Social and Public Policy - Shorts

This book explores the advantages of the capability approach and offers a way forward in addressing conceptual and empirical issues as they apply specifically to social policy research and practice.

A Sharing Economy proposes radical new ways to close the UK’s growing income gap and spread social opportunities. A new social wealth fund would boost economic and social investment and simultaneously strengthen the public finances and offer a powerful antidote to austerity.

During adolescence, young people are exposed to a range of harms and risks beyond their family homes and this book assesses social care organisations’ safeguarding responses across 10 countries. The authors highlight key areas for service development and give insights into how these risks and harms can be responded to in the future.

Drawing on Roma community voices and expert research, this book challenges conventional discourses on Romani identity, poverty and exclusion. Through the transformative vehicle of a ‘Social Europe’, it presents new strategies for framing social justice for Romani communities across Europe and provides innovative solutions to these dilemmas.

In The Right to Buy, Alan Murie provides an authoritative account of the origins, development and impact of the policy across the UK and proposals for its extension in England (and decisions to end it in Scotland and Wales).

This book provides crucial insight into the fight back against austerity by local authorities through emerging forms of municipal entrepreneurialism in housing delivery, examines what this means for the changing relationship between local and central government and provides new ways of thinking about meeting housing need within and beyond the UK.

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.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Bringing to light the most contemporary research, policy and practice, this book presents stark evidence from Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine the root causes of homelessness and provides a robust evidence base to reimagine how we respond to homelessness.

Thom Brooks draws on first-hand experience and interviews with key figures including past Home Secretaries to expose the UK's Citizenship test as ineffective and a barrier to citizenship. This accessible guide offers recommendations for transforming the citizenship test into a ‘bridge to citizenship’ which fosters greater inclusion and integration.

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.

Christopher O’Leary provides a fresh perspective on prosocial working choices in this first substantive critique of Public Service Motivation. The book reviews concepts of PSM and research to date and explores the rationales and aims of public and third sector workers before proposing alternative theories for people’s motivations to serve.