Abstract The introduction to the themed section on ‘Labour in Government and Its Impact on Social Policy’ is setting the scene for the following articles in three steps: First, it sketches the social policy landscape at the start of the Labour Party’s current term in government, shaped by New Labour and the following years of Conservative (and Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition) rule. Secondly, to contextualise the broader political backdrop for the different policy areas that are analysed in the themed section, we highlight the tensions between the large scale of social policy challenges faced by the government on the one hand, and the relatively modest ambitions of the Labour Party, due to its self-imposed restrictions around fiscal policy and its political positioning, on the other. Thirdly, the introduction presents the rationale for a collection of analyses of the Labour government’s social policy orientations and impacts after 12 months in office, underlining its relevance and usefulness as a state-of-art resource for academics, practitioners and students. Finally, we summarise the focus and key insights from the articles in the themed section, before presenting a range of cross-cutting considerations that run across the diverse social policy areas.
This contribution to the themed section on ‘Labour in Government’ provides annotated suggestions and some general guidance related to additional sources to support reading and research around the topic of the UK Labour Party and social policy. It gathers academic sources (books and journal articles) alongside those drawn from web accessible materials, both formal (government) and relevant grey literature.
While the abolition of secondary school fees has expanded educational access across low-income countries, empirical research has focused predominantly on student outcomes and institutional or elite perspectives, overlooking how ordinary citizens perceive such reforms or the factors shaping those perceptions. This gap is especially salient in Ghana, where the Free SHS policy, arguably the most comprehensive in Sub-Saharan Africa, is both nationally lauded and politically contested. Drawing on policy feedback theory and deservingness heuristics, this article explores how Ghanaians interpret the policy’s goals, trade-offs, and implementation using a nationally representative sample of 1915 respondents. Latent Class Analysis reveals five classes, from Universal Access Champions down to Ambivalent Observers. A follow-up multinomial logistic regression shows that partisanship, education, civic engagement, and economic outlook significantly predict class membership. These findings highlight that sustaining support for large-scale reforms requires not just expanded access, but also public trust in their fairness and responsiveness.
This study examines welfare governance in rentier states as an adaptive system. The system reconciles centralised control with selective modernisation. The empirical base is 143 policy documents from 1971 to 2024. The framework draws on the Policy Arrangement Approach, with assemblage theory and Foucauldian governmentality as supplementary lenses. Three questions guide the analysis. How does the rentier state calibrate welfare provision to sustain legitimacy? How does it absorb external pressures without conceding authority? And how do the four policy arrangement dimensions interact across reform episodes? The findings show four patterns. Centralised resource control entrenches power asymmetries. Selective integration channels civil society towards national priorities. Modernisation narratives mediate the tension between reform and control and flexible policy arrangements absorb external pressure while preserving state authority. This study contributes to comparative welfare scholarship by introducing welfare-as-governance, an analytical category through which rentier welfare is distinguished by membership differentiation and institutional continuity rather than social citizenship.
Political manifestos are often framed as contracts between parties and voters. They also function as strategic texts that communicate party identity, define problems, set priorities, and articulate visions of a better future. This article examines the UK Labour Party's 2024 election manifesto in this light, investigating what it reveals about its ideological direction and its social policy agenda. It places the 2024 manifesto in historical context, utilising content analysis and computer-aided large language model techniques and triangulating Manifesto Project coding with automated classification and manual adjudication to assess continuity and change in Labour's policy positioning. It finds that, across multiple measures, including left-right indices, party coding proximities, and principal component analysis, Labour's 2024 manifesto clusters closely with New Labour programmes and, on some measures, aligns more closely with Conservative platforms than with Labour policy traditions. These findings suggest that 2024 marks an ideological recalibration for the Labour Party that brings with it significant implications for the direction of the welfare state.
