disability

Quarterly highlights collection: policy evidence, institutional capacity and the limits of state action

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by Sarah Brown & Allegra Fullerton


This quarter’s highlights collection brings together three of Policy & Politics’ most read open access articles of 2025. Taken together, they speak to a shared concern at the heart of contemporary policy scholarship: how governments define, authorise and act on evidence under conditions of institutional constraint, political short-termism and contested authority. Each article examines a different moment in the policy process — from the mobilisation of lived experience, to the organisation of state capacity, to the formal enactment (and non-enactment) of law — offering complementary insights into why policy ambition so often falters in practice. 

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When is a law not a law? And why does that matter to long-term care?  

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by Catherine Needham and Emily Burn

When is a law not a law? When it gets passed into statute but never enacted. Lord Norton (a Conservative peer and expert on UK parliament) calls these cases ‘law but not law’. Such cases have been missed in the policy literature to date. Existing literature looks at the difficult process of policy design and policy making, taking it to the moment of legislative approval. Other literature takes it from the point of enactment to see how well the implementation fares. But there has been a failure to acknowledge a slim but important set of cases in which policies which gain legislative endorsement but are never enacted. A review by the UK House of Lords library found 480 such examples in the UK parliament between 1960 and 2020. In a system where the executive usually controls the legislative agenda and is not required to implement legislative mandates that it did not instigate (eg. Westminster in the UK), non-enactment represents a particular puzzle.

In our recent article in Policy and Politics, we explore the phenomenon of non-enacted policy through the example of long-term care funding in England. Two legislative interventions to reform long-term care funding in England have been abandoned prior to enactment. A package of reforms – including a cap on private liability for care costs and an increase in the means-test threshold – was passed into law in the Care Act 2014, but enactment was first delayed and then abandoned. A very similar reform package was then passed into law again in the Health and Care Act 2022, with implementation scheduled for 2023. This too was delayed and then abandoned.

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The Welfare State on the Chopping Block

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zach_morrisZach Morris, Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare

Zach Morris, 2017 winner of our Bleddyn Davies Prize for the best article from an early career scholar, summarises the findings from his winning article, which is free to read until 15 June 2017.

With the Republican Party in power in the US, the welfare state is once again on the chopping block. And disability benefit programs – traditionally designed for the “deserving poor” – may not be protected from these cuts. So, what political strategies are retrenchment advocates pursuing? And will their efforts succeed?

As discussed in my P&P article, a major safeguard against disability benefit retrenchment in the US is its structural positioning as a “Social Security” program. In the UK, the disability benefit program has always been considered distinct from the old-age “State Pension” program. But in the US, the disability and old age programs have historically been grouped together under the auspices of the Social Security Administration. This connection between disability benefits and the more popular old-age program provides a form of institutionalized protection to the US disability program and is a major reason why that program has historically proven so difficult to cut. Continue reading →

Individualised disability funding in Australia and England – different design, same challenges

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needham-and-dickinsonCatherine Needham, University of Birmingham and Helen Dickinson, University of Melbourne

In July 2016, the full national roll out began of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

This scheme, which has been piloted in several localities in the last three years, constitutes a major new investment in disability services in Australia. We have been undertaking research and writing on the implementation of NDIS and comparing it to our earlier research on personalisation and a critique of individual budgets and personalisation in English social care services. Continue reading →

Setting the stage for another reform? Changing narratives around disability benefit recipients in the UK

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Zach Morris
Zach Morris

by Zach Morris, School of Social Welfare, University of Berkeley, USA

The Department of Work and Pensions recently released the statistics for those who died after being found “fit for work,” and thus ineligible for disability benefits in the U.K. The Guardian reports that nearly 90 people a month are dying after being found fit for work. Caution is due, however, before interpreting the outcome of the assessment process as the cause of these deaths. Yet, the emergence of these figures and their wide reporting in the press shed light on how the public is coming to perceive the country’s recent experiment with disability benefit cuts. The growing attention to this issue could lead to increasing support for disability benefit recipients, which, as reported in my P&P article on the topic and shown below, has been in decline for many years. If so, now may prove an opportune time for political entrepreneurs Continue reading →