Critical Social Policy

‘User Involvement’ has become the new mantra in Public Services with professionals constantly being reminded that ‘user knows best’. The pur pose 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 the 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 frame works. 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.

In recent years, there has been an intense public and policy debate about ethnic diversity, community cohesion, and immigration in Britain and other societies worldwide. In addition, there has been a growing preoccupation with the possible dangers to social cohesion represented by growing immigration flows and ethnic diversity. This paper proposes a critical framework for assessing the links between immigration, social cohesion, and social capital. It argues that the concept of social capital is episodic, socially constructed and value-based, depending on the prevailing ideological climate. Considerations of social capital as a public policy tool to achieve social cohesion need to incorporate an appreciation of alternative conceptions of social capital rooted in a textured under-standing of immigrant processes and migration contexts.

The last ten years have seen a historic shift in policies regulating the lives of lesbian and gay citizens, including most recently civil partnerships. In addition, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) made it possible for lesbians and gay men to access fertility treatments in private clinics. The 2003 review prompted Mary Warnock to argue that such access should be extended to treatment on the National Health Service. In these changing times, Anthony Giddens maintains that lesbian and gay relationships may reflect ideally the ‘pure relationship’. Mary Warnock is not so sure and thinks the state should play a more active role in regulating the lives of those wishing to become parents. This article considers the philosophical justifications for policies affecting lesbian and gay couples and their children, deconstructing the assumptions made by Giddens and Warnock about choices and family and questioning the ‘friendly’ foundation of ‘queer family policy’.

This paper explores the socio-political construction of drug-related crime; a concept that has dominated recent developments in UK drug policy. It has been assumed that the perceived overlap between known offenders and drug users is also present among the much larger groups of unknown offenders and drug users. This assumption has led to inflated claims of scale, precision and causality in political discussions of the drug-crime link. The discourse coalition approach is used to analyse how such methodologically suspect knowledge has been translated into policy since 1997. It is argued that the concept of drug-related crime has been influential because it is tactically and structurally useful to powerful groups in discursive struggle.

In this paper, we argue that the ‘crime control housing crisis’ which has engulfed social housing is qualitatively different from most previous and current understandings of housing crisis (which have been of a quantita tive nature, or been resolved to that). By contrast, the crime control housing crisis is a crisis precisely because it appears insoluble. All hous ing problems and policies now have to be legitimated by reference to this crime control housing crisis. The gaze of this crisis has been upon the ‘social’ sector, but that has also caused reflection on how to placate the crime control housing crisis in the private sector. It is this latter area that is the focus of the case study in the second part of this paper and starkly raises the central, deceptively simple, problematization for government: how to govern the ungovernable without being seen to govern. The case study concerns regulations promulgated by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive regarding the licensing of houses in multiple occupation. We argue that this regulation is symptomatic of a mutated ‘housing crisis’ in which the old questions of the adequacy of provision have been supplanted by new questions of responsibility for deviant behaviour.

Over the past decade the outdoor play spaces designed for children in Canada have been largely shaped by fear and profit, rather than by what we know about children's play and development. Since the early 1980s the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) has played an increasingly important role in this transformation as their technical standards for children's outdoor play spaces have been gradually adapted as policy by local and regional agencies. While the CSA has historically regulated industrial and commercial projects that enable international trade and harmonization with countries such as the United States, their extension of influence to early childhood is problematic; particularly when applied to childcare centres. The following describes some of the issues that arise from the use of safety standards as policy, and the problems these standards cause when applied to childcare centres.

This article draws on original case study research to develop more general conclusions about policy-making processes under New Labour. I discuss the Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) as an exemplar of new trends in contemporary capitalist welfare regimes, and I compare some of the enterprise rhetoric surrounding and justifying LIFT to the experiences of National Health Service managers and clinicians in my case study. I consider why many of the voices that I studied appear to remain unheard outside private interviews and meetings, and conclude that changes in the public sector are helping to create closed networks that are unresponsive to concerns expressed ‘on the ground’. Finally, I consider some implications of my data for the future of neo-liberal welfare policies.