‘Race’: the missing dimension in social policy higher education?

This chapter discusses the key analysis and messages from the Social Policy Association (SPA) race audit, looking at the challenges facing the discipline. The report was tasked with looking at social policy in terms of student composition, staff composition, conference/journal content, and curriculum content. Social policy has treated debates on ‘race’ and racism as marginal for too long, as reflected in the relative absence of ‘race’ from the major social policy journals. An important issue that has arisen is that the SPA has never made use of ethnic monitoring in membership applications, making it impossible to assess the representativeness or otherwise of its membership. The SPA clearly has some way to go to persuade social policy academics of the importance of confronting this challenge, and this is unlikely to happen without a major cultural shift within higher education institutions (HEIs) and the discipline more broadly.

After a decade of austerity, does the UK have an income safety net worth its name?

This chapter explores the evolution of the level of benefits entitlement of different UK families and whether these are enough to meet minimum needs. It uses the Minimum Income Standard, a family-specific budget derived by iterative group discussions between people from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds, supplemented by selective inputs from nutrition, domestic, and transportation experts. Since 2010, safety net benefits have declined but pensioners' entitlements are much closer to what they need (just over 90 per cent). This ties into the widespread perception that pensioners have been protected from the worst effects of austerity. On average, families with children get slightly over half and singles without children only a third. The chapter concludes that although the UK's safety net benefits have never maintained a systematic link with need, they have recently become less adequate and more arbitrary. It provides a strong case for strengthening the link between basic household needs and government safety net benefits.

No way home: the challenges of exiting homelessness in austere times

This chapter explores the ways in which austerity manifests at the ‘street level’ for a particularly poor and marginalised population, drawing on interviews with single homeless people and practitioners living and working in homelessness accommodation projects. While existing research has assessed the impact of recent housing and welfare reforms on those at risk of or transitioning into homelessness and those sleeping rough, the chapter offers additional insight by placing focus on the implications of austerity for transitions out of homelessness. The data presented reveals the ways in which austerity-driven policies are actively hindering service users' efforts to move beyond homelessness and leaving them increasingly susceptible to longer-term cycles of instability. Increases in benefit sanctioning and conditionality, combined with cuts to homelessness services over the last ten years, have resulted in overwhelmed practitioners increasingly forced to focus on crisis management, while little or no resources are left to invest in prevention and helping users to transition out of homelessness. Meanwhile, the interviews with homeless service users and practitioners suggest that contrary to the prevailing narrative of welfare dependency, insufficient funding has impaired transitions into work.

‘Everywhere and nowhere’: interventions and services under austerity

This chapter explains how austerity has led to an increasingly fragmented and disparate economy and geography of welfare. These changes have affected people's ability to access services, leaving some of them isolated and excluded from activities that they previously enjoyed. The chapter then questions the use of new information technology (IT) systems and the related expansion of cybernetic relations to register, administer, manage, and target some of the most vulnerable members of society. It argues that these virtual systems emerge as a way of dealing with cases that need physical and in-depth contact in the context of austerity budgets rather than a tested way of pooling information to save lives. This argument suggests that they can also be a way to exclude service users from decision-making about their entitlement and ultimately their lives, reconfiguring the power relations between the public and the state.

A new page? The public library in austerity

This chapter demonstrates how, in the UK, austerity has not been limited to the provision of social security. Most government departmental budgets were cut and there was a clear shift in responsibility from central to local government, which also had its budgets slashed. The cuts to local government have also resulted in a marked decrease in the provision of key services. The chapter finds that libraries can be important spaces for support workers to meet clients, as well as for those with fewer resources to access computers, books, or simply a safe communal space outside of their home. Future lack of investment in universal public services may perpetuate and further widen the inequalities in access to these resources.

