Social Policy

Thinking beyond the market: housing, planning and the state

policypressblog1 Comment
Allan Cochrane
Allan Cochrane

by Allan Cochrane, Open University, UK

Everybody seems to accept that there is something wrong with the way that housing is delivered in Britain, particularly in England. In some parts of the country house prices are stubbornly high and rising; elsewhere there seems to be housing nobody wants. All political parties are committed to enabling people to live in homes that they own, yet levels of home ownership are falling as the proportion of the population living in private rented housing rises. More people now live in private rented accommodation than in social or council housing. The massive decline in council house building since the 1980s has not led to a significant rise in the building of new homes for sale.

The solutions on offer by the major political parties seem to circle around the provision of some sort of subsidy to first-time buyers, as well as looking for ways of persuading (sometimes effectively bribing) local authorities and neighbourhoods to allow developers to build in their areas. Under the last Labour government, regional and local targets were introduced for new housing, albeit with few levers to ensure that the targets would be met. The latest proposal from the Conservative Party is to allow tenants of housing association properties to buy the homes they live in at discounted rates, with little reflection on the extent to which the sale of council houses has brought more private rented property onto the market, rather than increasing home ownership.

There is a powerful rhetoric that blames the planning system for the problems. Planners are said to be too slow to grant permission for development and to Continue reading →

In Defence of Welfare – why the welfare state is good for us

policypressblogLeave a comment
Elke Heins
Elke Heins

Elke Heins is a Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Edinburgh.

After the success of In Defence of Welfare: The Impacts of the Spending Review published in 2011, the UK Social Policy Association (SPA) has produced a follow-up volume in the run-up to the General Election 2015 to make the case for why we need the welfare state. Around 50 UK social policy experts give their verdict on key developments in British social policy over the past five austerity-dominated years. In one of these short contributions to In Defence of Welfare 2 I argue together with Chris Deeming that welfare and well-being are inextricably linked.

Well-being is a concept that has gained significant momentum since the global economic crisis both internationally and within the UK as the measurement efforts by diverse actors, ranging from the OECD and EU to various government and non-government bodies, to replace the one-dimensional GDP with multi-dimensional well-being indicators demonstrate. Measuring individual and societal Continue reading →

Policy, politics, health and housing in the UK by Danny Dorling

policypressblogLeave a comment

Terry Robinson [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Terry Robinson [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Paul Burton introduces Danny Dorling’s paper in Policy & Politics, Policy, politics, health and housing in the UK.

You know you’re in for a bit of a treat when Danny Dorling begins by saying he’s written something that is not in the standard journal style; and so it turns out in his paper ‘Policy, politics, health and housing in the UK’.  His wide ranging analysis connects recent developments in UK housing policy with a variety of current and possible public health impacts and offers some thoughts on the political motivations of those responsible for these developments.  As usual he offers a fine example of engaged scholarship that avoids the piety, academic sniping and wilful opacity that characterises some work in this field.

In a nutshell, since the end of the last millennium we have seen a pronounced rise in private landlordism so that one quarter of all families with children in Britain now live in a home owned by a private landlord, mainly because of transfers of housing from the public sector and the emergence of a tax and welfare regime that underwrites many of the costs of private landlordism.  Dorling acknowledges that this policy direction Continue reading →

What does the impact of financialisation on the welfare state tell us about citizenship?

policypressblogLeave a comment
Craig Berry
Craig Berry

Craig Berry discusses his article ‘Citizenship in a financialised society: financial inclusion and the state before and after the crash’. Craig is Deputy Director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.

All recent governments in the UK have pursued ‘financial inclusion’ at the individual level, as part of the broader agenda around ‘asset-based welfare’, that is, efforts to enable individuals to play an enhanced role in ensuring their own long term financial security through asset ownership.

