New Labour and adolescent disadvantage: a retrospective

Labour invested significant public expenditure and policy effort in trying to remedy multi-dimensional problems of adolescent disadvantage. The effects were intended to be long-term and multi-faceted. However, individual programmes were evaluated in isolation and over a short time-scale. The generation of children whose life-course coincided with most of these policy and expenditure changes is now making the transition to adulthood. As such, it is a good time to ask what happened to them throughout their adolescence. This paper outlines Labour’s approach to adolescent disadvantage and analyses the data on their key Public Service Agreement targets, namely: child poverty; educational underachievement, school exclusion and truancy, teenage conceptions, NEETs, juvenile crime, and drug and alcohol misuse. The remarkable decline in teenage pregnancy is now well documented. Our analysis shows a similar or greater magnitude in reductions across the other indicators of youth disadvantage for the cohort who experienced these policies.

What is ‘impact’? Learning from examples across the professional life course

The inclusion of research impact in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework in the UK (REF2014) was greeted with scepticism by the academic community, not least due to the challenges of defining and measuring the nature and significance of impact. A new analytical framework of the nature of impact is developed in this chapter and it distinguishes between policy creation, direction, discourse and practice. This framework is then applied to the top-ranked impact case studies in the REF2014 from the Social Work and Social Policy sub-panel and the ESRC Early Career Impact Prize Winners in order to assess impact across the life-course of academics.

Social policy and populism: welfare nationalism as the new narrative of social citizenship

This chapter investigates the relationship between far-right populism and social policy. The chapter argues that an approach anchored in framing and policy narratives will yield new understandings of how far-right populist discourses have come to challenge social democratic and neoliberal welfare narratives. The new narrative challenges and denigrates the economic and political elite as self-serving and corrupt, claiming to represent the interest of the ‘people’ instead. In defining ‘people’, the interests of certain societal groups are prioritised on the bases of culture or ethnicity. Importantly for social policy, this chapter argues, in this universal social rights and social citizenship are reframed in ethno-nationalist and welfare chauvinist terms. The chapter draws upon the case of Sweden in order to briefly exemplify the discursive strategies at play.

Outcomes-based approaches and the devolved administrations

Governments in all three devolved administrations of the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) have been adopting what they define as an outcome based approach to aspects of their policy making. This chapter examines the attraction of outcome based approaches and the outcome based accountability (OBA) model in particular. It assesses the conceptual issues arising from the OBA methodology and its application and examines arguments about the value of the OBA approach. The relationship between outcomes and indicators and the use of OBA for monitoring and evaluating performance is discussed. While there has been substantial buy-in to the principle of an outcomes based approach in the three administrations the paper questions whether there is evidence that these approaches have improved performance and policy.

Back to the future of community cohesion? Learning from New Labour

New Labour developed an ambitious programme to address what it saw as increasing social divisions in British society caused, primarily, by ethnic and cultural difference. Developed in 2001, community cohesion became embedded in many other social policy areas, especially regarding social inclusion, a commitment to empowering both individuals and communities, and developing a sense of British identity compatible with a rapidly globalising world. Though it was marginalised during the Coalition and Conservative governments, rising uncertainty and increasing division in the current period warrants a re-assessment of the utility of a discrete social cohesion policy framework. This chapter assesses New Labour’s approach to community cohesion, drawing out lessons from its use in the New Labour years and asks whether policymakers should return to a focus on social cohesion and what, if anything, should be done differently in an uncertain political and social landscape.

Childcare, life chances and social justice

The notion of ‘life chances’ is frequently invoked in political rhetoric and debate about social mobility and equality of opportunity. Typically, it is only loosely defined. This article considers the relationship between the ‘life chances’ agenda and persistent questions about the relationship between childcare and social justice. It unpacks the notion of ‘fair life chances’, considers problems associated with how life chances are measured, suggests that childcare will hold a pivotal place in any coherent ‘life chances’ agenda, and offers a defence of the crucial value of a child-focused analysis as part of the wider articulation of such an agenda. The chapter concludes with a proposal that we address childcare as a ‘relationship good’ – a uniquely valuable form of relationship, the distribution of which should be treated as a basic matter of social justice.

Modern slavery in the United Kingdom: an incoherent response

This chapter reviews developments leading to the enactment of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act in England and Wales and parallel legislation in Northern Ireland and Scotland. It analyses the response of the UK government to growing pressure for legislation, and the failings of the actual legislation put in place, including a comparison with some key elements in its Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts. Despite claims to be world-leading, the Modern Slavery Act has already been found to be deficient in many key areas such as continuing protection for victims and linking slavery and immigration legislation, and is considered to be in need of substantial reform.

Making markets in employment support: does the variety of quasi-market matter for people with disabilities and health conditions?

Welfare-to-work services have been a key area of experimentation in quasi-marketised public service delivery. This chapter develops and extends a conceptual framework for unpacking variation in the formulation of quasi-markets and finds that there are important differences in the type of market adopted by two British employment support schemes: Work Programme and Work Choice. A novel quasi-experimental analysis is then used to investigate the implications of the alternate market formulations for those with health conditions and disabilities, by comparing the employment and earning outcomes for a matched group of participants on the two schemes. The findings suggest that the promises of innovation and performance improvement allied to the provider-directed Work Programme are not met. Employment and earnings outcomes are significantly and sizeably lower for the Work Programme than for Work Choice. The hybrid market position of Work Choice – which leans towards a provider-directed arrangement but retains important levers for both the state- and user- preferences – emerges as an important mediator of programme participant experiences.

Learning from New Labour’s approach to the NHS

This chapter treats Labour’s approach to the NHS between 1997 and 2010 as representing a series of ‘programme theories’ to consider what can be learned from them about healthcare and public reorganization more generally. The chapter suggests that Labour’s programme theory of ‘delivery’ had, through the Quality and Outcomes Framework, potential for learning how better to handle performance management, but that ‘choice and competition’ has not achieved the goals asked of it. The theory represented by the ‘Private Finance Initiative’ presents a significant legacy and challenge to policymakers and NHS organizations today because of the financial commitments it requires of organizations that put in place poorly-negotiated deals. Labour’s theory of health ‘funding’ appears to be linked to an improvement in patient satisfaction and health outcomes, both of which now risk being undermined.

Fiscal welfare and its contribution to inequality

The tax reliefs and related subsidies of fiscal welfare contribute significantly but virtually invisibly to maintaining and reinforcing inequality. This chapter examines their support to occupational and personal pensions, the largest area of social spending through the tax and National Insurance systems. The benefits go to less than half the working-age population and disproportionately to those paying higher rates of tax, their employers and the pensions industry. It is a major example of ‘means-enhancing’ redistribution as opposed to the means-testing of much welfare state provision. The particular and considerable value of National Insurance exemptions deserves far more attention than government or independent analysts have given it. Official statistics need to integrate fiscal with public spending and include the impact of fiscal welfare in their distributional analyses. Democratic policymaking needs to take account of it in tackling and reducing inequality across the whole society.