Critical Social Policy

The much-heralded anti-poverty strategy of asset-building has been adopted by many countries across the world. Asset-building programmes are designed to help low-income families achieve long-term financial stability through savings and asset accumulation. This article offers a comprehensive and critical review of the current state of theory and research on asset-building programmes, with an emphasis on Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) in the United States. Studies of IDAs have involved quantitative evaluations of the programme, focusing on three key topics: the programme’s effects on clients’ savings behaviour, its effects on clients’ outlook on life, and its long-term impact. On the basis of a careful review of these findings, it is argued that the claim that IDA programmes and asset-building in general have the potential to reduce poverty is overrated and premature. The article builds on theoretical insights regarding the nature of neoliberalism to make sense of the picture portrayed in the research literature.

In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an eight-month-long protest against assistance policies and practices which they argued dehumanised and jeopardised their dignity and survival. Central to this public protest, termed ‘Refugee Occupy’, was the transformation of a traditional mechanism for asylum-seeker containment – the refugee camp – into a vehicle for asylum-seeker voice, participation and resistance. In this article, we discuss the asylum-seeker assistance policies and practices over the last decade that have resulted in a borderless refugee camp in Hong Kong. We explore the asylum-seekers’ use of the camp concept and its spatial and political transformation into an instrument for asylum-seeker resistance and political engagement. We conclude by situating the Refugee Union’s formation alongside other migrant-led social movements in Hong Kong and globally.

This article analyses the changing rationalities and techniques through which the Irish state seeks to govern community development; specifically, how the displacement of its flagship Community Development Programme by the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme has been justified and operationalised. Adopting a governmentality perspective, it explains how community development came to be constructed as an anti-poverty strategy and why it should also be understood as a ‘technology of government’. This article argues that the changing governmentalities shaping Irish community development are reflected in a re-problematisation and re-signification of community development’s purposes, rationalities and sources of legitimacy. Under the cover of austerity’s manufactured public spending crisis and new forms of expertise, preoccupations with effectiveness, efficiency and international best practice have intensified, thus demonstrating ongoing incursions by neoliberal ideas and practices in Irish Social Policy.

Since former Chancellor George Osborne described reducing public spending as ‘the great national challenge of our generation’ (Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2010: 12) the UK Government have demonstrated a profound interest in Payment by Results (PbR) as a mechanism to improve service quality, value for money and innovation (Audit Commission, 2012). Although PbR is not a new initiative, it has been rebranded and sold as a vehicle that can steer ongoing strategies for reform, particularly in the field of criminal justice and drug/alcohol treatment (Her Majesty’s Government, 2010; Ministry of Justice 2013). Despite such assertions, the initiative has become synonymous with budget cuts (Community Links, 2015), the privatisation of public services (Policy Exchange, 2013) and controversy. Drawing upon the findings of a focus group with staff who work in a Therapeutic Community, this article highlights the lived experience of practitioners as PbR takes hold of the alcohol and drug treatment sector. The findings suggest that outcome-orientated incentives, such as PbR, hold the potential to transform welfare-orientated sectors into a financial, market-focused milieu.

Adult social care policy in England is premised on the concept of personalisation that purports to place individuals in control of the services they receive through market-based mechanisms of support, such as direct payments and personal budgets. However, the demographic context of an ageing population and the economic and political context of austerity have endorsed further rationing of resources. Increasing numbers of people now pay for their own social care because either they do not meet tight eligibility criteria for access to services and/or their financial means place them above the threshold for local authority-funded care. The majority of self-funders are older people. Older people with complex and changing needs are particularly likely to experience difficulties in fulfilling the role of informed, proactive and skilled navigators of the care market. Based on individual interviews with older people funding their own care, this article uses a relational-political interpretation (Deneulin, 2011) of the capability approach (CA) to analyse shortfalls between the policy rhetoric of choice and control and the lived experience of self-funding. Whilst CA, like personalisation, is seen as reflecting neo-liberal values, we argue that, in its relational-political form, it has the potential to expose the fallacious assumptions on which self-funding policies are founded and to offer a more nuanced understanding of older people’s experiences.

This critique conducts a technical analysis of a UK Home Office report which was a key justification for passing the Immigration Act 2014. The law seeks to reduce non-EU immigration to the UK. The report is based on a 2012 report by the Migration Advisory Committee which used firmly established methods in the field of immigration studies. Despite this, it is concluded that the Home Office report not only excludes several important aspects of analysis, the entrepreneurialism of migrants and student immigration, but also has severe statistical problems. The report’s choice of operationalisations, lack of information regarding confidence intervals, and lack of sufficient model testing and repetition all combine to make it a weak piece of research and substantially undermine its suitability to inform policy. In the final analysis, this critique posits that the Home Office report reflects the Conservative government’s utilisation of ‘policy driven evidence’.

One of the symptoms of post financial crisis austerity in the UK has been an increase in the numbers of suicides, especially by people who have experienced welfare reform. This article develops and utilises an analytic framework of psychopolitical autopsy to explore media coverage of ‘austerity suicide’ and to take seriously the psychic life of austerity (internalisation, shame, anxiety), embedding it in a context of social dis-ease.