Financial inclusion ostensibly refers to the ability of individuals to participate in the financial system. At the most basic level, it means access to banking services. Often, the benefits of financial inclusion have been articulated in terms of enabling and incentivising individuals to save. Invariably, however, the aim is to ensure individuals are able to access credit (the economic opposite Continue reading →

The social investment welfare state: the missing theme in British social policy debates

policypressblog4 Comments
Colin Crouch
Colin Crouch

by Colin Crouch, University of Warwick

It is curious how little traction the idea of the social investment welfare state (SIWS) has had in British social policy discussion. The basic idea behind SIWS is that some forms of public social spending contribute positively to creating an innovative economy. Spending on education, skills and active labour market policy are the most obvious elements, but spending on high-quality childcare is also part of the concept. This is partly for its contribution to early-years education but also for making life reasonable for the two-parent-earner family that increasingly characterizes the most productive economies. Of course, elements of this enter British discussions, especially education, but it comes in piecemeal, whereas it gains most strength Continue reading →

Why should we care about social policy language?

policypressblogLeave a comment
Daniel Beland and Klaus Peterson
Daniel Beland and Klaus Peterson

by Daniel Beland (Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy) and Klaus Peterson (University of Southern Denmark)

We should care about social policy language because both scholars and practitioners would gain from understanding where the key concepts they use come from, and how their meaning changes over time and from country to country. In our book, Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Language, with the help of our contributors, we systematically explore the language of social policy, using a comparative and historical perspective. The volume features discussions about social policy concepts and language in 12 advanced in industrial countries (Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, and United States) as well as 3 transnational organizations (European Union, Organisation for Economic Continue reading →

The Social Policy Context of Single Parent Families

policypressblog3 Comments
Laurie Maldonado and Rense Nieuwenhuis
Laurie Maldonado and Rense Nieuwenhuis

by Laurie C. Maldonado and Rense Nieuwenhuis

Our collaboration started off debating each other’s research, over a midday cup of chai tea latte at a Starbucks in New York City. NYC is the home of The Luxembourg Income Study Center at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (LIS Center), where Rense Nieuwenhuis served as a visiting scholar and Laurie C. Maldonado is currently a predoctoral scholar.

Nieuwenhuis had just published his first article, in the Journal of Marriage and Family, which showed that while work-family reconciliation policies facilitate maternal employment across 18 OECD countries from 1975 to 1999, family allowances formed a disincentive for maternal employment. This article is now part of a completed dissertation on “Family Policy Outcomes”. Maldonado co-authored Continue reading →

Policy experts and the making of the ‘Age of Austerity’

policypressblogLeave a comment
Hartwig Pautz
Hartwig Pautz

Hartwig Pautz from the University of the West of Scotland discusses his forthcoming panel at the International Conference of Interpretive Policy,July 2015 in Lille, France.

The relationship between policy expertise and policy outcomes and the role that ‘politics’ plays has inspired a rich and varied literature – with academics, journalists and pro-transparency campaigners making important and thought-provoking contributions. They tackle questions of influence and power, discuss the ‘red lines’ between legitimate exchanges and undue influence and critique the diminishing part which academic scholars play in political discourse.  In short: the role of policy experts and their activities in a complex world is considered by many worth thorough and critically-minded scrutiny.

The near-collapse of the global financial system and the ‘Great Recession’ set in motion, in many western countries, a number of policy changes Continue reading →

Where next after the third way?

policypressblogLeave a comment
Christoph Arndt and Kees van Kersbergen
Christoph Arndt and Kees van Kersbergen

Christoph Arndt and Kees van Kersbergen reflect on their article ‘Social democracy after the Third Way: restoration or renewal?’, available now on Policy & Politics fast track.

What do social democratic parties do after they regain power after the Third Way? This was the guiding question for our study of the public policies of the current Danish social democratic government (2011-2015). The Third Way (TW), with Britain’s New Labour as its forerunner, was at first a successful strategy for many European social democratic parties to regain power after long bourgeois incumbencies in the 1980s and 1990s. However, it usually ended in electoral disaster since TW policies did not square with the preferences and values of many social democratic core voters who then abstained or shifted to Continue reading →

Women are worse affected by the crisis and changes to pensions

policypressblogLeave a comment
Liam Foster
Liam Foster

Liam Foster gives us an insights into his latest article in Policy & Politics on the impact of the latest pension reforms on women. Liam is from the University of Sheffield, UK.

The global economic and financial circumstances since the summer of 2007 are without precedent in post-war history. The resultant higher unemployment, lower growth, increasing national debt and financial market volatility have made it harder to deliver on pension promises and demonstrated serious weaknesses in the design of many pension schemes and their long-term sustainability. The crisis has enhanced existing challenges as well as creating new ones. This has accelerated the momentum of change in relation to pensions in a number of EU countries. Recent strategies to deal with pension challenges have differed with some countries extending help to safeguard private schemes while, in others, pension Continue reading →