Most debate on home ownership and risk has focused on the management of mortgage debt. But there are other risks for home buyers in settings where housing dominates people's wealth portfolios: where the investment dimensions of property are at a premium; and where housing wealth is, de facto, an asset base for welfare. This article draws from qualitative research with 150 UK mortgage holders to assess the character, extent and possible mitigation of this wider risk regime. The analysis first explores the value home buyers attach to the financial returns on housing. Next we document the extent to which home equity is earmarked and used as a financial buffer. Finally, reflecting on the merits and limitations of this tactic, we conclude by asking whether – in the interests of housing and social policy, as well as with a view to managing the economy – there is any need, scope or appetite for more actively sharing the financial risks and investment gains of housing systems anchored on owner-occupation.

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.

The English NHS has been repeatedly restructured since 1991. Drawing on multiple case studies in English primary health care from 1998 to 2005 and on (other) published studies, this article uses Therborn's theory of power to make a framework analysis of how these reforms redistributed power between medicine and management in NHS primary care. Legal changes ended the GP monopoly of primary medical care provision and, with greater managerial discretion in NHS spending, allowed more diverse organisational forms of primary care provision to appear, although general practice remained predominant. Changes in managerial and professional ideologies relaxed the restrictions on managerial decisions about general practice. Re-negotiations between the medical profession and the state mostly tended to increase managerial power. Evidence-based medicine has tended to weaken the impersonal sources of medical power. On balance, these events have tended to increase managerial power over medical practice. They also suggest adjustments to Therborn's conceptualisation of power.

In the last decade, UK public agencies have increasingly been required to collaborate with non-state providers to deliver welfare services. Third sector organisations are now providers of services from early years to old age, taking a growing role in children and young people's services in socially deprived neighbourhoods. National policy has recognised third sector expertise in working with marginal groups of people. However, changing relationships with the state have drawn community organisations into new, often uncomfortable, organisational arrangements, affecting their work and their roles in relation to service users and community stakeholders.

This article examines recent changes from a third sector perspective, drawing on data from a study of community-based organisations providing children and young people's services in deprived localities. It considers the changing environment of ‘new localism’ affecting these organisations, focusing on recent plans for local area commissioning of services.

The article identifies some progress in supporting community services in deprived areas but illustrates how the continuing emphasis on competitive contracts and centrally driven frameworks undermines collaborative work and community trust. It argues that such mechanisms may serve short-term state interests but devalue the very community-level work, which is increasingly being promoted to address challenging social problems.

Lone mothers are a key target group for government policies to increase employment participation rates. Employment sustainability is central to achieving this goal and thus it is important to understand the factors that affect sustainability. When the lone mother starts work, her daily life changes in various ways, and so do the lives of her children, and perhaps also other family members who may become involved in childcare, or in other forms of help. These social relationships – at home, in work, in care settings, at school – may be a key element in employment sustainability, and one that has not yet been systematically explored in research. This article draws on data from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of lone mothers and their children, which has been following the families from the point that the mothers left income support and started working for at least 16 hours per week. The analysis starts from the assumption that sustaining work over time is a process that actively involves the family as a whole and not just the individual lone mother. In this article we explore how social relationships, inside and outside the family, are central to the ‘family–work project’ of sustaining employment.

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.

Voluntarism has moved to the centre of most western neo-liberal governments' focus in terms of welfare delivery. At the same time, very little of the social policy literature has identified specific historical, cultural and political contexts of place in shaping the particular form of voluntarism and the scale at which it takes place in a country. In order to address policy-related issues of the voluntary sector, a geographical perspective focusing on these local contexts can be very useful in unpacking how the sector can exist across regional and local scales. This article explores the rise of voluntarism in adult learning disability services in Ireland. Ireland experienced the ‘community turn’ much earlier than most Western states, in that the state advocated a ‘hands-off’ approach in learning disability services from the outset. It uses data from 40 interviews with local health agencies, voluntary organisations and informal carers. It critically examines the complex geographical factors that have contributed to the particular form of voluntarism that has evolved, thus demonstrating that understanding levels of voluntary activity requires attention to local circumstances.

