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This article explores the impact of the 'hostile environment' on racialised migrant women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England, arguing that the 'hostile environment' functions as a technology of 'stratified reproduction.' First coined by Shellee Colen, the concept of stratified reproduction describes the dynamic by which some individuals and groups may be supported in their reproductive activities, while others are disempowered and discouraged. This paper locates the stratified reproduction produced by the 'hostile environment' as intertwined with wider gendered and racialised discourses around British citizenship which have been 'designed to fail' racialised residents of the UK. Drawing on interviews with racialised migrant mothers in the north of England, this paper analyses how the proliferation and intensification of immigration controls interacts with gender, race, class, and other social regimes to differentially allocate the resources necessary for a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and how this is experienced materially by pregnant migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the literature on state capacity in financialized political economies by studying the market-based investment setting for the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a £4.2 billion sewer, built underneath central London to prevent raw sewage from spilling into the River Thames. Most analyses conclude that financial statecraft undermines state capacities, as it empowers finance and exposes states to uncontrollable risks. This article moves beyond these accounts by arguing that public policy officials engage with finance instrumentally, taking on risks to solve the governing challenges they face. It demonstrates that state action can build islands of state capacity with financial statecraft in fragmented policy environments. Based on expert interviews and documentary analysis, the article traces how the UK's Ministry of the Environment experimented with a policy instrument and used investment capacities from different levels of government, to implement the Thames Tideway Tunnel through institutional equity investment and share risks in the privatized and financialized environmental sector. The paper concludes that under the current conjuncture, financial statecraft will play an important role in addressing the climate crisis. Therefore, further comparative research is required to explore its normative paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the dramatic evacuation from Kabul airport in August 2021, the UK government proclaimed its commitment to a 'warm welcome' for Afghans. In this paper we draw on original qualitative research to explore the emerging experiences of evacuees, and other recent arrivals, during their first year in London. Using the narratives of our Afghans participants, as well as insights from key stakeholders, we show how they navigated slow, opaque bureaucratic processes and lack of communication with official agencies. As a result of these lengthy processes, many thousands of evacuees remained in temporary hotel accommodation for protracted periods. Drawing on the concept of 'everyday bordering', we explore the extent to which Afghan resettlement policies are achieving their objectives. We consider how such policies are birthed within a punitive immigration system, which is designed to 'wear down' migrants in the UK, regardless of their reason for migration. Moreover, we argue that the ad hoc response of the Home Office and the Foreign Office has created 'false distinctions' between categories of Afghan refugees, reinforcing notions of 'deserving' versus 'underserving' migrants. This distinction allows the government to present itself as humanitarian, 'rescuing' people from Afghanistan, while simultaneously maintaining its commitment to the 'hostile immigration environment'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread recognition that housing is a serious social concern, policy responses have tended to be inadequate. After a brief review of the magnitude of the problem, this paper focuses on recent experience in the UK where, during a period of political volatility, housing has been the subject of significant government interventions, which in turn have provoked noteworthy reactions. However, the paper argues that all current mainstream housing policy proposals are limited by their adherence to the failed market model. Instead, a more radical agenda is proposed which draws on the UK's successful record of public housing. The paper summarises some of the key Conservative government housing policies since 2016 - including the influence of the Grenfell fire - and discusses the Labour Party's response. It particularly critiques the policies of London Mayor Sadiq Khan which relegate traditional council housing in favour of more income-targeted provision. A high-profile report by the housing charity Shelter is also considered because of its apparent reluctance to include explicit reference to council housing within its recommendations, at a time when, it is argued, there is renewed interest in non-market housing alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in basic income proposals. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon, what is different about the current discourse is the Left's wholehearted embrace of what has traditionally been seen as a conservative social policy in Britain. It is my contention that UBI is potentially a dangerous policy for the Left, in that it risks undermining the – admittedly imperfect – welfare protections already in existence. This paper draws on Marxist political economy in order to demonstrate how the emancipatory potential of UBI has been somewhat overstated by some of its Leftist supporters, while a discussion of the neutrality of the State is important in considering how this 'shape-shifting social policy' is likely to be implemented in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social policy falls predominantly under national rather than European Union (EU) jurisdiction, there are nonetheless multiple ways in which social policy and social outcomes in EU member states have been affected by EU membership. This paper draws on existing evidence and analysis to review the consequences for UK social policy of the decision to leave the EU. We focus predominantly on the implications of the British government's pledge to 'take back control' of money, borders and laws. Our conclusion is that Brexit is likely to have negative effects on the quality of public services and, for some groups in particular, social rights, and that these effects are likely to be greater the more distant are the future trading and wider relationships between the UK and the EU27. