabric of excluded neighbourhoods through its New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme. It begins by examining three key concepts that embody and underpin this policy intervention – community, agency and exclusion and proceeds by contrasting these conceptual dimensions with a set of discordant, intra-neighbourhood processes of conflict, contestation and division, identified by recently conducted fieldwork in an NDC area. I argue that such processes produce a complex social terrain that is inhabited by social agents with a diverse range of needs, values and experiences, before discussing how this challenges and de-stabilises NDC's aspiration to ‘promote’ community, change individual behaviour and tackle exclusion effectively. The paper concludes by questioning whether New Labour's desire to implement a ‘community’ project, shaped by theoretical precepts, constrains NDC's ability to deliver lasting change to excluded areas.

Social policy has treated welfare states as nation states. Contemporary processes seem to have unsettled the spatial, scalar and social coherence of nation-states. This article examines the challenge of rethinking the relationships of nation, state and welfare. It argues for a transnational conception of both the current remakings of nation, state and welfare, and of their past formations. Such a view casts doubt on the value of the container model of the nation-state, and makes visible the constitutive or nation-constructing role of welfare states.

There is a lack of research on parent abuse in the UK and a lack of research on the overlap between domestic violence and parent abuse internationally. This article explores why this is the case. Findings suggest that conceptual conflicts in defining both concepts, in framing children's safety as subsumed under mothers’ safety and the desire to challenge deterministic ‘cycle of violence’ models may unwittingly have contributed to the failure to address parent abuse in the domestic violence field. The author argues that only by integrating parent abuse into the domestic violence framework will this issue be appropriately addressed.

Care is an important analytical concept in social policy because of what its social organisation reveals about social formations and the nature of welfare states. To date, social policy analyses of care have focused on the social (re)organisation of care within nation states, which are largely treated as ‘sealed’ entities. Consequently these analyses neglect to examine the impact of transnational processes on the socio-organisational shifts observed. This article outlines the contours of a global political economy (GPE) of care with a view to elucidating the transnational dimensions to care restructuring. It focuses in particular on domestic care labour because of the extensive internationalisation of domestic services and its significance for the social relations of production and the division of labour. The discussion reflects on analytical issues for the academic study of social policy and care raised by a GPE approach.

Responsibilisation is commonly associated with a neoliberal transfer of responsibilities from state to social actors. However, it also covers the construction of responsibility where it does not exist yet – where citizens need socialisation to manufacture responsibility so they become economically and socially active, healthy, and productive subjects. This article aims to bring more conceptual clarity in these practices. Based on an analysis of literature on contemporary welfare state policies, three different techniques are discerned: reciprocal governance in welfare state services; training and treatment of vulnerable citizens through support and structure; and choice engineering by working upon the unconscious and psychological triggers underlying decision making. These techniques of behavioural power seek responsibilisation by working upon people's understanding of responsibility as a moral imperative and upon the rational or psychological mechanisms that constitute the choices they make and the attitudes they have.

Not enough is known in the UK about how economic phenomena and policy changes have impacted families’ ability to feed themselves. This article employs a novel way of identifying the types of UK families at risk of food poverty over time. Applying a relative deprivation approach, it asks what counts in the UK as a socially acceptable diet that meets needs for health and social participation and how much this costs. Comparing this to actual food expenditure by different family types, between 2005 and 2013, it identifies which are spending less than expected and may be at risk of food poverty. The analysis finds the proportion has increased over time for most family types and for lone parents and large families in particular. The discussion considers findings in light of changing economic and policy contexts and the implications for policy responses of how food poverty is defined and measured.