Informal payments for health services are widespread in many transition economies in post-communist Europe and the former Soviet Union. Their existence complements and in some cases significantly contributes to the financing of their health systems. It has been suggested that they are the legacy of planned socialist economies and a temporary side effect of the transition from a planned to a market economy. This article discusses the findings of the study investigating the extent and nature of the informal payments and evaluates the policy options on offer. It asserts that despite the level of declared support for moderate cost-sharing by different population groups, it is unlikely that any legalised form of co-payment will affect or replace informal payments, as the government uses them to sustain the illusion of ‘free’ health care. The study argues that the utilitarian gain maximisation principle, calling for the greatest collective welfare in communitarian egalitarianism, and the satisfaction of individual preferences in libertarian economics enable the acceptance of informal payments as a viable policy option.

Gender equity and its effects on fertility vary across socio-political contexts, particularly when comparing less with more developed economies. But do subtle differences in equity within more similar contexts matter as well? Here we compare Italy and Spain, two countries with low fertility levels and institutional reliance on kinship and family, but with employment equity among women during the 1990s slightly greater in Italy than Spain. The European Community Household Panel is used to explore the effect of this difference in gender equity on the likelihood of married couples having a second birth during this time period. Women's hours of employment reduce the birth likelihood in both countries, but non-maternal sources of care offset this effect to different degrees. In Spain, private childcare significantly increases birth likelihood, whereas in Italy, father's greater childcare share increases the likelihood, particularly among employed women. These results suggest that increases in women's employment equity increase not only the degree of equity within the home, but also the beneficial effects of equity on fertility. These equity effects help to offset the negative relationship historically found between female employment and fertility.

Individuals' donations to overseas charities are an important source of funding for development assistance from rich industrialised countries. But little is known about the nature of these charitable donations. The literature on giving focuses on total donations to all causes and does not identify separately the pattern or the determinants of giving to any particular cause. We investigate giving to overseas causes using UK survey microdata that record individuals' donations to different types of charity. We establish a picture of overseas giving, comparing this with giving to other causes. Socio-economic correlates of both types of giving are analysed, including gender, marital status, occupation, education and, especially, income. We also investigate the relationship between individuals' overseas giving and their attitudes towards poverty in developing countries.

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.

Recent Mental Health Acts provide evidence of diverging UK and Scottish government policy styles. The UK legislative process lasted almost ten years following attempts by ministers to impose decisions and an unprecedented level of sustained opposition from interest groups. In contrast, the consultation process in Scotland was consensual, producing high levels of stakeholder ‘ownership’. This article considers two narratives on the generalisability of this experience. The first suggests that it confirms a ‘majoritarian’ British policy style, based on the centralisation of power afforded by a first-past-the-post electoral system (Lijphart, 1999). Diverging styles are likely because widespread hopes for consensus politics in the devolved territories have been underpinned by proportional representation. The second suggests that most policy-making is consensual, based on the diffusion of power across policy sectors and the ‘logic of consultation’ between governments and interest groups (Jordan and Richardson, 1982). The legislative process deviated temporarily from the ‘normal’ British policy style which is more apparent when we consider mental health policy as a whole. Overall, the evidence points to more than one picture of British styles; it suggests that broad conclusions on ‘majoritarian’ systems must be qualified by detailed empirical investigation.