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of stepmother is, in many ways, a troubled one – constructed as "other" and often associated with notions of "wickedness" in literature and everyday talk. This paper reports findings from a study on the difficulties faced by stepmothers and how they use talk about their (male) partners, often constructing men as hapless, helpless or hopeless, to repair their "troubled" identities. The data were collected from a web forum for stepmothers based in the UK and 13 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with stepmothers. The analysis took a synthetic narrative-discursive methodological approach, underpinned by feminist theory with particular attention to the discourses that were drawn on by participants and the constraints that these imposed. This paper presents these findings in relation to three constructions of their partners through which repair work was attempted: men as in need of rescue ; men as flawed fathers ; and men as damaged. The paper concludes with some suggestions for supporting stepmothers by challenging dominant narratives around families in talk, in the media and in government and institutional policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between flexibility in spatial governance partnerships and their legitimacy. While partnerships have become increasingly prevalent, questions have been raised about their accountability or ‘input’ legitimacy. However, recent research highlights how multiple norms of legitimacy exist and how flexible delivery of aspired outcomes may confer ‘output’ legitimacy to governance processes. This paper explores these issues through examining the delivery of a major urban extension at the edge of Cambridge City, in the East of England. It makes the case that a particular dimension of flexibility, namely flexibility in resource deployment, has been crucial to delivering outcomes underpinned by the shared vision of sustainable communities. This suggests that future research on partnerships could benefit from a more refined analysis of the different ways in which flexibility is exercised and how these may enhance or detract from the legitimacy of partnership arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper shows how regeneration policies in Bradford (UK) have over the years been modified following local, national and international events since 1997. It will be argued that policy makers reacted to public perceptions of the city itself and of its large Muslim community in three phases: celebration of local minority ethnic culture; pathologization of the same; exclusion of any cultural element from the city’s self-projection. The paper suggests that these changes are at the same time reflexive of historical events and hegemonic discourses, and likely to be constitutive (as they have the potential to deeply affect social relations in the city). Further investigation is required to measure such constitutive long-term effects on minority ethnic groups and social relations in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Failure to take climate change seriously enough has resulted in the world now facing a climate emergency, with rising global temperatures, melting polar ice caps, increasingly frequent and severe storms, floods and droughts, and rising sea levels. Despite being the first country in the world to set statutory carbon emissions reduction targets (in the Climate Change Act 2008), the UK government since 2012 has fallen increasingly behind, even by its own standards. This paper details what this has meant in terms of specific policies and identifies some of the reasons for this policy failure: in particular, a negative attitude towards regulation and a return to a reliance on market forces, plus an overriding concern to continue with 'business as usual', in terms of support for fossil-fuel industries and ever-increasing energy demand and supply. Ironically, this has resulted in a situation where radical solutions seem even more necessary and more urgent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon analysis of policy documents and interviews with key policy makers and professionals co-ordinating Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) in various settings, this paper interrogates the socio-political drivers underpinning SRE policy and practice with reference to the contemporary Welsh context. In media output in the UK context and beyond, there have been widespread public concerns about the over-sexualization of young girls, sexual grooming and the increasing commercialization of sex. These issues are also significant in Wales, but a different socio-political culture has led to different public pronouncements and a distinctive SRE approach. In this paper, we outline relatively new Welsh Assembly Government guidance on SRE (March 2010) in the context of a devolved education system. We argue that the characteristics of the Welsh approach to SRE include an emphasis on children’s rights and citizenship values, together with efforts to make SRE delivery more multidisciplinary and integrated. We also identify a different political rhetoric around sexual morality and family values, compared with that of England. This more progressive approach to SRE policy making, implementation and delivery in Wales is contrasted with the more heated pronouncements on the subject emanating from Westminster, particularly in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Labour market activation policies aimed at those with multiple barriers to employment require inter-agency collaboration between local organizations providing social and employment services. This local collaborative context is shaped by different institutional logics (state, markets, professions and community) that are crucial for policy implementation. Using case studies of nine German, UK and Swedish cities, it is argued that different institutional logics help shape the form and operation of local collaboration between different agencies and actors and thus the concrete support