Social and Public Policy - All titles

Social Policy Review is an annual selection of commissioned articles focusing on developments and debates in social policy. Social Policy Review 14 reviews a varied and interesting selection of social policy developments in Britain and internationally, and sets current policy developments in a broader context of key trends and debates.

Evaluating New Labour's welfare reforms builds on the analysis of bestselling 'New Labour, New Welfare State?' (The Policy Press, 1999) to examine the Government's welfare policies to the end of its first term. It moves beyond a descriptive account to provide an evaluative perspective on New Labour's welfare reforms.

It is widely assumed today that the 'welfare state' is contracting or retrenching as an effect of the close scrutiny to which entitlement to social security benefits is being subject in most developed countries. In this book, fifteen authorities from nine different countries investigate to what extent this assumption is warranted.

The study, when published in 2002, received coverage across the globe from Brazil to Greece and attracted the support of the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. Anyone interested in understanding, campaigning or simply debating the issues facing policy makers today will find this book a rich and compelling resource.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.

Childhood poverty and social exclusion offers a rare and valuable opportunity to understand the issues and concerns that low-income children themselves identify as important. Using child-centred research methods to explore children's own accounts of their lives, this original book raises critical issues for both policy and practice.

There is a growing recognition that people over the age of fifty experience discrimination in the labour market. This ground-breaking report provides new evidence that ageism and discrimination are also having devastating effects on the lives of people as young as forty, with a cost to the economy of up to £31 billion per year.

This book presents a psychosocial examination of changing relationships between service users, professionals and managers in the post-war welfare state. It challenges current emphasis on consumer rights by linking social responsibility to its psychosocial roots and theorises the links between experiences of care and development of social policy.

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.

It is often argued that the regulated labour markets, relatively generous social protection and relative wage equality of European welfare states has become counter-productive in a globalised and knowledge-intensive economy. Using in-depth analysis of employment, welfare and citizenship in a range of European states, this book challenges this view.

Against a background of population ageing, policy makers in the majority of industrialised countries are developing policies aimed at extending working life and promoting the benefits of employing older workers. This report reviews developments in several countries and offers recommendations for public policy.

This report demonstrates the urgent need to re-evaluate our understanding of poverty and home ownership. Drawing on data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain, it presents a detailed picture of the realities of home ownership at the margins, providing evidence in support of radical policy for sustainable home ownership.