There has recently been public discussion of the rewards available to senior staff in English and Welsh charities. However, that discussion is usually based on examples of individual salaries, or on unrepresentative and small subsets of the charity population. To provide a robust and informed basis for debate, we have conducted analyses of evidence on the payment of high salaries (defined as the numbers of people paid above £60,000 p.a., a reporting threshold used by the Charity Commission) in: (a) a representative sample of c.10,000 English and Welsh charities, and (b) surveys of individuals regarding comparative salary levels in different sectors of the economy. Overall, survey data show that the proportion of staff in receipt of high salaries is lower than average in the third sector than in other sectors. Information from charity annual accounts is used to demonstrate which charities are more likely than others to pay such salaries, and to relate the likelihood of paying high salaries to charity characteristics (income, location and subsector). We show that the distribution of high pay in the charitable sector is largely a function of the size and complexity of organisations, and is generally unrelated to subsector or income mix.

The UK Conservative government has committed to increasing funding for domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services in England but this has not been extended to Wales. Wales has however made clear commitments to developing these services, through the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. This article draws on focus groups and interviews with fifty-three service users and thirty-one purposively selected service providers to explore their perspectives on Violence Against Women (VAW) service provision in Wales. There are clear shared priorities and some tensions between service user and provider perspectives on appropriate services. Drawing on the long history of intermediate co-production in VAW services, the article argues that co-production at the strategic level is now needed. This would provide an arena for resolving tensions, setting standards and developing funding criteria to enable co-produced VAW policy and build resistance to funding cuts.

There has been little comparative policy research hitherto on the substantial differences in law and order policies between Western industrialised countries. Instead, criminologists have filled this void and used concepts such as Esping-Andersen's worlds of welfare or Lijphart's patterns of democracy to interpret cross-country variation. However, the state of the art has two weaknesses: it almost exclusively relies on imprisonment data as dependent variable and it remains silent as to why welfare state regimes or types of democracy should be responsible for similarities in law and order policies. The present article tackles these shortcomings by (1) examining differences and commonalities in law and order policies in twenty Western industrialised countries and by (2) investigating whether the clustering of countries is associated with features of the welfare state or the political system. We find three distinct clusters and show that their formation is related to the characteristics of the political economy of the countries.

Using the China Household Income Project 2007 data and imputing health and education benefits through microsimulation, this article provides evidence on how the inclusion of health and education benefits might change the estimated size, structure and redistributive effects of the Chinese social welfare system. We find that the inequalities in social welfare systems across the urban–rural–migrant populations persisted, reinforcing the multidimensional inequalities in health and education well documented in the literature. Imputed health benefits were larger and played a greater redistributive role in urban areas than for their rural and migrant peers. Imputed education benefits, on the other hand, played a more equalising role in rural and migrant populations as compared to the urban population. These results highlight the importance for China to use health and education benefits effectively to mitigate such multidimensional inequalities and enhance the life opportunities of disadvantaged citizens, especially children.

There has been optimism that social media will facilitate citizen participation and transform the communication strategies of public organisations. Drawing on a case study of the public police in England, this article considers whether social media are transforming or normalising communications. Arguing that social media have not yet served to facilitate interaction between constabularies and citizens in the ways that have been proposed and desired, the article considers factors that structure the transformative potential of social media. It is argued that the uses of social media are mediated by the existing organisational and occupational concerns of the police. This article reveals how an interplay of organisational, technological and individual and cultural dynamics come together to shape how social media are used in constabularies. Embedding social media into police communications is challenging and the technology itself will not bring about the organisational and cultural changes needed to transform police–citizen engagement.