for service users at the local level. Although all three countries are characterized by centralized employment policies, each city shows a prevalence, but not exclusivity, of certain institutional logics over others. These differences, partly reflecting the local context, are likely to lead to local variations in understandings of solidarity, policy implementation, inter-agency collaboration and networks of actors and national–local tensions. The paper suggests that an institutional logics approach provides a useful framework for helping to understand local variations and potential national–local policy conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the regulation of commercial sex in the city has traditionally involved formal policing, recent shifts in many jurisdictions have seen sex premises of various kinds granted formal recognition via planning, licensing and environmental control. This means that 'sexual entertainment venues', 'brothels' and 'sex shops' are now not just labels applied to particular types of premises, but formal categories of legal land use. However, these categories are not clear-cut, and it is not simply the case that changes in the law instantiate a change whereby these premises are brought into being at a particular point in time. Countering the privileging of space over time that is apparent within much contemporary research on sex and the city, this paper foregrounds the varied temporalities in play here, and describes how the actions of those policy-makers, municipal bureaucrats and officers allow sex premises to variously 'fade in', accelerate, linger, or disappear as legal land uses within the city. We examine the implications of these different temporalities of the law by exploring how sex premises have been subject to regulation in London and Sydney, showing that the volatile, contradictory and fractured nature of legal space-making does not necessarily provide the certainty sought by the law but produces overlapping and contested understandings of what types of premises should be subject to regulation. More broadly the paper highlights how attention to the contingency and complexity of municipal law can help us better understand the ways that commercial sex is differently manifest in different cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses implications for the practical and theoretical understanding of consent in light of the coming into force of the European Cookie Directive (2009/136/EC). This Directive shifts behavioral advertising from being an opt-out practice to an opt-in one requiring consent. The aim of this paper is to assess conceptions of consent as detailed by the European Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, the UK government and the behavioral advertising industry. This is achieved through the application of philosophical understandings of consent generated in the first half of the paper that detail the ways in which these have been applied in health, an area that deals extensively with informed consent. The paper concludes by offering recommendations to behavioral advertisers on how best to implement opt-in consent policies so as to progress to ethically sound privacy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the themed section of Critical Social Policy on social housing, privatization and neoliberalism. In tracing the key elements in the development of privatization and residualization since 1979, it argues that these can only be fully understood as part of a wider neoliberalizing agenda, an agenda that is driven by a particular class project. The paper also seeks to re-assert the importance of a critical approach to successive decades of social housing policies in the devolved UK, arguing that the classed basis of housing privatization policies has been largely overlooked by academics in favour of an evolutionary and ‘modernizing’ framework which isolates developments in social housing provision from other wider shifts in social welfare and in labour markets. Understanding such processes, it is claimed, is a necessary step in the development of a more socially just and sustainable form of housing provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically engages with a recent shift towards an emphasis on ‘resilience’ in policy and academic fields. The paper suggests that this shift is problematic for several reasons: that it supports normative value judgements; that it may overemphasize the ability of people to ‘bounce back’ and undervalue the hidden costs of resilience, especially those with gendered dimensions; and that it may be associated with policy prescriptions that shift responsibility for dealing with crisis away from the public sphere. The empirical illustration for this analysis is a qualitative study of the impact of economic decline in the Sussex town of Newhaven. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the continuing resilience of the notion of community in social policy making and wider political commentary in the contemporary UK. Focusing in particular on the ways in which community is negatively and positively invoked and mobilized in narratives of the ‘big’ and ‘broken’ societies, it considers why the notion of community, so popular with the previous New Labour government, continues to enchant the present UK Coalition government and has been given added resonance in the context of the economic crisis and of the ‘austerity’ measures currently being adopted. The paper argues that placing community at the heart of current welfare provision illuminates a number of tensions in the UK government’s policy-making agenda. Informed by a discussion of Liverpool – once one of the big society ‘laboratories’ – we highlight the contradictions between top-down, depoliticized understandings of community and the types of community engagement and participation that are to be found in poor, disadvantaged communities in particular. Such communities are also where the impact of UK government ‘austerity’ measures are being most keenly felt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper interrogates a concept at the core of a social policy agenda that has dominated thinking in the UK over the past decade. It argues that the notion of ‘community cohesion’ is based on a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the sources of tension and conflict in Britain’s towns and cities. It overly ethnicizes societal divisions and essentializes ethnicity. Examining the development of government policy since 2001 the paper shows that the result has been a predominantly culturalist agenda that obscures key sources of division, most notably those related to social class and material inequality. It is argued that the hegemonic status of this policy stream has also undermined the equalities agenda. