The Social Policy Digest went online in 2002, and since then has developed into a major web-based resource on UK social policy issues. By the end of 2008 it contained over 22,000 entries, covering policy developments and research findings across the whole range of social policy fields.

This paper analyses recent developments in US welfare policy and their implications for future reforms. The analysis begins by examining how the enactment of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme in 1996 changed the essential character of public assistance and the major social forces that accounted for this fundamental shift in US welfare policy. It then shows how the most recent welfare reforms under the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 broadened and intensified the TANF requirements, leaving four avenues along which issues of conditionality and entitlement are likely to be played out in future welfare reforms. Finally, the discussion highlights how a new social contract is being forged through progressive and conservative proposals, which shift the focus of public assistance from the right to financial support to the right to work and earn a living wage.

The welfare state faces a number of challenges. Recent reforms in the UK appear broadly successful in attaining targets and improving cost-efficiency, but are nonetheless confronted by public disquiet and unease. This article argues that one difficulty with the new directions in policy is that they rest on a particular and limited understanding of agency. Reformers tend to operate within a theoretical framework that understands behaviour as driven by individual and predominantly rational incentives and pays little attention to the expressive and normative aspects of social action. The problems that arise in these areas when a competitive market logic is applied in social provision tend not to be recognised. Such a logic may contradict established values of social care and commitment to user interests. A qualitative survey of 48 members of the general public is used to examine perceptions of and responses to the NHS reforms, and to show how public discourse in this area is at variance with the instrumental and individual assumptions of policy-makers. The result is that the reform programme damages the legitimacy of the service and that those responsible for the new policies fail to recognise that the individual instrumental agenda is eroding public trust.

Various authors point to the connection between public perceptions of poverty and institutionalised strategies of dealing with the poor. The way the general public perceives the poor, and especially the causes of poverty, is generally assumed to have a profound influence on the legitimacy of anti-poverty policies. Yet studies on popular perceptions of and attributions for poverty are relatively infrequent. Moreover, a considerable share of existing research appears conceptually and/or methodologically inadequate. This article provides a critical review of existing literature that is interwoven into the discussion of the two most common approaches to studying lay poverty attributions: the factor analytical approach and the forced-choice-question approach. With respect to the latter, we present an empirical analysis and interpretation of the four response categories that constitute the core of the forced-choice question included in Eurobarometer.

The outcomes for children in public care are generally considered to be poor. This has contributed to a focus on reducing the number of children in care: a goal that is made explicit in the provisions of the current Children and Young Persons Bill. Yet while children in care do less well than most children on a range of measures, such comparisons do not disentangle the extent to which these difficulties pre-dated care and the specific impact of care on child welfare. This article explores the specific impact of care through a review of British research since 1991 that provides data on changes in child welfare over time for children in care. Only 12 studies were identified, indicating a lack of research in this important area. The studies consistently found that children entering care tended to have serious problems but that in general their welfare improved over time. This finding is consistent with the international literature. It has important policy implications. Most significantly it suggests that attempts to reduce the use of public care are misguided, and may place more children at risk of serious harm. Instead, it is argued that England and Wales should move toward a Scandinavian system of public care, in which care is seen as a form of family support and is provided for more rather than fewer children and families.

Debates on welfare reforms have revolved around institutional inertias with the emphasis on institutions as structures. We argue that political discourses work in the same vein and create continuities constraining the array of possible policy options – political frames as carriers of institutional inertia and path dependence. The data are based on political debates on child home care in Finland and Sweden. The ‘trap for women’ frame became dominant in the Swedish discourse, while in Finland ‘freedom to choose’ has been hegemonic. According to the Swedish frame, public day care offers children the best preconditions for later development and enhances social equality, whereas in Finland care at home with all its positive characteristics was contrasted with bureaucratic institutional care. The article highlights how politicians have used these hegemonic discourses to maintain the legitimacy of certain policy options.

This article examines the impact of the introduction of market forces on child care provision in the Netherlands. In January 2005, the Dutch government introduced the Child Care Act, replacing the former financing system, which had elements of both supply- and demand-financing, with a fully demand-financing system. As a result, the provision of child care is now driven by market forces. Using data on the geographical location of child care facilities, this article compares the factors affecting the provision of child care in the Netherlands before and after the introduction of the Child Care Act. The results suggest that after the regulatory reform the provision of child care has shifted towards wealthy urbanised areas, characterised by high demand and high purchasing power. This shift has largely benefited for-profit providers particularly active in these markets. In parallel, the results indicate an important drop in child care provision by non-profit organisations, most pronounced in less wealthy rural areas. These findings suggest that the introduction of demand-financing may have implications for the accessibility of child care.

This article considers why the family nurse partnership (FNP) has been promoted as a means of tackling social exclusion in the UK. The FNP consists in a programme of visits by nurses to low-income first-time mothers, both while the mothers are pregnant and for the first two years following birth. The FNP is focused on both teaching parenthood and encouraging mothers back into education and/or into employment. Although the FNP marks a considerable discontinuity with previous approaches to family health, it is congruent with an emerging new approach to social exclusion. This new approach maintains that the most important task of social policy is to identify quickly the most ‘at-risk’ households, individuals and children so that interventions can be targeted more effectively at those ‘at risk’, either to themselves or to others. The article illustrates this new approach by analysing a succession of reports by the Social Exclusion Unit. It indicates that there is a considerable amount of ambiguity about the relationship between specific risk-factors and being ‘at risk of social exclusion’. Nonetheless, this new approach helps to explain why British policy-makers may have chosen to promote the new FNP now.

In 2003, New Zealand decriminalised sex work through the enactment of the Prostitution Reform Act. Many opponents to this legislation predicted that there would be increasing numbers of people entering sex work, especially in the street-based sector. The debates within the New Zealand media following the legislation were predominantly moralistic and there were calls for the recriminalisation of the street-based sector. This study estimated the number of sex workers post-decriminalisation in five locations in New Zealand: the three main cities in which sex work takes place as well as two smaller cities. These estimations were compared to existing estimations prior to and at the time of decriminalisation. The research suggests that the Prostitution Reform Act has had little impact on the number of people working in the sex industry.