Labour and Conservatives' claims that welfare conditionality is ‘fair’ rely upon an empirically unsupported assumption that almost-equal opportunities can exist alongside starkly unequal outcomes. Fifty interviews examined in-depth a diverse sample's values, views about work and welfare, and labour market choices. Respondents' views on equality strongly influenced their views on conditionality and what they considered acceptable labour market behaviour. ‘Alternative’ unemployed respondents, who rejected politicians' suggestions they ‘should work’, nevertheless favoured an equal society with work obligations and often undertook voluntary work. The article concludes that policy-makers should be more sensitive to Jobseeker's Allowance claimants' diverse moralities and motivations.

The 2008 recession presents a double challenge to legal aid. Unemployment extends legal aid eligibility. It is also associated with increased vulnerability to problems involving legal rights, feeding demand for legal services. Job loss, as distinct from unemployment, might be expected to increase vulnerability further still. In this paper, we set out findings from a first analysis of the relationship between job loss and the experience of rights problems. In the context of the current recession, we set out the likely scale of the recession's impact on the incidence of rights problems and demand for legal (and legal aid) services.

This paper reflects on a community research project aimed at building the capacity of Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs). The project intended to identify and collect a robust and reliable evidence base to equip RCO leaders with the relevant information required to engage in policy lobbying to raise awareness of the barriers faced by refugees when trying to access ESOL and support for mental health issues, education and employment. The main mechanism used to collect evidence was a team of 16 paid community researchers from a range of refugee backgrounds. This paper considers the rationale for adopting a community research approach, the meaning of community research to those involved, as well as the methodological challenges and practical concerns associated with the approach.

This article, based on a study conducted in a multi-ethnic Sure Start programme between 2003–6, explores aspects of the interface between policy, implementation and use of services. The early Sure Start discourse depicted parents both as legitimate recipients of support and as active and aspirational agents. It is argued that the second of these identities, tapping into a ‘social investment’ agenda, increasingly characterised the direction of the policy discourse. Interview data from professionals in the case study area about local need and use of services, however, emphasised the ‘constrained agency’ of many local mothers, and the inappropriateness therefore of the perceived direction of policy.

UK policy promotes third sector organisations as providers of NHS funded health and social care. We examine the evidence for this policy through a systematic literature review. Our results highlight several problems of studies comparing non-profits with other provider forms, questioning their usefulness for drawing lessons outside the place of study. Most studies deem contextual factors and the regulatory framework in which providers operate as much more important than ownership form. We conclude that the literature does not support the policy of a larger role for the third sector in healthcare, let alone a switch to a market-based system.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, UK policy and practice has become increasingly overt in its concern with families. In January 2010, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF, 2010) launched the Support for All: The Families and Relationships Green Paper. In its Foreword, Ed Balls, the then Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presented ‘Strong, stable families’ as ‘the bedrock of our society’, positioning the Green Paper as ‘supporting families to help themselves’, whilst ‘ensuring that all public services play their part in supporting strong and resilient family relationships’ (DCSF, 2010: 3). The Centre for Social Justice offered an immediate response with its own Green Paper on the Family, emphasising the role of ‘family breakdown’ as ‘the root’ of ‘pathways to poverty’ for many, as well as a barrier to appropriate childhood development and positive ‘future life outcomes’ (Centre for Social Justice, 2010: 4).

‘Whole family’ approaches to intervention and prevention have raised the profile of ‘family’ within social policy, where the family is constructed as a site of child care and protection, neglect and disadvantage. However, ‘family’ is a taken-for-granted and narrowly defined concept within policy documentation, and often used interchangeably with ‘parents’. This paper uses Sevenhuijsen's (2003) ‘Trace’ approach to explore the use of the concept of ‘family’ across a number of interrelated social policy streams. The efficacy of familial approaches is considered through a feminist ethic of care approach that questions both gendered and generational assumptions about families in practice.

A review of models and approaches to family-based policy and service provision for those at risk of social exclusion suggests three distinct categories. In the first category, approaches seek to strengthen the ability of family members to offer support to a primary service user within that family. In the second category, family members are recognised as having their own specific and independent needs arising out of their relationship with the primary service user. The third category includes ‘whole family approaches’ focused on shared needs and strengths that could not be dealt with through a focus on family members as individuals.

This article describes the contested and underdeveloped backdrop to ‘“whole family” approaches’, whereby families with care and protection needs are caught in a conflicting set of policy and practice expectations concerning responsibility to care whilst being positioned as families that fail. Questions are raised about how supported families are to navigate their way through these permissive and punitive policies and practices. We suggest that there is an urgent need for more ‘bottom–up’ research informed by the ethic of care to develop the kinds of policies and practices that might make it more possible for them to do so.

Disabled parents can experience difficulties when trying to access services to support their parenting role, and this is exacerbated wherever disability continues to be articulated as if it were impairment and associated with a need for ‘care’. Disabled parents and their families experiences of services demonstrate that, for a family approach to be positively developed within social policy, individuals should be kept in sharp focus by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. Failure to do so can result in the problematisation of parents who have support requirements, itself a barrier to the development of appropriate services for parents and families.

In the UK, the issue of parent abuse remains an unacknowledged and under-researched form of family violence receiving little recognition within social policy and professional practice. This may in part be due to the way it transgresses conventional notions of family power relations in which children are seen as potential victims but not as perpetrators. In this paper, we develop a framework for analysing the complexity of family power relations and explore how these may inform the context in which parent abuse and victimisation occurs. This may help to inform constructive policy and practice responses to this issue.

As this themed section has illustrated, understanding and supporting families with multiple and complex needs is an area of policy and practice that is gaining importance and emphasis in the UK. This growth in interest is reflected in the developing field of family focused policy and practice work. In this article, we review a range of recent government-led initiatives and interventions developed principally through the Cabinet Office's Social Exclusion Task Force Think Family initiative. Whilst we recognise that there are a number of related policy documents and initiatives (many of which are discussed by Murray and Barnes in this edition), we choose to focus on Think Family due to its emphasis on a ‘whole family’ approach for families facing multiple sources of disadvantage.