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications of the emergence of a Conservative-led coalition government in May 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the political commitment to rehabilitate citizens who committed various degrees of crimes in Great Britain. The government considers sentencing and punishment practices within the British criminal justice system when it published the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders. The paper covers sentences for threatening someone with offensive weapons, sexual and violent crimes. The impact of the paper on probation is also discussed.

This paper seeks to critically examine the emergence of contemporary religious fundamentalisms and how they have been able to acquire influence in a way that has opened new ‘fault lines’ within multiculturalist public policy discourse. Specifically, the paper is interested in understanding the curiously paradoxical place of religion and faith based groupings in the contemporary multicultural polity, and the confusion, and in some instances conflicts, this has caused amongst the Left. This is illustrated through an extended examination of the Shabina Begum case concerning a Muslim schoolgirl and her demands to wear the jilbab, a specific religious headscarf, to school. It is argued that, in part, these ideological fault lines have resulted from an uncritical embrace by some progressives of ideas associated with postmodernist thinking; in particular the uncritical assertion of virtues of anti-universalism and cultural relativism. This then leaves an urgent task for progressives to think through some alternatives based on a re-articulation of a new political discourse of egalitarianism which is unashamedly universalist and secular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The affordability of housing is a major policy issue that has increasingly become a concern for UK government as house prices have risen dramatically in recent years. This is partly because of the importance of affordability for the recruitment and retention of key workers, many of whom are on national pay scales and earning salaries that do not fully reflect the differences in prices that exist, in particular between London and the South East and the rest of Great Britain. Government policy is to increase the supply of housing in order to improve affordability in the greater South East. However, assuming that this expansion in housing supply is also to be accompanied by an expansion in employment, the outcome is that there will be both an increase in supply and in demand for housing, with the counter-intuitive result that, under one of the scenarios set out in this paper, in some areas affordability will worsen rather than improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For applied psychologists, the goal is to promote positive outcomes among the individuals and groups they serve. Psychological practice takes place within a real-world context, including societal conditions that both harm and support children. Within school and counseling psychology, growing recognition of the impact of society on children has led to efforts to identify social justice as a key framework and set of strategies. Despite the obvious impact of public policy on the lives of children, there is very limited research on pathways and experiences of counseling and school psychologists who are involved in public policy efforts in their capacity as psychologists. This study addresses this gap, interviewing eighteen individuals across the United Kingdom and United States. Key findings include the importance of cultural responsiveness, professional development opportunities, and building and sustaining relationships. Several implications for future research and practice are provided, highlighting the need for multidisciplinary collaboration among those engaged in public policy and social justice efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores employer perspectives on the extension of behavioural conditionality to working social security claimants ('in-work conditionality'). As policymakers across Europe and other developed nations have pursued increasingly interventionist approaches to activating the unemployed through conditional welfare policies, the UK has gone a significant and 'unprecedented' step further by requiring those in receipt of in-work benefits to demonstrate their efforts to increase their working hours and/or pay. As the actors ultimately in control over the jobs people can access and progress in, understanding employer perspectives on this new policy development is critical, which, however, has so far been overlooked by policymakers and researchers. We address this omission through presenting original analysis of 84 semi-structured interviews conducted with a diverse group of employers. We find that while the UK's Work First approach to activation has seemingly encountered little resistance from employers to date, this new Work First, Work More approach may be a step too far. We contribute theoretically by identifying a potential role for employers as latent path disruptors in policy development, and challenge the commonly-held assumption that employers are typically supportive of extensions of behavioural conditionality to social security claimants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the ‘night-time economy’ in the UK through the 1990s has been associated with neoliberal urban governance. Academics have, however, begun to question the use and the scope of the concept of ‘neoliberalism’. This paper identifies two common approaches to studying neoliberalism, one exploring neoliberalism as a series of policy networks, the other exploring neoliberalism as the governance of subjectivities. It is argued that to understand the urban night, we need to explore both these senses of ‘neoliberalism’. As a case study, the paper takes the ‘Alive After Five’ project, organised by the Business Improvement District in Newcastle upon Tyne, which sought to extend shopping hours in order to encourage more people to use the city at night. Drawing from actor–network theory, the planning, the translation and the practice of this new project are explored together with the on-going nature and influence of neoliberal policy on the urban night in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

