Reducing loneliness amongst older people is an international public health and policy priority, with signs of decreasing importance in the UK. A growing body of research on tackling loneliness indicates it is a complex challenge. Most interventions imply they address loneliness, when in fact they offer social connectedness to address social isolation and can inadvertently responsibilise the individual for the causes and solutions for loneliness. This article presents research that explored loneliness in an underprivileged community in South Wales through interviews and focus groups with nineteen older people and eighteen local service providers. Their perspective supports a growing body of evidence that loneliness amongst older people is driven by wider structural and socio-cultural exclusion. Interventions to build social connections will be more effective if coupled with policies that reverse the reduction in public services (including transport and healthcare), and challenge socio-cultural norms, including a culture of self-reliance and ageism.

This state-of-the-art paper begins to unpack the concept of a housing crisis. Whilst it may be a useful starting point in recognising the presence of problems within UK housing provision and allocation, its generic and umbrella coverage papers over the diversity of experiences. Similarly, as a concept it neither suggests the causes of the crisis nor possible solutions. With this in mind, this paper explores commodification within housing and uses this to recognise that our relationship to housing and our relationship to the crisis, can be shaped by our relationship to capital. However, the paper takes this further by arguing that the presence of vulnerability should also be borne in mind when considering commodification, where vulnerability includes experiences of discrimination, mental health, and legal status.

This article examines whether and to what extent legalised same-sex marriage can assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people to develop family life and protect them from defamilisation and familisation risks. It focuses on the provision of and gaps in welfare for LGBTQ+ people since Taiwan’s same-sex marriage legalisation in 2019. A content analysis of online community discussions since marriage equality shows that local LGBTQ+ community discussions were filled with concerns about the lack of familial status for cross-border couples, lack of legal parental status and rights for same-sex parents, and questions about heteronormative values and kinship ties. This article reveals how heteronormative assumptions embedded in the policy system and in the wider society adversely influence LGBTQ+ people’s welfare, and identifies supplementary and alternative measures. It highlights the importance of providing universal basic services free from heteronormative biases and prioritising the well-being and rights of all citizens.

The respective delivery roles of public and private providers is a key battleground in the ongoing transformation of welfare states. But despite a burgeoning literature on public attitudes to aspects of welfare state activity, delivery has to date received scant attention. This article makes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap. Drawing on original survey data from the United Kingdom, it analyses attitudes towards the delivery of social policies and explores their relationship to other welfare attitudes. We show that views on delivery display less variation than attitudes to welfare generosity and redistribution, that public support for private sector involvement in delivery is limited to certain fields and that there is very little consistent support for outright privatisation. The article thus demonstrates that there is very little congruence between attitudes to ‘welfarism’ and attitudes to ‘statism’.

This article focuses on how the policy on same-sex marriage and a person’s social locations impact upon Chinese lesbians’ life chances and welfare. Bringing the familisation and defamilisation literature, which has predominantly focused on heterosexual populations and families, into dialogue with an intersectionality perspective, we map the ways in which gender, sexuality, and class intersect in shaping lesbians’ experiences of defamilisation and familisation risks. The findings, drawn from interviews conducted in Beijing, China, reveal that the absence of legalised same-sex marriage, coupled with a lack of familial and societal recognition of same-sex relationships, exposes lesbians to both defamilisation and familisation risks, leading to difficulties in choosing whether and how to participate in the family. The intersectionality lens guides us to move beyond the heterosexual/homosexual boundary and to rethink the possibility of welfare alliances that can improve the welfare of not only lesbians but also other groups of women and minorities.

Activation policies, especially formal upskilling, can strengthen social inequality among long-term unemployed people. Also, receiving skill-enhancing activities may be at odds with the ‘work first’ principle. Drawing on interviews with frontline workers in the Norwegian employment and welfare service (NAV), this article analyses how frontline workers handle the challenging aspects arising from activation policies in providing enabling activities to claimants who need comprehensive support. The findings suggest that frontline workers face claimants who expect to embark on an education, and on the contrary, claimants who lack motivation or capability to do so. In both cases, frontline workers are challenged in terms of experiencing contradictory expectations from policies and users and in assessing future outcomes and suitability of the services. Education activities provided by the public employment agency (PES) involves multiple policy fields and require specific competency on the part of frontline workers.