The United Kingdom has a long history of a fraught relationship with the European Union, a discomfort demonstrated in the 23 June 2016 referendum on the membership of the EU, in which the UK voted to leave with nearly 52 per cent majority vote. Among the key concerns underlying UK's unease with EU are the interrelated areas of the economy, polity, and society. However, public debate surrounding the event focused on a relatively narrow range of issues. The two official campaigns representing the choice in the referendum, ‘Vote Leave, take control’ and ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’, were marshalled either to support Eurosceptic feelings or to emphasise the benefits of access to the Single Market. Commonplace convictions that the EU is responsible for that which is negative, inconvenient, or difficult to explain circulated alongside (though less frequently than) the recognition of the economic privileges and opportunities that come from EU membership. The political, economic and social concerns were encapsulated in themes of taking power back from Brussels, redirecting resources from the UK's contributions to the EU budget towards nationally determined projects (most famously allocating £350 million a week for the National Health Service), and effective border control to significantly curb migration. Contradictory claims about the EU and the UK's affiliation with it were further complicated by the fact that divisions over the support for or opposition to Britain's withdrawal spanned the whole political spectrum.

This article examines both the place of the social dimension in past and on-going debates about the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and the reciprocal influence of EU and UK institutions on developments in the social policy field. It explores fluctuations in the relationship between economic and social policy, the divisiveness within, between and across political parties, the role of key policy actors in shaping the social agenda, and the failure of attempts to harmonise social welfare systems as enlargement intensified their diversity. We argue that, although difficult to predict, the implications of Brexit for future social policy in the UK and EU may not be so far-reaching as in some other policy areas, due largely to the maintenance of unanimous voting and the subsidiarity principle in many social domains, combined with the shift towards soft law and the widespread resistance of member states to tighter social integration.

The analysis of EU level social and gender policies highlights uneven developments and concerns over the EU as not (always) beneficial to social progress and gender equality. The EU, although primarily market driven, has developed a range of social policies, with gender equality enjoying a long-standing status as EU's founding value, dating back to the 1957 principle of equal pay for equal work. Yet, sixty years later, social justice objectives and equality between women and men remain to be realised. Social and gender themes have been revived by the proposal to develop the European Pillar of Social Rights, the shaping and implementing of which post-Brexit UK will not take part in. This initiative entails some meaningful developments for social and gender progress. However, its current form and content represents an adjustment to, rather than a transformation of, the unequal European economy and society.

This article examines the development of the EU's gender equality framework of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ law, including the incomplete gender mainstreaming of the European Employment Strategy. It highlights contradictions, rooted in political tensions between the social democratic principles which underpin the European Social Model, and the promotion of neo-liberal economic policies. It assesses the UK's role in shaping this European framework, and the framework's impact on the UK's employment policy. It concludes that Brexit will harm the pursuit of gender equality in the UK due to decoupling from the EU's equality framework and policy pathway. An additional risk is greater insularity in UK policy making through reduced exposure to the Open Method of Coordination. Brexit may, however, help progress gender equality in the rest of the EU if the outcome is greater unity focussed on an inclusive employment policy without the UK dragging its heels in favour of deregulated flexibility.

This article explores the gendered nature of the process of withdrawing from the European Union. Considering the EU is widely accepted as a gender actor, particularly in the context of employment policy, the marginality of these issues in current debates reflects a hierarchy in the value attributed to different policy areas that crystallizes the high-low politics binary. European led initiatives have undoubtedly changed the nature of equality policies in the Member States. Recent studies have also outlined how, and to what extent, EU policy contributes to shifts in gender regimes, gender policy and gender relations at the national level. Women in the UK have benefited greatly from membership of the EU/EEC; thus, looking at Brexit as a process provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the relationship, and patterns of influence, between European and national legislation.

Growing concerns and hostility towards continuing large-scale flows of immigrants following the two rounds of EU enlargement and high levels of net migration played a major part in the Brexit referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. So too had welfare chauvinism, or the belief that welfare benefits should be restricted to citizens, come to the fore in negative attitudes to EU immigration, reflecting a rejection of EU migrants as fellow citizens. As the article shows, proposals as of summer 2017 for the status of current EU citizens in the UK indicate a desire by the UK government to incorporate current EU citizens within the far more restrictive British immigration rules, thereby curtailing some of their basic free movement rights, especially in relation to future family members. Leaked proposals for future EU citizens post-Brexit are to bring them within a single overall immigration system covering EU and non-EU migrants and applying differential rights of residence to skilled and less skilled, thereby stratifying EU migrants according to educational level and labour market sector. This would represent a return to the status of mobile workers with conditional rights of residence and social entitlements similar to those faced by non-EU migrants.