NHS research governance makes it almost impossible to collect certain kinds of data on the everyday life of hospitals and the experience of patients. Fortunately, those of us who get sick enough to be admitted can write about the experience without fear of regulation. This paper presents some observations on clinical ethics, ward organization and infection control that would have been difficult to obtain in any other way, but which illustrate the policy and information costs of the present system. While not personally recommending this as a research strategy, the paper identifies a growing evidence gap and comments on its implications for the delivery of humane and well-organized care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing policy focus since the 1970s in Scotland, the UK and internationally on ‘community’, community development and community ownership and enterprise has facilitated a certain growth of the community sector and therefore of concern for related discussions of theory and practice. This paper positions this turn to community within the shifting global political economic context, in particular the rolling out of the neoliberal state internationally from the 1980s and a related urban crisis management of structural inequality (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). By focusing on the emergence of community anchor organisations – understood in the UK context as multi-purpose, local community-led organisations – within Scottish and UK policy-making since the 2000s, the central dilemma for critical community sector theory and practice of sustaining a local egalitarian vision and practice (Pearce, 2003) given this neoliberal context is explored. A Scottish urban community anchor provides an illustration of this challenge for theory and practice and of how it can be re-considered through discussions of ‘progressive mutualism’ (Pearce, 2009) and ‘resilience, re-working and resistance’ (Cumbers, 2010; Katz, 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents personal stories from a participatory biographical arts-based study with a specific category of racialised migrants: individuals seeking asylum, in the North East of England. Responding to the important questions posed by this special issue, the article explores individual experiences of navigating the UK's hostile environment with a focus on the threefold punitive 'threat' of dispersal, detention, and destitution (Bloch and Schuster, 2005). Adopting an intersectional lens, the discussion highlights the impact of such policies and their compound effect of creating (un)safe and exclusionary everyday spaces, while also outlining the potential for resistance as illustrated by participants' actions and their creative (re)actions as part of the study's arts-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper subjects to critical scrutiny the idea of the ‘big society’ which, at present, is the UK Coalition government’s big idea and the personal mission of the Prime Minister David Cameron. First of all the concept is explained, with reference to some of the rhetoric surrounding it. Then the philosophical foundations of the ‘big society’ are unpacked, with particular reference to Red Toryism and libertarian paternalism. This is followed by an assessment of the big society and reference to the other major plank in the government’s social policy agenda, large cuts in public expenditure, that reflects the neo-liberal engine driving the strategy – the hollowing-out of the state – which has implications for the community initiatives and NGOs favoured by the big society’s promoters but which are entirely unacknowledged by them. Then a comparison is made between the present big society idea and Margaret Thatcher’s denial of the existence of society, which reveals many similarities in substance despite the rhetorical distancing. The final part of the paper examines the parallel Blue Labour analysis and suggests an alternative participatory democratic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this commentary we focus upon resistance to the UK’s Work Experience programme that aims to help the young unemployed secure paid employment. The programme hit the news headlines in February 2012 when the group, Right to Work, forced concessions from the UK’s Coalition government that removed sanctions for Work Experience conscripts who left their placement after a week. The paper critically engages with the Right to Work’s demand for ‘real jobs’, paying at least the minimum wage, suggesting that such demands are in danger of buttressing capitalist exploitation, rather than providing an alternative to it. The paper argues a more radical approach is required if the role of policies, such as Work Experience, in the societalization of capitalist accumulation is to be avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As subjects of the parental right to choose (DES, 1988), parents are called upon to fulfil certain duties and responsibilities when choosing a secondary school for their child, with the expectation that they might navigate the school system ‘successfully’ and become ‘better informed consumers’ (DCSF, 2008). To comply with these rules of citizenship parents are encouraged to make use of a variety of information on schools as part of a realistic and informed choice, one that is consummate with their role as consumer-citizens. Such ‘cognitive mapping’ is evident in school brochures and websites where choice is assembled on the basis of visual iconography and narrative terrains. This leads to a consideration of how choice is visually mediated and communicated through the circulation of symbols and the structure of narratives. To explain these phenomena, I analyse and compare the ways in which two all-girls faith secondary schools attempt to (further) define themselves, culturally, historically and pedagogically, in a crowded field of choice. I conclude the paper with a discussion of the benefits and insights generated through a visually orientated approach to the study of school choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that conceptualisations of sustainability are fundamentally limited. The