Drawing on three distinct yet interrelated areas of literature (the politics of affect and psychosocial dynamics of welfare, post and anti-colonial psychopolitics, and critical suicidology), the article aims to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. Key findings include understanding austerity suicides as embedded within an affective economy of the anxiety caused by punitive welfare retrenchment, the stigmatisation of being a recipient of benefits, and the internalisation of market logic that assigns value through ‘productivity’ and conceptualises welfare entitlement as economic ‘burden’. The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from an individual and psychocentric focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide, and thus to provide relevant policy insights about welfare reform.

British policy-makers have increasingly sought to intensify and extend welfare conditionality. A distinctly more punitive turn was taken in 2012 to re-orientate the whole social security and employment services system to combine harsh sanctions with minimal mandatory support in order to prioritise moving individuals ‘off benefit and into work’ with the primary aim of reducing costs. This article questions the extent to which these changes can be explained by Wacquant’s (2009) theory of the ‘centaur state’ (a neoliberal head on an authoritarian body), which sees poverty criminalised via the advance of workfare. We present evidence of an authoritarian approach to unemployment, involving dramatic use of strategies of surveillance (via new paternalist tools like the Claimant Commitment and the Universal Jobmatch panopticon), sanction and deterrence. This shift has replaced job match support with mandatory digital self-help, coercion and punishment. In relation to Work Programme providers, there is a contrasting liberal approach permitting high discretion in service design. This article makes a significant original contribution to the field by demonstrating that Wacquant’s analysis of ‘workfare’ is broadly applicable to the British case and its reliance on a centralised model of state action is truer in the British case than the US. However, we establish that the character of British reform is somewhat different: less ‘new’ (challenging the time-tethered interpretation that welfare reform is a uniquely neoliberal product of late modernity) and more broadly applied to ‘core’ workers, including working-class white men with earned entitlement, rather than peripheral workers.

Gender differences in the accumulation of pension savings are well documented. Work in this field has concluded that while differing lifetime work profiles (and family history) explained much of the difference, other factors such as pension knowledge and confidence in decision-making, may also be significant. This research, commissioned by the Fawcett Society and funded by Scottish Widows, explores some of these factors through the use of 30 semi-structured interviews and a focus group with women (aged 24–39) about their attitudes and motivations towards pension saving. It concentrates on discussions around pension knowledge, advice and decision-making, and identifies challenges in relation to women’s pension knowledge and the use of male ‘role models’ in making decisions. The article then explores potential policy mechanisms to enhance women’s pension saving for retirement, including the manner in which information and advice is provided and strategies to improve confidence in pension decision-making.

The success of the contemporary ‘living wage’ movement has been highlighted by the UK government’s decision to increase the statutory minimum wage for over-25s sharply, in the name of improving living standards. This breaks with neoliberal reluctance to intervene in labour markets, yet raises difficult issues centring around whether minimum hourly pay rates are suited to promoting adequate household incomes. At worst, ‘living wages’ could distract from other policies with this objective. This article acknowledges recent critiques of the living wage as an anti-poverty measure, but demonstrates that, in combination with other policies, wage floors can play a crucial role. It shows that low pay and inadequate working incomes overlap substantially. The article argues that governments promising that work will deliver adequate living standards need a clearer narrative in which pay, public transfers/subsidies and sufficient levels of employment combine to deliver minimum acceptable living standards for working families.

This article introduces a distinctive approach in the field of policy studies. In so doing, it attempts to show how functional change and policy change are mediated through discursive change. For this purpose, the hypothesis of a re-orientation of state functions in the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism is introduced and further investigated by re-conceptualising it as a policy change in the field of labour market policies (LMPs). By focusing on two case studies regarding the implementation of active and activating LMPs, I will take a closer look at the adoption of these approaches in Germany. More precisely, the associated political discourse is examined in order to highlight the accompanying ‘economic imaginaries’ and their role in legitimising the aforementioned approaches. I find that such discursive changes are of crucial importance since they represent competing guidelines for political actors in search of solutions to emerging problems.

This article describes the chaos caused by the 1999 privatization of the pension system in Poland. The recent measures taken by the right-wing populist government of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which reduced the retirement age and announced the complete elimination of ‘open’ (private) pension funds at the end of 2016, have not improved the situation of present and future retirees. Various forecasts show that the elderly will not be able to count on state aid in the future. The future of retired women (who tend to be less economically active) and those employed on ‘junk contracts’, from which social security contributions were not deducted, seems to be completely hopeless.

The NHS is facing a combination of lower spending and increasing demand. In response, NHS England is requiring local areas to substantially rethink and reshape services through Sustainability and Transformation Plans. These have been devised largely without the involvement of patients and citizens, giving rise to widespread concerns about service loss. Other structural changes are also taking place that have no obvious place for citizen engagement. All of this is highlighting the problem of a lack of local accountability and legitimacy for decision-making in healthcare. This commentary describes the changes, identifies the accountability gap and suggests a framework for future development.

The notion of prioritising ‘productive’ social investments over ‘consumptive’ social spending has long been advocated but only sporadically applied. Since 2011, however, New Zealand governments have implemented an ambitious, multi-agency social investment agenda that promises to overhaul public social spending through analyses of citizen-derived data. This commentary focuses on the development and features of the social investment agenda. In doing so, it discusses the apparent primacy of fiscal outcomes over social outcomes, and the practices and politics of data-driven governance.