Globally, resettlement is considered one of the most durable solutions for refugees. The UK has introduced a Community Sponsorship Scheme that enables communities to resettle refugee families providing them with enhanced integration support aided by volunteers. This paper investigates the nature of integration support that sponsored refugees receive utilising the analytical framework of UK’s Indicators of Integration (IoI). Data was collected from interviews with refugee adults resettled in diverse and less diverse areas. Our findings illustrate the importance of support given by volunteer groups to enable access to resources and connections. We establish that there is much potential for sponsorship programmes to add value to refugee support suggesting that the current expansion of sponsorship from its Canadian roots may help facilitate refugee integration. However, further research is needed to uncover the long-term experiences of sponsored refugees and to compare their outcomes to those of forced migrants arriving via different mechanisms.

This study extends debates on implications of informal welfare for population health and well-being. It examines whether cultural and ideational precepts such as social capital, affect enrolment in National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) among people living with chronic disease(s) in Ghana. It also explores how NHIS enrolment explains the association between social capital and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) using empirical data from five regions in Ghana. Results indicate that bonding social capital was associated with HRQoL. Bridging and linking social capital were positively and negatively associated with enrolment in NHIS, respectively. Enrolment in the NHIS explained the relationships of trust in neighbours, bridging and linking social capital with HRQoL. Thus, while social capital can improve HRQoL of people living with chronic disease(s), it does so by, among others, influencing their participation in formal health protective services. Culturally driven informal welfare resources are critical to making formal programmes meaningful to people.

This paper argues that young people who claim state support in the UK are prone to accept the contemporary hegemonic conceptualisation within advanced capitalist societies, that individual behaviour and mindset are the key determinants of valorised labour market outcomes. The notion that the self is all encompassing and one can, and should, choose to overcome all challenges in life through self-improvement is particularly salient for recent generations of young people. Social policy reinforces this trend by encouraging changes in the individual to combat structural problems, and such ideology is present in the contemporary intensification of welfare conditionality. This paper draws upon secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative data generated as part of the Welfare Conditionality Project (2013–2019) to demonstrate that young people who experience welfare conditionality are likely to individualise pathways to their future aspirations.

The COVID-19 pandemic destabilised the political, social, and economic life of countries as it spread around the world. It posed multiple threats to individuals, societies, and across different domains of life, highlighting their intersectionality and uneven impacts. The paper focuses on the UK and South Korea, countries which took very different paths in framing and addressing the crisis. It draws on secondary data and an integrated critical human security and state capacity approach to compare how state responses, institutional capacity, and the mobilisation of policy instruments themselves construct constellations of insecurity which intersect with human security and vulnerability. It will demonstrate the structural constraints that have continued to shape vulnerability and the dynamics of human security and insecurity in turbulent times.

Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical approaches of symbolic capital and symbolic violence, this article examines the everyday mechanisms of ‘otherising’ language practices in schools that reinforce racism against marginalised youths in Sweden. The empirical material is based on focus group discussions and individual in-depth interviews with youths with migrant backgrounds in Sweden. The stories told by the participants in this study indicate how young people with immigrant backgrounds are discursively racialised and otherised as a group that does not belong to Swedish society, through the articulation of negative opinions, attitudes, and ideologies as part of established colonial discourses. It is argued that the marginalisation of migrants in Sweden, which is a consequence of social policy, has even resulted in utilisation of a marginalised language — one that deviates from the majority language in several different ways.

The UK welfare landscape is increasingly challenging due to ongoing austerity involving public sector cuts, service retrenchment, and withdrawal of statutory responsibilities. This article shows that as the welfare state contracts, precarity increases and responsibility for service provision is progressively devolved to front-line individuals and service users. To illustrate, the article examines the use of assistive and everyday technologies to improve social housing residents’ quality of life based on a longitudinal mixed methods study conducted between 2020 and 2022. The findings highlight how housing providers can support person-led technology interventions for older residents, where minor improvements positively impact day-to-day living. However, interventions are often limited by practicalities, capacity, and cost. This article connects technological engagement in housing to the ongoing ‘responsibilisation’ of many areas of housing provision to social landlords and tenants. This suggests an extension of responsibility where social housing providers are papering over the cracks in the welfare state.

In 2022, the Welsh Government announced a basic income pilot for care leavers in Wales. This article uses this policy experiment to provide an insight into the relationship between devolution and social citizenship. This article makes two claims. First, the basic income pilot is part of an approach the Welsh Government has taken over the past twenty years to expand the idea of social citizenship to include rights to money. This is justified by a principle of progressive universalism, but this principle also has a wider UK context. Second, the financial constraints imposed by the UK Government frustrates the extent to which the Welsh Government can turn such experiments into reality.

