The new genetics is of undoubted importance to the future of welfare reform, but if this influence is not to be dominated by Right-wing values and prescriptions then some alternative conceptions need to be in place. This article begins by criticising the recent intervention by Charles Murray, insisting that Murray opens the door to a laissez faire eugenics. It then proceeds to outline a theory of regulated eugenics, justifying use of the concept ‘eugenics’ along the way, in terms of three elements: a multi-dimensional conception of human nature, differential egalitarianism and the precautionary principle. It then elaborates upon these ideas, and contrasts them with laissez faire eugenics, in a discussion of three areas of direct and immediate relevance to social policy: genetic screening, gene therapy and reproduction.

‘Making work pay’ is the keystone of New Labour's strategy to reduce welfare dependency. This strategy is especially directed at lone parents, through increased financial support for childcare, a specific ‘New Deal’ and reduced benefits for non-working lone parents. Reducing welfare dependency for lone parents has several possible objectives; minimising welfare expenditures, maximising the employment rate, improving the socioeconomic status of women, or improving conditions for their children. This article analyses the implications of each of these objectives for policy design, using evidence from other countries as well as the United Kingdom, and examines the internal coherence of New Labour's policy approach to lone parents and its coherence with other policies on the family and on lifelong learning. The potential effectiveness of ‘making work pay’ is examined through the findings of recent literature, leading to arguments for a carer's allowance.

Accommodation and care for older people is commonly thought of in relation to residential care homes: the collective settings with communal lounges and dining rooms, where older people may live what seems to be a fine balance between individual and group routines. Yet, while there have been changes to the living arrangements of people in relatively large collective groups, the ideal put forward as a basis for care settings has remained that of ‘home’, with the family model still central. With the tensions between public and private, domestic and institutional living, regulated and non-regulated settings, all too obvious, this article uses a pilot study in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire of registered small homes with less than four residential places, often run by the proprietor and her family, to consider whether residential homes may replicate a homely environment, or whether the model has run its course.

In December 1997, South Australia's alternative care system was radically restructured along ‘funder-purchaser-provider’ lines. A recent progress report into the workings of the new system (Barber, Cooper and Delfabbro, 1999) identified high levels of frustration and dissatisfaction throughout the sector. This article argues that the current problems in alternative care are a legacy of policy decisions by successive state governments, some of which date back many years. The most important of these are the nationwide demise of residential care, the unhelpful role of the state under the ‘funder-purchaser-provider’ model, and the decision to outsource the entire foster care service through competitive tender. The article concludes that the state's policy preference for distancing itself from service delivery is incompatible with the community's growing reluctance to volunteer.

Since its election to government in 1997, the programme of social policy reform introduced by the British Labour government has proceeded at a dizzying pace. This article analyses the impact of these reforms on gender relations, and how policy is working to shape the roles of citizen worker; parent and carer and spouse or partner. The article focuses on how the New Deals, tax and benefit policy (including the Working Families Tax Credit) and childcare policy affect these roles. The analysis reveals how, in institutionalising paid work as the key route to citizenship, New Labour runs the risk of building implicit gender bias into a number of its policies. The analysis suggests that more gender-sensitive policy would follow where consideration was given both to how individuals relate to the labour market over their lifetimes and to the effect of policy on the division and distribution of unpaid caring work.

This article presents a series of measures of the extent to which social policies in twenty-one OECD countries are oriented towards the support of elderly (over 65 or in formal retirement) and non-elderly (under 65 and not retired) population groups. Employing breakdowns by age in spending on social insurance, education and health, tax expenditures on welfare substituting goods, and housing policy outcomes, this article shows that countries tend to demonstrate a consistent age-orientation across a variety of policy areas and instruments. After correcting for the demographic structure of the population, Greece, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United States have the most elderly-oriented social policy regimes, while the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada and the Nordic countries have a more age-neutral repertoire of social policies. In identifying the age-orientation of social policy as a dimension of distributive politics that is not captured by other welfare state typologies, this article suggests the need to develop new accounts of the development of welfare states that include the dimension of age.

This article considers the public and voluntary sector relationship in housing provision from an historical and social science perspective. It pays particular attention to models based on markets, hierarchies and networks and presents an overview of voluntary action and state intervention in English housing since 1900. The article focuses on housing agencies with charitable status, and on three periods – pre-1914, the 1950s and the 1970s. For the first two periods, the emphasis is on the William Sutton Trust, England's largest house-building charity. In the latter period, attention shifts to Shelter, founded in 1967 and the most successful of the homelessness charities. In these case studies, the role of the courts, charity commissioners, government legal officers, Ministries responsible for housing, parliament and local authorities are discussed. The importance of attempts to politicise charity law and charitable status throughout the twentieth century is underlined. Central government is shown to play a significant part in this process, legitimising its preferred response from local authorities and voluntary agencies. A hierarchical interpretation of state intervention is tempered, however, by stressing the significance of unintended consequences attending central government's successive interventions in housing provision.