This article achieves two objectives. It introduces new insights to current thinking on social policy in the Middle East based on a case study of religious welfare in Lebanon. This in turn provides an analysis of how faith-based welfare may connect to social policy more broadly. Focusing on how five of the most prominent Lebanese Muslim and Christian welfare organisations engage with poverty reduction, the article draws attention to the moral dimension of social policy-making. This is illustrated by an analysis of how the Lebanese faith-based organisations (FBOs) define the objects of their interventions and, subsequently, how appropriately they respond to the causes of social problems. The analysis also includes a review of the FBOs' evaluation of their services. The overall argument of the article comments on the extent to which social welfare in Lebanon has scope to act beyond short-term, instrumental or politicised goals. It argues that human need, the ‘social case’ and poverty are three core concepts which determine the design of social interventions, but they also serve to confuse the definition of the object of social policy. The argument concludes that needs interpretation by welfare service providers in Lebanon is the site of deep contention in the policy-making process, since the lack of clarity in defining the object of policies can hamper the effectiveness of services. This means that while the social action undertaken by FBOs in Lebanon is more complex than the private or corporate charity initiatives known in the British or North American faith-based contexts, religious welfare programmes in Lebanon are more focused on palliative in-kind services.

This article recounts the methodological story of a qualitative research project that investigated the work of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain and the news media's deconstruction of the Commission's report – the Parekh Report – which was published on 11 October 2000. Our project used a multi-method fieldwork approach, combining textual analysis of news media coverage and the extensive documentary archives of the Commission, along with semi-structured interviews with Commissioners and other figures involved in the publication of the Report. The article attempts to offer a reflexive account of the experiences of interviewing a particular public policy-making elite and examines how a particular ‘public trauma’ – that is, the damaging political fall-out of extremely negative news media coverage of the Parekh Report – inflected our research encounters. We argue that the openness with which many of the participants spoke about this traumatic experience suggests that the production of policy documents can constitute highly emotional labour for participants. We extend this argument by examining how this openness also reveals the instabilities and uncertainties of power within the research interviewee/interviewer relationship. In this way the article seeks to contribute to debates about the problems of defining the category ‘elites’ in both public policy and social research worlds.

This article explores how proponents of a public health model of alcohol policy have, for more than a quarter of a century, argued consistently but unsuccessfully for an integrated national alcohol policy in the Republic of Ireland. It looks in particular at the past decade, a time when increases in alcohol consumption and related problems strengthened the case for such an integrated policy, and when managerial innovations in the sphere of cross-cutting management appeared to provide a template for its implementation. A number of explanations are offered for the refusal of successive governments to respond to what its advocates see as the only rational, evidence-based approach to the prevention of alcohol problems. It is argued that, unlike the Nordic countries, the political culture of independent Ireland has never been one in which the state could unilaterally impose strict alcohol control policies as a feature of its broader vision of the welfare state. It is also argued that during the recent period of economic prosperity (the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ era) the country was characterised by a neo-liberal policy climate, which was specifically antipathetic to the idea that the state should interfere directly in the alcohol market with a view to preventing related problems. It is suggested that the social partnership model of governance, to which many people attributed the country's economic success, created an atmosphere of consensualism within which the state as mediator between the two main protagonists (the public health lobby and the drinks industry) was unwilling to challenge the drinks industry. It is also concluded that this failure to create a national alcohol policy based on public health principles demonstrates the limitations of the cross-cutting, or ‘joined-up’, approach to public management in those areas of social policy characterised by clashing value systems or fundamental conflicts of economic interest. Finally, it is acknowledged that in Ireland, as elsewhere, neo-liberal certitudes have been effectively dethroned by the economic recession and banking crisis of late 2008; whether these more straitened economic circumstances will provide a better fit for the ‘nanny state’ ideals of the public health perspective on alcohol remains to be seen.

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.

While both migration and welfare states are popular topics of research, the intersection between them is rarely studied. In this article, we present the findings of a study that explored migrant workers' conceptualisation of ‘social protection’ and their relationship with the Irish welfare state. The main foci of analysis for the purposes of this article are the migrant workers' understandings, experiences and expectations regarding their social protection and the welfare state. While our findings hint at the presence of many migrant workers who are very poorly anchored into and even completely detached from the Irish welfare state, they also reveal complex and ambivalent attitudes towards component parts of the social protection system. While the findings presented here stem from a qualitative study in a single country, we hypothesise that similar patterns can be identified among the migrant populations in other, particularly liberal, welfare states.