Improving community attitudes and behaviours is core to improving inclusion for people with disability. To identify ways to achieve such change, we analysed data from qualitative interviews with sixty-one expert stakeholders in Australia, informed by our preceding literature review on effective interventions. We identified five themes describing factors with the potential to change attitudes and behaviours to improve inclusion and reduce discrimination: ensuring people with disability have active presence across all life domains; leadership by people with disability, together with organisational and governmental leadership that values the diverse contribution of people with disability; a holistic approach to policy and interventions that targets multiple levels of change; long-term and adequately resourced initiatives to achieve structural and sustained change; and commitment to measuring and monitoring change interventions, to inform decisions and maintain accountability.

Despite significant evidence that age is an important factor in homelessness, life course considerations have not been systematically incorporated into the most influential theories of the factors that heighten the risk of becoming homeless. To address this oversight, this article examines variations in the risk of transitioning into homelessness among single adults in Dublin, Ireland. Consideration is given to how these transitions are shaped by the interaction between life course stage and changing personal circumstances, experiences, and relationships. It reveals that while some triggers of homeless, such as leaving institutional or private rented accommodation, are common experiences among all age groups, younger and older adults both experience distinct patterns of transition into homelessness. This understanding can help to strengthen the traditionally weak evidence base for homelessness prevention strategies, and in particular inform the design of targeted measures, that address the specific homelessness risks faced by some age groups.

The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have poorer housing outcomes than heterosexual counterparts: they are less likely to be homeowners; more likely to be private renters; and more likely to be social renters. With growing intergenerational inequalities in access to home ownership, we argue that, as openly LGB (and broader trans and queer) people being on average younger than the rest of the population, this could lead to LGB people, as a group, being excluded from asset-based welfare in the future as they age.

This article builds a bridge between research on the queer economy and that on the mixed economy of welfare by developing the ‘queer economy of welfare mix’ framework. While the two fields are related, there is a lack of discussion about the queer dimensions of the mixed economy of welfare or the mixed strategies employed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals to explore the benefits and limitations of the queer economy. The purpose of our framework is to show how local and transnational goods provided by the mixed economy of welfare can enable LGBTQ+ individuals to organise their welfare through the mixed strategies – citizen strategy, consumer strategy, and consumer-citizen strategy. By examining Taiwan’s legalised same-sex marriage and its impact on Hong Kong and Mainland China, we demonstrate the empirical significance of the framework, which serves as an analytical tool for examining the government’s role in promoting LGBTQ+ individuals’ welfare and the challenges involved.

In this study the authors examine the impact of social incomes on social inequalities and social integration in the post-2010 populist welfare system in Hungary. A detailed quantitative analysis reveals the structure and distribution of social incomes among different groups in contemporary Hungarian society. This analysis includes factors such educational attainment, demographic structure and income of households, number of children, and deprivation index. The results of the research show that welfare redistribution has lost its ability to reduce inequalities and instead serves as a means of perpetuating social disparities.

This article used text mining processes to map continuity and change in policy principles of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia and reflect on the underlying agendas of reform. Specifically, this research aimed to: (1) examine the substantive content of the NDIS legislative, operational and reform documentation, (2) assess changes in objects, principles and issues over time, and (3) discuss the implications of these shifting logics and agendas. To achieve this, text mining approaches were applied to ten key NDIS documents from 2011 to 2019.

The findings included a low prevalence of ‘rights’-based terminology, sustained attention to Scheme ‘costs’ but limited latterly attention to ‘sustainability’, and increasing prominence of interpersonal (e.g., ‘family’, ‘community’) and decision-making terminology (e.g., ‘decision’, ‘review’). How these shifts have influenced subsequent proposed reforms is explored and ongoing dilemmas about designing policy that ensures rights and entitlements, while balancing cost, sustainability and consistency are identified.

In recent decades, populist parties and leaders have obtained great political success. Since populism plays on voter dissatisfaction with the political elite, we might expect that dissatisfaction with the welfare state should also play a role. In this study, we suggest measures to assess welfare state performance (WSP), and we examine how assessment of WSP helps to explain support for the populist political parties – both rightwing and leftwing. Our findings are based on the sixth round of European Social Survey data that has a special module on democracy, which includes questions that enables us to measure WSP. This article shows that WSP is a significant predictor in explaining support for populist parties, but the dynamics differ between how WSP influences support for leftwing populist (LWP) and rightwing populist (RWP) parties.