Japan has undergone drastic demographic changes in the past few decades. To cope with the needs of being an ageing society, the government has enacted a Long-term Care Insurance Law for the elderly that was implemented from 1 April 2000. The new legislation was conceived as a political compromise to appease two strongly opposed forces: reformists and the old guard. In the process of drafting reform, new political players, including ordinary citizens and mayors of small-scale municipal governments, have emerged. Two citizen action groups participated in the reform process, and succeeded in reflecting their preferences in its policymaking. The mayors who supported the new system started reforming social welfare administration systems, challenging traditional local politics. This article focuses on a few of these groups and how they have changed the Japanese political scene. It concludes that their political activities have contributed not only to promoting social policy reform, but also to revitalising politics in this country.

The recent concern to develop a radical but critical account of agency in social policy is to be welcomed. However this article questions whether the work of A. Giddens can provide an adequate foundation for such a project. Giddens's account of the welfare subject contains several weaknesses. It is voluntaristic and yet paradoxically it cannot offer an adequate understanding of radical change. It is also rationalistic and assumes the existences of a unitary and knowledgeable subject. As a consequence there is a danger that social policy develops a lop-sided model of agency which is insufficiently sensitive to the passionate, tragic and contradictory dimensions of human experience. A robust account of the active welfare subject must be prepared to confront the real experiences of powerlessness and psychic injury which result from injustice and oppression and acknowledge human capacities for destructiveness towards self and others. Only by exploring these different subject positions – victim, ‘own worst enemy’ and creative, reflexive agent – can we develop an understanding of the welfare subject which is optimistic without being naive.

While there are feminists in other countries who would like to see the buying of sex made illegal, Sweden is indeed unique for having done so. Sweden's popular form of radical feminism has shown itself to be highly effective in mobilising support and creating a broad consensus on an issue which can be very divisive. This article outlines the Swedish debate about prostitution, to find out why legislation was passed which is barely on the agenda in other countries. While the strength and purpose of the women's movement was a key factor, others also played a part. The women's movement was itself rooted in a popular movement tradition that is particularly effective in influencing government policy. The link between drugs and prostitution provided both a rationale and a symbolic discourse for intervention. Fears about foreign prostitutes and liberal practices abroad played a part. Sweden's weak liberal tradition also made the advocacy of the liberal argument difficult.

By any standard, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore are remarkable health care performers. In this article we document their performance – which in each case combines excellent outcomes with low cost – and argue that across all three cases it has a lot to do with the British colonial legacy. In particular, this legacy has generated a strong state role in health care provision. On the basis of these three experiences, we hold that health care reformers should shift their attention from finance, which continues to be something of an obsession for many contributors to debate, and look more closely at provision.

Employment and social policies continue to be based upon a gender template that assumes women, especially mothers, are or should be natural carers. Invariably, policies that seek to promote women's entry to paid work do so by facilitating their management and conduct of caring work, thus reinforcing the gender template. In addition, contemporary debates around concepts of citizenship emphasise the obligation to paid employment but fail to tackle the gendered division of caring activities and organisation of care. Enhanced access to childcare merely recreates the gender template by promoting low paid jobs for women as paid carers who are predominantly providing care services for other women. The provision of unpaid paternity leave is unlikely to challenge the strong association between femininity, mothering and care work.

In this article we explore notions of caring, home and employment. It is argued that ambivalence exists amongst policy makers, employers, and society more generally, towards the gendered nature of caring and the implications of this for women, and men who wish to care, who are in paid employment. These are old issues and the authors consider why change in social and public policies is so slow. The authors argue that a consideration of gender and equality principles, currently largely absent from welfare and employment policies, and debates on notions of citizenship, should form the basis for the development of future strategies to support parents and children.

This article's starting point is Glennerster et al.'s 1991 question in JSP, 20: 3 whether ‘the decisive break’ they then saw in British social policy represented ‘A New Enlightenment or a New Leviathan’. Evidence is produced from the policy arena of education and training (i.e., learning) to argue that the Learning and Skills Act due for implementation from 1 April 2001 represents an example of the latter rather than the former. The Act is a further step on the road from what was traditionally ‘a national system of education locally administered’ to a national system nationally administered. This is clearly seen when the post-war system of education and training established by the 1944 Education Act is contrasted with the new system of contracting out provision through agencies. In presenting this contrast the article is an exercise in ‘Learning Policy’, described as ‘a new area of social policy … [which] indicates the concerted approach that many governments in developed countries now take to integrate the reproduction of knowledge at all levels in the education institutions under their control with skill formation in training in and out of employment’ (Ainley, 1999, p. 9).