conceptualisation of sustainability operating within urban regeneration schemes should powerfully shape how they make manifest (or do not) the principles of sustainable development. Documents guide, but people implement regeneration— and the disparate conceptualisations of stakeholders demonstrate even less coherence than policy. The actions towards achieving sustainability have become a policy ‘fix’ in Eastside: a necessary feature of urban policy discourse that is limited to solutions within market-based constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of area-based deprivation indices is now a firmly established means of assessing which areas ought to be the focus of government policy, with separate indices of deprivation established for each constituent part of the UK. In England, the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 has been widely used to support decision-making for key urban policies and in more local assessments of deprivation. Implicit in the development and use of these indicators is the notion that area matters and that it can be an important influence on a whole range of different activities. However, there is also a sense in which contemporary measures of deprivation are spatially short-sighted since they are not able to account formally for the spatial context of individual locations. This paper therefore offers an alternative approach to the measurement of local conditions by combining spatial statistical approaches with a much-used deprivation index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context in which the current 'debate' about Muslim women and the veil is taking place, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, is that of the new orthodoxy, the 'clash of civilisations'. This attempts to explain much of the world's political turmoil in terms of a clash between the ('secular modern') West and the ('traditionalist religion') Islam. The increased visibility of veiled bodies in Britain today has stirred a response that draws on long-standing orientalist oppositions and reworks them in the current climate of the 'war on terror', connecting them to parallel racist discourses about 'threats' to British culture. Sections of the British media have homogenised the variety of Muslim veiling practices and have presented the veil as an obstacle to meaningful 'communication'; an example of Islamic 'refusal' to embrace 'modernity'. Veiled women are considered to be ungrateful subjects who have failed to assimilate and are deemed to threaten the 'British' way of life. This paper reviews the debate over the veil in Britain in the context of British foreign policy, attacks on civil liberties, the further marginalisation of poor communities and the politicisation of British Muslims, where the veil is an increasingly political image of both difference and defiance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'User Involvement' has become the new mantra in Public Services with professionals constantly being reminded that 'user knows best'. The purpose of this paper is to ask where the preoccupation with 'the User' comes from and to pose some questions about what 'User Involvement' actually means. Within our paper we see three issues as central within this. The first is a consideration of the historical antecedents of the discourse of 'User Involvement', focusing in on the struggles over British welfare that took place around tile late 1970s--early 1980s. This forms the context from which we seek to understand and critique the New Labour project in relation to the massive expansion of regulatory frameworks. We argue that, far from enabling the delivery of high quality integrated services that truly reflect the interests of current and future users, these policies represent the further commodification of basic human needs and welfare. Finally, it has become apparent the current 'User' discourse has assumed contradictory manifestations, in particular the emergence of groupings of 'professional users' who participate in the formation of state policy as 'expert consultants'. We conclude by arguing for an approach in which user perspectives are neither privileged nor subjugated, but are situated in a process of creative critical dialogue with professionals, which is linked to the development of a concept of welfare driven by emancipatory rather than regulatory imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from part of an evaluation study of the Communication Aids Project (CAP), a government-funded project in England which provided communication aids to school-aged children. The paper focuses on parents' views of the CAP process and the impact of the aid. Fourteen parents were interviewed twice over the telephone: once before or just as their children received communication aids and again six to eight weeks later. Parents expressed satisfaction with the impact of the aid on their children's lives and showed they had realistic expectations concerning potential short- and long-term benefits. They raised two main concerns regarding the provision of aids, namely the timescale involved and access to accurate information and advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues both that devolution is central to our understanding of developments in social policy in the contemporary UK and that social policy is a key means through which we can develop a critical understanding of the process of devolution itself. Much of the devolved powers available to the governments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff centre on social policy innovation and practice. Devolution was widely welcomed as opening up the potential for the development of radically different social policies. However, the discussion of devolution has been largely dominated by an approach that focuses on institutional and/or organizational differences marginalizing, in the process, the wider social relations of welfare around which social policy is organized. In bringing the study of devolution into the heartland of social policy analysis, it is argued that we can begin to develop a more critically informed appreciation of social policy across the entire devolved UK. Through critical social policy analysis we can both evaluate and explain the complex interrelations between devolved governance and the continuing reproduction of inequalities and social divisions throughout the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of