Social and Public Policy - Shorts

This book explores the critical role that local knowledge plays in public policy processes as well as its role in the co-production of policy relevant knowledge with the scientific and professional communities.

The first hand stories in this book, collected through The Children's Society's campaign The Debt Trap, offer a unique understanding of life for families and children fighting a daily battle against poverty and debt.

This book calls for a bold forward-looking social policy that addresses continuing austerity, under-resourced organisations and a lack of social solidarity. Based on a research programme by the Webb Memorial Trust, a key theme is power which shows that the way forward is to increase people’s sense of agency in building the society that they want.

Using new research, Anne Daguerre examines Obama’s legacy on welfare and antipoverty policies, focusing in particular on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Amid urgent debates around the function of welfare in the post-industrial 21st Century, and how we pay for it, David Byrne and Sally Ruane deploy the concepts and analytical tools of Marxist political economy to better understand recent developments, and the possibilities they present for social change.

This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy. It argues that the reforms effectively ‘delawyerise’ disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process.

Arguing that the UK Government intends to privatise all local services through its devolution agenda, Peter Latham proposes a new basis for federal, regional and local democracy, including land value taxation and a wealth tax.

This provocative short book is a valuable introduction to social security in Britain and the potential for its reform.

This book analyses the roots of the current housing crisis in England, critically reviewing the development of policy under successive UK Governments and presenting a specific critique of the current Conservative Government’s housing and planning reforms.

Advising in austerity provides a lively and thought-provoking account of the conditions, consequences and challenges of advice work in the UK. It examines how advisors negotiate the private troubles of those who come to Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) and construct ways forward.

In the UK, as in other rich countries, the ‘playing-field’ is anything but level and the family plays a surprisingly crucial part in maintaining inequality. This book explores how seemingly mundane aspects of family life raise fundamental questions of social justice and calls for a rethink of what equality of opportunity means.