This article examines the situation of institutional care in two Chinese cities. During China's market reforms, previous state welfare homes have encountered significant financial difficulties. At the same time, the demand for institutional care has been on the increase. In response, the Chinese government adjusted previous policies for institutional care in order to mobilise resources from the newly developing market economy. Guided by these new policies, state welfare homes in the two cities tried to solve the problems facing them in creative and entrepreneurial ways. Their efforts gradually changed their financial bases from total reliance on state resources to having more diversified resources. At the same time, new types of welfare homes began to emerge, which were funded by mixed resources from the government, the business society, local communities, and families or individuals. In fact, the coverage of institutional care in one of the two cities was greatly expanded with only very limited state investment.

Although the relationship between unemployment and poor mental well-being has long been an area of interest within behavioural science, the role of state intervention in the unemployment situation has not been thoroughly investigated. This article investigates how unemployment benefit systems and active labour market policy measures affect mental well-being among the unemployed in Sweden. The study uses a longitudinal and nationally representative survey of 3,500 unemployed Swedes. Three different types of active labour market policy measures involving the unemployed were studied, ‘activation’, ‘vocational training’ and ‘work-place participation’ measures. Of these only involvement in ‘workplace participation’ was found to have a clearly positive effect on mental well-being among those participating. Of the two Swedish unemployment benefit systems, the more generous income replacement Unemployment Benefits and the less generous flat rate Cash Unemployment Benefits, only access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was found to mediate the mental well-being impact of unemployment. The positive effect of access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was further accentuated when unemployment was prolonged. Those with access to this benefit system seemed to suffer no further deterioration of mental well-being, while the mental well-being of the rest of the unemployed further deteriorated.

Drawing on neo-classical assumptions many studies generally assume negative effects of female labour supply with systems of married couples' joint taxation. By comparing the structure of rewards or concessions contained in the various tax systems for particular family employment patterns with the frequency distributions of the various family patterns of labour force participation that can be observed in ten different European countries, however, a clear ‘shaping effect’ of tax systems can not be found. This leads to the conclusion that the systems of family taxation alone can not explain emerging family patterns of labour force participation. Only if various social policies, such as the design of the tax system and labour market regulation, family policy, and – most important – childcare supply are coordinated to support a certain model of families' labour force participation that is in line with the preferences of families can a shaping effect be found.

This article examines why, despite similar general interests, institutional positions and political constraints, EU social NGOs find it so difficult to develop co-operative strategies except on the most fundamental issues. To demonstrate these difficulties the article considers the general reasons for and against co-operation between social NGOs and then examines the difficulties and advantages of collective EU social NGO action during the 1998 NGO funding crisis, Red Card protest and civil dialogue. The article argues that there is a fundamental desire for, and are benefits from, close co-operation between the EU social NGOs. However, due to the complex ‘context structure’ within which NGOs must operate, this co-operative impetus is constantly undermined. In conclusion, the article argues that social NGOs will remain weak and insignificant actors until the Commission/Parliament and/or the social NGOs can organise the complex context structure and allow co-operative strategies to emerge.

This article analyses income transfers to elderly households in Korea and Taiwan in order to find out to what extent income maintenance policy contributes to the income of elderly households in these countries. It also examines private transfers to those households since we need to see the outcome of public policy in the broad picture of welfare mix. The article argues that private transfers play a bigger role than public transfers for elderly households. The poorer households are more dependent on private transfers. Nevertheless, private transfers failed to help the elderly escape poverty. It shows that elderly households in general and single- and couple-only households in particular are far more prone to poverty that the general population. Although state pensions are expected to play a bigger role in the future after coming into full operation, public policy has so far failed to improve the living standard of the elderly. This outcome of the research calls for urgent policy intervention to protect the elderly in the wake of the economic crisis in Korea and the massive earthquake in Taiwan.

The introduction of social care markets was one of the main planks of the Conservative government's community care reforms of 1990. The Labour government, whilst emphasising collaboration rather than competition, has not sought to reverse this policy. What have been the consequences? We discuss a decade of market-related change under five heads: purchasers, providers, commissioning, care planning and delivery, and users and carers. There have been quite substantial changes effected by social care markets in each domain, in turn generating a number of pertinent questions for the future success of social care policy in England. One is the very suitability of market-like arrangements in social care. Another is whether transaction costs are too high. More generally, are social care markets structured in a way that will generate the efficiency improvements that successive governments expect of them? Fourth, to what extent will price competition damage quality of care? Finally, will commissioning arrangements mature so as to achieve a better balance between competitive and collaborative modes of working?

While emerging UK policy in relation to adult protection confirms the theoretical primacy of prevention, the meaning thereof is unevenly elaborated. In residential and nursing care, prevention is explicitly promoted via a combination of transparent standards and rigorous regulation. In the domestic and civil spheres, however, the limits of public law protection mean that prevention cannot be conceived in terms of such a unitary model. Drawing on tentative messages from research, this paper explores a range of policies which, while diverse in their explicit aims, could claim to pursue an implicitly preventive objective in relation to abuse. These include community care provision, both generally and with an eye to national service objectives, together with specific funding for the promotion of independence, extending into wider self-help and social inclusion initiatives.