Non-application to the social fund can lead to a reduction in the resources available to some of the most vulnerable members of society. This article shows how traditional models of take-up are inadequate for examining why payments from the discretionary cash-limited social fund do not always reach the people for whom the benefit was designed. Nevertheless, it is crucial to examine why non-application to the social fund denies many people even a chance of meeting their needs. A new model of take-up is proposed that widens the debate beyond the level of claimant behaviour, allowing non-application to the social fund to be looked at as a variant of non-take-up. It provides a framework for examining the influence of structural and administrative factors on social fund application rates and highlights the extent to which policy makers and legislators play a part in non-application.

Whilst studies of employment have fuelled arguments about post-Fordism and questions of flexibility, recent debates about welfare have considered social polarization and the growth of an anti-social, anti-work ‘underclass’. In both cases, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which people in depressed local economies now survive through precarious, marginal and informal work.

This article explores how people deprived of jobs seek to re-create positive working lives for themselves through voluntary work. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with working-class men and women in Teesside, it explores the motivations and meanings of volunteering and the significance that voluntary action has for work and welfare in such communities. State intervention in the voluntary work sphere is assessed and a number of recommendations are made for policy and practice.

The term ‘postmodernism’ has recently entered the study of social policy, prompting debate over its usefulness for social policy analysis. Peter Taylor-Gooby's (1994) appraisal of literatures often described as ‘postmodern’ leads him to reject them as having little to offer the discipline of social policy. This article argues that such a view derives from a confusion about the field of ‘postmodernism’; in particular, from a conflation of several different theoretical positions and schools of thought. This article provides a clarification of these literatures in order to argue that the issues they raise have important implications for the way in which we might understand the prospects for policy formulation and implementation. The article distinguishes between the political economy strand of the ‘post’ literatures – postindustrialism and postfordism – and the cultural studies strand – poststructuralism and postmodernism – showing that the different issues they highlight, and the ways in which they conceptualise power and control will lead to different theoretical connections between social policy and political action.

Over the years during which Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian economy has become heavily dependent on wages earned in Israel. Yet Israel has done relatively little to modernise these territories' social security arrangements, or to enable Palestinian frontier workers to benefit from its own social security system. This article compares the occupational welfare, public assistance and health insurance programmes in the three entities, and suggests how they could be better organised to protect Palestinian workers and their families against daily contingencies which can decimate their economic security.

Political consensus on the scope and structure of the welfare state in post-war Britain has been much overstated. The Labour governments (1945–51), committed to universalism and a planned economy, gave state welfare a central role in guaranteeing ‘fair shares for all’ and used it to help secure union co-operation over wage restraint. The Conservative governments (1951–64), committed to the restoration of ‘sound finance’, abandoned these objectives and attacked components of the welfare state designed to control prices and mediate demands for higher wages. The author concludes that, for comparative social policy studies to be effective, differing frameworks of state welfare have to be more exactly defined.

A study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that whilst the income of the poorest tenth of society fell by 18 per cent in real terms between 1979 and 1992 (after housing costs), their expenditure rose by 14 per cent. In a separate report on changes in individuals' incomes over time, the IFS found significant movement in and out of the poorest sections of society between 1991 and 1992. The latest edition of Households Below Average Income showed that real net income rose by an average of 38 per cent (after housing costs) between 1979 and 1992/93, but fell by 17 per cent for the bottom tenth of the population (24:3/95,1.1). The narrowing of the gap in the north–south divide has halted, but a report on the geography of poverty explores many other divisions between and within areas of the UK. The report of the Commission headed by Lord Dahrendorf called for a new investment strategy and benefits structure, as well as measurement of social and environmental conditions as part of an annual audit of ‘wealth’. Tony Blair, the Labour Party leader, promised a fundamental review of the social security system once in power.