British government policy on accommodation for people with learning disability compares two White Papers: Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped (DHSS, 1971) and Valuing People (DOH, 2002). NHS employment issues muted the influence of Better Services. Statistics show a slow transfer from the NHS to other providers, but little development of independent living alternatives since 1971, despite a policy emphasis on social inclusion themes in recent policy. Promotion of housing choice, where residential care provision dominates, inhibits inclusive housing. Valuing People does not address the potentially conflicting choices of disabled people and their families and is critical of local authorities for not supporting large-scale residential care. Supported living alternatives cannot receive sufficient support where residential care agencies' interests predominate. Better incentives are needed for local authorities to provide support for people with learning disabilities to safely live in a home of their own rather than in residential care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we assess the findings of the UK energy market investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority, conducted during June 2014-June 2016. We argue that the results of the investigation have been advantageous for the large energy companies and they risk failing to bring any significant and positive change to the energy industry. We highlight three major aspects of the Competition and Markets Authority's assessment. First, the panel examined retail and wholesale segments of the energy industry in isolation, which can be misleading in the assessment of vertical integration. It also considered new entries to the sector as a sign of competitive strength when many were due to favourable government policies in the form of exemptions from various obligations. Second, its conclusion that a position of unilateral market power by the large energy companies arises from weak customer engagement (i.e. low switching rates) shifts the focus and responsibility for the problems of the energy markets away from the conduct of the companies onto customers. Finally, the investigation placed an overemphasis on competition without due reference to its consequences for consumers' welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social housing across Western Europe has become significantly more residualised as governments concentrate on helping vulnerable households. Many countries are trying to reduce the concentrations of deprivation by building for a wider range of households and tenures. In England this policy has two main strands: (1) including other tenures when regenerating areas originally built as mono-tenure social housing estates and (2) introducing social rented and low-cost homeownership into new private market developments through planning obligations. By examining where new social housing and low-cost home ownership homes have been built and who moves into them, this paper examines whether these policies achieve social mix and reduce spatial concentrations of deprivation. The evidence suggests that new housing association development has enabled some vulnerable households to live in areas which are not deprived, while some better-off households have moved into more deprived areas. But these trends have not been sufficient to stem increases in deprivation in the most deprived areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, a long continuing battle began to find out more about Government record-keeping on the deaths of disabled people claiming benefits. Drawing on a timeline of evidence co-produced with disabled people, we analyse how deaths related to the benefits system are an outcome of slow violence, where both the delay between policies and their harmful effects, as well as the more active use of delay tactics, are central to how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) weaponise time as a strategy to avoid accountability and deny justice. DWP reviews into deaths are an under-researched yet significant focus because they are (supposedly) tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own policies, and yet, they are designed and carried out in a way that systemically invisibilise state accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersex people suffer human rights abuses and harms because of non-consensual early medical interventions. They have historically been rendered outside of welfare regimes and equality, diversity and inclusion policies, or forcibly subsumed within sex-binaried institutions. This article draws on critical intersex studies to interrogate the policy silences and collusions that have taken place regarding intersex people's suffering. Using Ireland and England as case studies, we show that current formations of equality and diversity policies are inadequate in relation to intersex issues. Analysis of policy documents from Ireland and the UK using Bacchi's method reveals the erasure and/or marginalisation of intersex people, despite some stated commitments to gender and sexual equality. We conclude that there is a pressing need for social policy work around intersex issues and for reform to support intersex people's equality, diversity and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Immigration Act 2016 is central to the Conservative Government's drive to create a more hostile environment for potential migrants and current 'illegal' migrants residing in the UK. The Right to Rent provisions of the Act, which require private landlords in England to conduct mandatory immigration document checks on prospective tenants, or face sizeable fines and criminal prosecution, have been highlighted as a key facet of the legislation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key experts and analysis of Home Office guidance documents, we argue the Right to Rent has turned the private rental market into a border-check, with landlords responsibilised to perform 'everyday bordering' on behalf of the State. This creates a potentially discriminatory environment for all migrants, as well as for British citizens who lack documentation and/or may be subject to racial profiling. It may also be forcing vulnerable, undocumented migrants into even more precarious housing situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses relations between sub-national institutional actors responsible for the attraction