The family welfare source and inequality in liberal welfare states: evidence from cohort studies

This chapter analyses the impact of implicit and explicit family welfare resources on young people's transition to economic independence, drawing on longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study and the 1997 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. In both the UK and the US, the commonly used measure of parental socioeconomic background was a factor that persisted and intensified as cohort members moved through a transition. Rather than inequalities reducing into adulthood, inequalities widened. Trends in co-residence and labour market insecurity in the UK mirror those of the US; therefore, the US evidence can inform both future research and policy formation in the UK. The empirical evidence suggests that if social policy in the UK is interested in supporting successful youth transitions across the income spectrum, the long-lasting imbalance created by unequal family resources will need to be addressed, beginning with a restructuring of the benefit system for low-income young people alongside structural changes to the youth labour market.

Young people as cultural critics of the monocultural landscapes that fail them

This chapter examines the experience and views of young British Muslim women and their solutions to the limitations embedded in the monocultural mindsets organising the public spaces of their Sunderland cityscape. The narratives of the young ‘Mackem’ women clearly identify how long-standing racialised ideas connecting whiteness as belonging, which were pervasive in the local monoculture, act as an impediment to solution-focused opportunities for a multi-vocal intercultural present. The chapter draws on empirical data to foreground the voice of young women, offering a counter-narrative to dominant constructions of young British Asian Muslims whose experiences have been publicly articulated through the prism of continuing British racism and Islamophobia. The young women involved in the research articulated themselves as cultural critics of the dominant monocultural white imaginary of Britishness, nationhood, and belonging. Their nuanced understanding of British identity illustrated an orientation of their life-world beyond the confines of monocultural imaginaries, offering hope for intercultural belonging.

Economic hardship in young adulthood: a cause for concern or a matter of course while settling into the Swedish labour market?

This chapter utilises longitudinal Swedish register data to examine youths' labour market trajectories, with a focus on the complexity, timing, and duration of labour market disadvantage for individuals with and without experience of early adulthood economic hardship, as indicated by different degrees of social assistance receipt. Findings from multinomial regression suggest that when early adulthood economic hardship is extensive, this is associated with elevated risks of disadvantaged labour market trajectories, such as having an insecure labour market position through large parts of the twenties or following a track of long-term labour market exclusion. On the other hand, experience of low degrees of hardship only had a weak association with disadvantaged labour market trajectories. These findings imply that social-democratic welfare states such as the Swedish one are effective in addressing low levels of financial hardship without incurring long-term disadvantages through a relatively generous benefits and social services system. However, similar to liberal welfare states, the Swedish welfare state also struggles when hardship is prolonged and the family is not available as a safety net.

Returnees: unwanted citizens or cherished countrymen

This chapter looks at the ‘othering’ of migrants within discourses of return migration — a reflection of the complex interplay between race, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity, particularly in the fluid context of migration. It analyses Polish and Estonian social policy experts' narratives on returnees and their access to welfare. The concept of othering in relation to welfare can help one to better understand national discourses around migration and return migration. Poland and Estonia have adopted vastly different attitudes towards return migrants: while Estonian policy experts stressed the positive nature of migration (migrants were seen as successful individuals), Polish narratives around migration are more negative, drawing attention to the ‘social costs’ of migration, such as broken families. The Polish experts thus questioned the potential belonging of return migrants, seeing them as a burden on the welfare state, while Estonian experts saw return migration as mostly positive and a sign of loyalty.

Cultural education and the good citizen: a systematic analysis of a neoliberal communitarian policy trend

This chapter assesses the articulation of notions of ‘good citizenship’ in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of policies targeting the cultural literacy of young people in the UK over the past decade. To do so, it analyses the findings of a systematic review of relevant policy documents published between 2007 and 2018. Cultural literacy policies have been used to promote a particular vision of the good citizen through a ‘neoliberal communitarian’ model of governance. This model combines the individualising logics of neoliberalism that emphasise responsibility and self-regulation with the collective focus of communitarianism on shared culture and values. These threads are deployed simultaneously to ‘responsibilise’ citizens in order to reduce the perceived burden that they present to the state, as well as to police nationalist parameters of inclusion and exclusion.