This paper explores the disjuncture in the New Labour Government between the largest reform in fifty years of the nation's Legal Aid system and the concurrent pursuit of progressive anti-poverty, social inclusion, community regeneration, and human rights social policies. The failure of the newly...

Based on outcomes for residents and qualitative studies, it is widely thought that public services meet the needs of residents less well in deprived areas, and that this is due to both the demands placed on services being greater and the services themselves being of a lower quality. This paper...

From a detailed analysis of the roles of childhood experience, schooling and educational qualifications in the emergence of adult social exclusion, two key patterns emerge: Educational qualifications show a strong relationship to all 36 measures of adult disadvantage (at ages 23 and 33 for both...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

Homelessness is still an ever-present problem in many towns and cities in the UK today. This paper is part of a more in-depth study of homelessness and social exclusion. It presents the results of a small-scale study, which illustrates the range of problems experienced by homeless young women...

The new Labour Government in Britain has made the reduction of child poverty one of its central objectives. This paper describes the specific initiatives involved in Labour's approach and weighs them up in terms of their potential impact. After setting out the extent of the problem of child...

Government policies on disability - and criticism of them - rest in part on an understanding of the circumstances of disabled people informed by cross-sectional survey data, dividing the population into 'the disabled' and 'the non-disabled'. While conceptual debates about the nature of...

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequality in four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures by population groups and income sources (except for Japan because of data limitations)....

In 1998, a conference brought together US psychologists, economists, sociologists, demographers, political scientists, social workers, and medical doctors, to review what we know about the processes that affect child development and how we might wisely increase public and private investments in...

This paper develops a typology of welfare services and attempts to illustrate its use in clarifying discussions about the privatisation of welfare and in analysing changes in expenditure. A third dimension, which concerns the extent of the consumer's decision-making power and turns on the...