and retention of foreign direct investment, other ‘governance’ actors in regional business systems – local and sub-regional government, cluster/sectoral bodies, RDA and LEP executives, and those involved in the coordination of skills provision – and subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. It is based on qualitative research in two regions of England conducted between 2008 and 2011. Within a context of international competition for investment within global production networks, it explores recent politically driven changes in sub-national governance, including the abolition of Regional Development Agencies, alongside the more long-standing instability of economic development and skills coordination in England. The analysis is centred on an argument that a more adequate understanding of sub-national economic governance requires the active integration of perspectives on political systems of governance, and embedded patterns of economic coordination, as analysed in the varieties of capitalism literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the relevance of diagnosis in general practice to implications for quality of care in Great Britain. It examines studies that concentrate on respiratory and non-respiratory illnesses which reveal the factors that affect the making of diagnostic and management decisions in general practice. It notes the policies enacted to improve public health in the area which include a strong focus on the long-term health needs of patients.

Suicide prevention policies set out government strategies and priorities for action and in doing so construct meanings, legitimise knowledge and frame possibilities. Despite their importance, prevention policies remain underexamined and taken for granted. Using Bacchi's poststructuralist 'What's The Problem Represented To Be' approach we critically analyse UK suicide prevention policies as sites of biopolitical surveillance and consider how suicide is constructed within such policy regimes. Drawing on Foucault, we contextualise suicide as an object and focus of biopolitical surveillance. We argue that suicide prevention policies seek to negate the contingency and complexity of suicide and instead represent it as amenable to biopolitical governance. Prevention policies do this by framing suicide as a visible and predictable object that can be known and governed via surveillance driven risk management. Such policies risk marginalising some publics, and diverting attention from the political, social and economic contexts of injustice in which suicides occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market-based approaches to service provision are heterogeneous. The point is often lost in comparative welfare state research due to the dominance of the welfare regime approach, which emphasizes the prevailing locus of provision (state, market or family) over other dimensions of a mixed economy: finance and regulation. Comparing the cases of the British and American approaches to early childhood education and care, this paper argues that these broadly similar ‘liberal’ welfare regimes exhibit qualitatively different approaches to market-based service provision – market manager (UK) versus market moderator (US) – through the state’s role as financier and regulator. Evidence is drawn from a variety of primary and secondary sources, including prior academic studies, national policy documents, and national and international statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the Coalition government announced its plans for adoption reform which included ‘removing barriers’ to transracial adoption. The government has blamed social workers’ looking for ‘perfect ethnic matches’ for denying black and minority ethnic children placements with ‘loving and stable families’. The paper draws upon qualitative research with professionals and parents, which shows that the government has failed to take into account the complex ways in which race and ethnicity matter within adoption. Their wish to deracialize transracial adoption fits with wider concerns about race mixing, families and national belonging in multicultural Britain. While they attempt to minimize the importance of race and ethnicity, they continue to place race at the heart of these debates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the development of the Right to Buy, introduced by the Housing Act 1980, from the standpoint of governmentality, risk and responsibilization. Our focus is on the risks not only to the purchasers but also to local authorities and to those tenants who have not purchased their homes. We trace how these risks have been assessed, allocated and rebranded, by central government, by local authorities as landlords with wider responsibility for housing issues in their local area, and by the judiciary. Our analysis, for the first time, points out the sharp contrasts between these three arms of government. Central government has promoted the Right to Buy as an opportunity through technologies such as ideological policy documents, legislation and regulations, within a governing rationality which has succeeded in normalizing the tenure of owner-occupation. Local authorities recognized from the outset the risks associated with the Right to Buy both to individual purchasers and more widely. The courts have allocated risk on the basis of individual responsibility, implicitly supporting local authorities. Despite neoliberal policies and ideology emphasizing the free market, central government has reduced or re-allocated risks through interventions to protect purchasers and also the broader community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of devolution on social welfare for older people and the associated administration of age equality. Analysis of policy discourse, rights and stakeholders’ views reveals divergent practice in the constituent nations of the UK. In normative terms this is shown to present a tension between universal welfare rights and entitlements – and regional differentiation. It is argued that this presents a dilemma in terms of territorial justice. Whilst, in distributive-welfare terms, variations between polities might be seen as unjust, they are founded on the autonomy of national minorities to determine local priorities and are shown to have fostered progressive practices that go beyond the prescriptions of the central state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]