This article provides a policy-oriented overview of the five-year ESRC Growing Older Programme of research on quality of life in old age: the largest UK social sciences research endeavour to date in the field of ageing. By way of an introduction to the Growing Older Programme, its main objectives are stated and some of its unique contributions to knowledge and research methods are summarised. Then the bulk of the article focuses on the relationship between research and policy: first in general terms and then specifically with regard to the operation of and outputs from the Programme. The particular methods used by the Programme to engage with the policy process are described, within a broad enlightenment framework. This is followed by an outline of the key elements of a multi-dimensional approach to extending the quality of later life. The five priority elements of this skeletal strategy – inequalities in old age, environments of ageing, economic and family roles, participation and involvement, and frailty and identity – are derived from the Growing Older Programme's comprehensive evidence base. In each case the policy implications of the research evidence are illustrated. Finally, the role of older people in living their own lives of quality is discussed, and the results of the Programme are used to show how aspects of both structure and agency combine to determine the quality of later life.

This article reviews the policy process behind recent welfare reforms and considers the policy styles used in a broad range of social policy areas on the basis of interviews with leading policy actors. It argues that a mix of policy-making methods is currently being used, ranging from the classic top-down approach, through the use of external commissions to a more bottom-up approach, where policy is to a large degree designed by external groups. The type of policy and the power relations between key actors and the government determine the approach. Indeed, this shows a different perception of British policy-making, as the inclusive approach contrasts sharply with the traditional directive Westminster model.

This article explores some of the emerging tensions in the management of welfare in Britain. The success of Labour's proposals for welfare reform, particularly retirement pensions, hinges on their ability to promote the idea of the consumer citizen and to undermine traditional ideas of citizenship rights. However, managing this transition – including the presentation of ideas and the management of consumers – has not been straightforward. While the Government presents retirement as a matter of lifestyle choice, welfare ‘consumers’ are demanding more of their providers and are regularly disgruntled with the response.

Simultaneously, pension providers are expressing reservations about their ability to manage aggrieved consumers. Furthermore, they believe pension fund management has been politicised, and their scope for discretion reduced by regulation, while technical and scientific developments in terms of portfolio management and risk assessment have changed the working practices of those in the pension industry. These tensions between consumers, providers and legislators may generate further dissatisfaction with the balance of rights and responsibilities being hotly contested.

As a result of the consolidation of democracy and the spread of globalisation, the Korean welfare regime has undergone significant changes. This article examines the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. Overall social policy has benefited from a marked increase in expenditure since the 1990s. This has been especially visible in terms of the ratio of social expenditures to GDP, which reached 11 per cent by 1998. These changes in Korean social policy brought about a readjustment of the roles of both government and the private sector. The development of income maintenance programmes has been the core change within the Korean welfare regime. Unlike income maintenance programmes, public social services have developed at a rather sluggish pace. The provision of social services has long been regarded as the responsibility of the family and has changed relatively little in comparison to income maintenance programmes. Although Korean social policy has undergone remarkable changes, it would be erroneous to argue that a complete shift in the welfare regime has taken place.

Fifteen per cent of British babies are now born to parents who are neither cohabiting nor married. Little is known about non-residential fatherhood that commences with the birth of a child. Here, we use the Millennium Cohort Study to examine a number of aspects of this form of fatherhood. Firstly, we consider the extent to which these fathers were involved with or acknowledged their child at the time of the birth. Secondly, we identify characteristics that differentiate parents who continue to live apart from those who move in together. Thirdly, for the fathers who moved in with the mother and their child, we enquire whether they differ in the extent of their engagement in family life compared with fathers who have been living with the mother since birth. Finally, for fathers who were living apart from their child when the child was nine months old, we assess the extent to which they were in contact, contributed to their maintenance and were involved in their child's life at this time.

Prioritisation of cases and resources as a means of rationing the limited legal aid budget has recently become a feature of access to justice in the UK. This article explores the utility of devising proxy models of ‘legal need’ as a means of enabling the rational and equitable planning of legal services in these circumstances. Different conceptual and methodological approaches are considered, highlighting preliminary development work in Scotland. The likelihood of developing ‘legal needs’ measures that promote equity of access to appropriate legal services is discussed in the light of problems with defining ‘legal need’ and the diversity of services available for the resolution of legal problems.

Government in the UK, as elsewhere in Europe, is keen to encourage individuals to delay their retirement, work for longer and save more for their retirement. This article argues that much of this public discussion is based on the debatable premise that most people are actively choosing to leave work ‘early’. Research on retirement decisions hitherto has concentrated on individual factors, which dispose towards early retirement and has neglected the role of the employer in determining retirement timing. New research reported here, undertaken in three organisational case studies, explores the management of retirement and how individual employees experience these processes. It employs the concepts of the ‘retirement zone’ and retirement scenarios to demonstrate how the interaction of individual attributes (themselves subject to change) and organisational practices (also unpredictable and variable) produces retirement outcomes. It concludes that there is considerable management discretion over the manner and timing of individual retirements. Hence, government needs to recognise that the majority of individuals may have relatively little personal discretion over their departure from work and hence concentration on urging them to work for longer and delay retiring may be missing the real target for policy change.

The devolved government in Northern Ireland set about the task of putting in place ‘a modern and effective system of public administration that can deliver high quality public services to our citizens’. It did so through a review of public administration launched in June 2002. This article offers a formative evaluation of the quest to improve the quality of public services, now being taken forward by a British minister since the suspension of devolution. It argues that the review is being driven by institutional concerns and is devoid of a public service modernising agenda. Additionally, it contends that how people in Northern Ireland perceive public services is contingent on their views on its constitutional status (Direct Rule or devolved government) which, in turn, is linked to their support for the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, rather than the performance of public bodies. As a consequence, the reforms may result in little more than institutional tinkering with doubtful impact on the quality of public services.

