Cambridge Core Blog
In 2013, the proportion of benefit claimants being sanctioned reached record levels. Over 6% of jobseekers were having their out-of-work benefit payments stopped each month for a minimum of four weeks, and many more were going without payment while their decisions were under appeal.…
The contribution of unpaid work, often performed by women, is and has been largely unrecognised, a situation feminist scholars have long drawn to our attention.…
Irrespective of moral and political arguments, current fiscal restraints in the English National Health Service (NHS) make decommissioning apparently unavoidable. Decommissioning – that is the removal, relocation or replacement of treatments and services – is being pursued by health care planners in response to the need to balance budgets, but has also been advocated by exponents of evidence based medicine on quality grounds (Hurley, 2014; Malhotra et al, 2015).…
Since the Brexit referendum the UK government has been criticised for failing to recognise the positions and concerns of the devolved governments.…
Leaving the EU would free up more money for the NHS, according to Leave campaigners. This pledge has been all but disowned – and in any case, writes Joan Costa Font, Brexit will impose further costs on an already cash-strapped service. The biggest effect will be on wage bills, but it will also restrict choice for Britons and raise procurement costs.…
Below is a blog based on Kevin Farnsworth’s Journal of Social Policy article. A longer, fully-referenced version can be found at: http://www.corporate-welfare-watch.org.uk/ Many of those who voted to leave the EU would have been encouraged to do so in order to ‘take back control’ from Brussels.…
The role of regulation in saving lives, enhancing public health and welfare, and protecting the environment rarely features in policy debates in the UK.…
As many commentators have pointed out, the UK welfare state faces long-term structural problems in two main areas. Globalisation and technological changes demand that government directs attention to national competitiveness, and population ageing requires more spending on pensions, health and social care.…
With Brexit negotiations underway, a key question is whether withdrawal from the EU will affect equality policies. The Fawcett Society has recently warned that Government ‘Great Repeal Bill’ will present ‘a real threat to our equality laws’ in so far as it risks ‘weakening of protections’.…
This article just published in JSP is a direct challenge to official and mainstream social policy orthodoxy on the issue of ageing which focuses on old age, not ageing, and assumes that later life is a natural period of decline. It also provides an antidote for the poisonous tendency of politicians, seen most glaringly in the recent General Election, to regard rising social care costs as the inevitable result of population ageing. Rather than asking if the projected demand for social care is inevitable and, if not, what can be done about it, the common response across the political spectrum is to concentrate only on supply side funding.…
The so called ‘Troika’ of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund was frequently criticised during the Eurozone crisis on the basis that it had imposed austerity on countries requiring a bailout.…
It is almost two months after Christmas and food banks are recovering from one of their most active periods of the year.…