The article discusses government policies towards unemployed people in the context of the development of ‘fair employment’ policy in Northern Ireland. It presents results from a survey of long-term unemployed people in West Belfast which challenge the direction and content of existing training and employment schemes, and their capacity to address inequalities in unemployment between Catholics and Protestants. The article argues that current supply side labour market policies are having limited impact in Northern Ireland and goes on to explore policies to influence labour demand. On the basis of interviews with employers, a number of policies are advocated, including giving priority to recruitment of long-term unemployed people in areas of high unemployment by means of making grant aid conditional.

General Practitioner fundholding has been shown to enjoy a number of advantages over centralised systems of purchasing: it is more consumer sensitive, shakes up providers, shifts resources into primary care, enables expert understanding and skills to inform the purchasing function and ensures that treatment quality will have priority over cost savings. These benefits are offset by the very significant drawbacks of extra resources being needed for administration, limitations on purchaser power and the danger that the internal market principle will be undermined.

This article examines the extent to which these effects are applicable in the specific context of purchasing of community nursing services that took effect from April 1993. It is found that few of the above advantages are applicable in the community setting and that the disadvantages are particularly severe. The solution may be to combine formal centralised contracting with an element of competition at the operational level to produce a more ‘organic’ system than hitherto visualised.

Health visiting is adopting an enabling model of practice, which may promote social inclusion, but is under pressure to justify itself. The article focuses on health visitors' work with Pakistani women and comparable white women in Glasgow, examining the nature of health visiting and women's responses to it. Health visitors' perspectives involve the appreciation of cultural differences, building relationships with clients, and some stereotyping of clients. Techniques include highly valued home visiting, and processes of negotiation with clients. Problems faced include difficulties with interpreters, lack of training, relationships with other professions, recent changes in the NHS, and issues of stress and personal safety. Women's views of health visitors are generally positive, especially concerning home visits, time spent with clients, and gate-keeping access to GPs. Negative views came mostly from white women, and concerned the more controlling models of health visiting. Thus, enabling health visiting practice was widely appreciated, and could act as an inclusionary force, facilitating access to and use of health services. Exclusion was operating at institutional level, towards minorities and women of lower socio-economic groups, but was being actively resisted by practitioners.

This article considers the current state of help with funeral expenses in Britain. It argues that assistance has been progressively and deliberately eroded to the point where the famous ‘from the cradle to the grave’ protection of the welfare state has been removed from increasing numbers of poor people. The article sets these developments within the context of the contemporary British funeral industry, with emphasis upon its treatment of less-well-off consumers. The changing nature of social security provision for funeral expenses is traced in detail, including the actions of the incoming 1997 Labour government. This article investigates the public health role of local authorities in the case of burials, concluding that such services are insufficiently robust to meet the new weight placed upon them. The article ends with a consideration of the impact which these different changes produce in the lives of individuals upon whom they have an effect.

Peter Taylor-Gooby's recent contribution to the debate on globalisation and the logic of welfare retrenchment with which it has come to be so closely associated (1997), represents a valuable and timely intervention in a debate whose significance can scarcely be over-stated. Our assessment of the extent to which the contours of the contemporary global political economy circumscribe the parameters of the politically and economically possible is crucial to our understanding of the trajectory and future of the welfare state in a post-Keynesian era, as it is to any attempt to reclaim a positive agenda for welfare reform in a context in which social policy is increasingly being subordinated to the perceived imperative(s) of economic competitiveness. Yet, despite its important challenge to the equation of globalisation, ‘new times’ (however labelled) and welfare retrenchment, Taylor-Gooby's intervention is not unproblematic. The counterposing of an ‘old sociology’ concerned with class, capital and the state with a ‘new sociology’ of fragmentation and diversity (a sociology of and for new times) is ultimately unhelpful. It presents an artificially stark choice between a celebration of the novel that threatens to prove complicit with contemporary welfare reform on the one hand, and a reassertion of continuity and the continuing relevance of ‘second-best theory’ on the other. It is the argument of this brief response that is only by rejecting the dualistic pairings of ‘old’ and ‘new’ sociology, ‘old’ and ‘new’ times alike, that we can fashion a sociology and attendant political economy capable of detailing the complex and contingent processes currently restructuring the welfare state and of charting the space for positive alternative trajectories of welfare reform. In so doing we must resist the temptation to make do with second-best.

Alan Deacon (ed.), From Welfare to Work, IEA Health & Welfare Unit, 1997, 155 pp., £8.00 paper.

Karen Gardiner, Bridges from Benefit, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 60 pp., £11.95 paper.

Alex Bryson, Reuben Ford and Michael White, Making Work Pay, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 89 pp., £11.95 paper.

Jane Millar, Steven Webb and Martin Kemp, Combining Work and Welfare, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 59 pp., £11.95 paper.

For the new Labour government, employment is the key to the reform of welfare. While the same could be said of the first post-war Labour government, the words have a rather different meaning. It is true that Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has alluded to the concept of full employment that Keynes, Beveridge and, latterly, Attlee's government foresaw was essential to fund the development of the Welfare State. But the strategy that Brown set out in his first two budgets has a more narrow focus. Employment is to provide a route out of dependency, a mechanism for social inclusion, that enables expenditure on social security to be diverted to investment in education and health that is likely to attract a greater political dividend. More specifically, in his 1997 budget he used income generated from a windfall tax on the privatised utilities to fund the New Deal, a programme of counselling and work experience schemes with a large element of compulsion (Table 1), and supported this with a National Child Care Strategy and a commitment to introduce a minimum wage. He complemented these moves in his 1998 budget by increasing Child Benefit and announcing a Working Families Tax Credit, and one for disabled persons to replace Family Credit and Disability Working Allowance and also a Childcare Tax Credit.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health care

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Local government

11 Gender

12 Demography