Critical Social Policy

The re-establishment of a Scottish parliament in Edinburgh in May 1999 has promised new and innovative developments in social policy. Focusing on poverty and social exclusion, this article considers the likelihood that the approach by the new Scottish parliament will represent a departure from the approach of the Westminster government. There is some expectation that Scotland's experience will be different given the distinctive political and cultural environment, but instead it is argued that the Scottish parliament is very much in tune with New Labour thinking in relation to poverty. The neglect of wider structural inequalities in wealth and income means that the Scottish parliament is unlikely to develop a radical approach which challenges existing structures of inequality.

This article examines the prospects for the Scottish parliament to ‘contribute to a fairer and more inclusive society’ through the use of housing policy. After reviewing concepts of social exclusion and initiatives to increase inclusion, the article considers the powers of the parliament under the Scotland Act 1998. It argues that institutional and resource constraints surround future housing policy interventions and concludes that greater social inclusion is more likely through participation and improved economic prospects than through housing policy.

The central concern of this article is to examine and investigate the assumptions underlying the development of post-war urban policy in Britain. The essential presumption underlying the article is that in order to situate and analyse policy responses, it is first necessary to understand the ‘problems’ to which policy is responding. This involves asking why, and how, a particular issue (i.e. a facet of reality) comes to be defined as a problem. Additionally it is argued that the definition and construction of a ‘problem’ contains within it the ‘solution’ to that problem. Moreover, the construction of a ‘problem’ (and its ‘immanent solution’) involves the development of a particular discursive narrative (a ‘story’) depicting/portraying the evolution and causes of the problem. Drawing upon work in discourse and narrative analysis and recent developments in policy analysis, this article investigates the ways in which urban problems have been constructed over the last 30 years, providing a periodization of urban policy based upon the distinct modes in which urban problems have been constructed and the immanent policy responses to those problems.

Drawing on two principal theoretical perspectives—social constructionism and Foucault's ideas about power—and data from a study of sponsored day care for children in need, the article problematizes the concept of ‘the child in need’—which plays a major part in current discourse, policy and practice in British social work—and explores how the concept is both produced from dominant discourses about childhood, and is in turn productive of a particular construction of the child and particular practices. A different experience, from Reggio Emilia in Italy, is described to make visible some of the assumptions that underlie the concept of ‘the child in need’.

In the UK there is currently a new focus on the basic purpose and objectives of services, not on organizational structure or the efficiency of the systems alone, but on the outcome of services for people who receive them. The Labour government has defined the promotion of independence as a priority for health and social services, but this outcome can be interpreted in a variety of ways which may not be compatible. As part of a programme of research into identifying ways of measuring the outcomes of community care, views about outcomes have been gathered from a number of stakeholders—disabled and older service users, family members and social service staff. This article outlines the views of disabled service users collected from both in-depth interviews and focus groups in a northern city. The article focuses on outcomes of services which they identified as important and considers the meaning of independence and the wider implications for clarifying objectives and defining service quality.