In response to population ageing, the UK intends to increase female labour supply. To this end, the Chancellor has announced a ten-year strategy designed to allow parents to combine work with family responsibilities more easily. The policies proposed centre on extending parental leave and childcare provision, while promoting greater flexibility in employment. While these policies may improve labour supply in the short term, this article looks at their implications for fertility, which if negative may reduce the labour supply in the longer term. Recent demographic studies suggest that measures which allow women more readily to combine childbearing with paid employment may also stabilise or improve fertility rates, so mitigating the trend to population ageing. However, the evidence is not conclusive, for relationships between female employment and fertility are complex and context dependent. The article suggests several factors that might therefore merit further consideration. These include gender inequities in the domestic division of labour, long working hours and a re-evaluation of unpaid work in the home. Enthusiasm for the work ethic may have to be balanced by a more explicit acknowledgement of a care ethic.

This article takes a fresh look at the intellectual context of the poor law in Britain and Ireland from the 1830s to the 1930s, and is focused on the different conceptions over time of the ‘service user’ as agent (drawing on Le Grand) in relation to a fundamental contrast between social theory which is ‘non-idealist’ and ‘idealist’ (drawing on Harris). It first examines the ideas of liberal tories, rather than Benthamites, in remodelling the poor law in England and introducing it to Ireland in the 1830s. Second, it explicitly draws a contrast between idealist and non-idealist social thought, relating it to the idealist nature of both the majority and minority reports on the poor law of 1909 and to the non-idealist thought of Spencer and the earlier discussion. The subsequent dominance of idealist thought in social policy theory and practice is then reviewed, considering Titmuss on agency, the ‘rediscovery’ of informal care in the 1970s as evidence of a shift to the non-idealist perspective that people can act as rational agents for their own well-being, and the resurgent influence of idealist thought on ‘New Labour’. The article concludes that links identified between ideas of agency and types of social theory since the 1830s enhance our understanding of debates today.

It is increasingly impossible to understand and explain the shape and delivery of contemporary social policy unless we consider the role of business. Several factors have been at work here. First, many of the changes in social policy introduced since the 1970s have been in response either to business demands or more general concerns about national competitiveness and the needs of business. Second, globalisation has increased corporate power within states, leading to transformations in social and fiscal policies. Third, business has been incorporated into the management of many areas of the welfare state by governments keen to control expenditure and introduce private sector values into services. Fourth, welfare services, from hospitals to schools, have been increasingly opened up to private markets. Despite all this, the issues of business influence and involvement in social policy has been neglected in the literature. This article seeks to place corporate power and influence centre-stage by outlining and critically reflecting on the place of business within contemporary welfare states, with a particular focus on the UK. Business, it argues, is increasingly important to welfare outcomes and needs to be taken into account more fully within the social policy literature.

This article examines police complaints reform in England and Wales during the course of the last 40 years. In that time, four separate complaints systems have been in operation and each has been established at the end of a reform cycle characterised by stages of mounting public concern, appointment of formal inquiries, the legislative process and inception. Recurrent themes identified over the decades have been the trend towards independence, under-representation of complainants’ interests, the longevity of the reform process, and changing police priorities. It is argued that marginalisation of complainants’ interests in the reform process is the principal reason for the endurance of the police complaints problematic.

Using detailed extracts from two life histories, this article examines the nature of the personal identifications that often underpin the commitment of welfare workers to their jobs. We explore the paradox that it is those identifications such as class and gender, mediated through individual biography, that fix the ‘self as object’ and that also provide us with the resources for self-transformation. In this respect, the article not only throws light upon the psychical and emotional roots of commitment to the other, but also upon some of the impasses ‘identity theory’ currently finds itself in.

This article argues that services have been under-theorised, in both welfare economics and social policy analysis. Programmes for opening up public services for competition and choice, and for widening the scope for ‘targeted’ services, treat them as analogous to goods. This ignores relational and contextual elements in human well-being, and the potentially crucial role of services in meeting such needs. The author calls for co-operation between economists and social policy analysts in filling this gap in welfare theory.

The 1990s witnessed the spread and broadening in Europe of different types of relationships between public administration and private organisations (both for-profit and non-profit), derived from the two main categories of contracting out and accreditation. These models, linked to the process of developing new modes of governance, also focus on forms of contracting between providers and users of services. This contractual configuration of local welfare systems appears to encourage ‘civil society’ and recipients to play a more active role in designing interventions and putting them into practice. Nonetheless, several questions still remain to be answered, mainly concerning the different position adopted by the beneficiaries in the case of intervention theoretically aimed at ensuring or increasing their ‘freedom of choice’. This article sets out to analyse these questions with specific reference to the implementation of the Italian legal reform of social services. The field of observation covers interventions based on economic benefits looking to promote recipients' independence. Our intention is to focus on whether and how the present structures incorporate and elaborate this impulse towards change, with particular reference to the new configuration of the users' own position.

Financial exclusion is increasingly being recognised as an important aspect of socio-economic inequality where disadvantaged individuals and communities are isolated from mainstream financial services, particularly affordable and readily available credit. In the face of these problems, social policy initiatives have emerged that have travelled under various names: social investment, micro-finance, community finance and community development finance. These initiatives are seen as the basis of a ‘new economics’ that will create self-sustaining local economies. The government is also promoting community development finance as an aspect of community regeneration with the aim of providing credit to poor communities to stimulate local enterprise and thereby reduce dependency on state support. The same approach is being taken to grant-funded community and voluntary organisations to encourage them into a neo-market approach to the delivery of services. This article explores the phenomenon of community development finance and assesses its proposed role in community regeneration and in relation to the community and voluntary sector.