Pension policies are an increasingly important topic in British elections. This paper discusses what the first year under a Labour government has meant for pension policy, drawing on the Labour Party's pre-election pledges, before critically considering future directions of pension policy and areas not currently addressed by the Labour government, or where policies could go further. The paper argues that structural inequalities in the labour market and the pension system persist, with consistent evidence of gender and ethnic inequalities in labour market participation, the nature of such participation, pension outcomes, and a range of financial and non-financial wellbeing indicators. Placing adequacy and fairness at the heart of Labour policy can send a strong message on the government's part of understanding the complex interactions of opportunities and costs across the lifecourse for individuals from diverse backgrounds, and anticipating further demographic and socio-economic changes in the British society and economy.
In welfare states, there is considerable interest in the potential of guaranteed income (GI) experiments to improve the well-being of (marginalised) populations. However, understanding the mechanisms by which GI affects interrelationships between financial well-being, mental health, and crime and under which conditions is limited. This paper addresses these gaps by analysing a Dutch GI experiment involving fourteen forensic psychiatric clients, employing a mixed-methods approach. Using realistic evaluation principles, the study identifies four key mechanisms that contributed to a decrease in recidivism risk: meeting basic needs; alleviating financial scarcity and its psychological repercussions; strengthening social connections; and facilitating social withdrawal. Additionally, contextual factors such as social networks, identity, and life events are explored to explain variations among participants over time. Our analysis illuminates the intricate relationships among livelihood security, health care, and criminal behaviour while exploring the potential for targeted welfare interventions to enhance both individual health outcomes and public safety.
This article investigates the recent development of formal childcare services in China, focusing on the policy framework introduced since 2019 and its implementation in three county-level regions. Drawing on Mahon's typology of childcare welfare models, it identifies China's approach as a tailored third way model, characterised by reliance on private investment, limited public funding, and the assignment of primary caregiving responsibilities to families. Based on policy analysis and qualitative fieldwork, the study reveals significant gaps between policy goals and service accessibility. While formal childcare is framed as a solution to declining fertility and work-life imbalance, high service costs and inadequate local support have constrained equitable access. The Chinese case suggests that without stronger public investment and gender-equality measures, the third way model is unlikely to sustain women's employment and may deepen social inequalities.
Women's employment, as a critical dimension of gender equality, is conditioned on national family policies. Using panel data from the China Family Panel Survey, this article analyses how family policies affect multi-dimensional employment outcomes of women in China, where recent reforms in family policy are highly fertility-oriented. Findings show that extended maternity leave exerts negative effects on women's wages and occupational socioeconomic status among all Chinese female employees, irrespective of motherhood. By contrast, the negative effect of maternity leave on female labour force participation is much less prominent. Furthermore, funded childcare has a protective but limited effect on women's employment. Our findings suggest that family policy may influence not only mothers but all women due to the realised or potential fertility, thus affecting the gender disparity in the labour market to a broader extent. Implications for work-family reconciliation and gender equality are also discussed.
Although participatory methods are increasingly used in social care regulation, limited research examines how inspectors apply information from service users. This study addresses this gap through a case study of onsite interviews with children in residential care in Israel. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with inspectors and headquarters staff from Israel's Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. The analysis identified four approaches used by inspectors: assessing care quality against standards, advocating for children as a group, advocating for individual children, and empowering children to address their concerns. These approaches illustrate inspectors' dual role as regulators and facilitators of participation, balancing oversight with a relational approach that shapes service users' lives at a personal level. This multifaceted role reflects an evolving view of regulation that extends beyond oversight to include advocacy, protection, and empowerment, emphasising the balance inspectors maintain between regulatory duties and the well-being of service users in social care.
Starting in 2025, China is gradually increasing the statutory retirement age for male and female employees. However, little is known about how parental retirement delay affects the fertility intentions of adult children. This study investigates this issue using a 2 & times; 4 factorial survey experimental design (N = 773) and a difference-in-differences method to identify causal relationships. It further examines the mediating roles of grandparental economic support and childcare. The results show that the Delayed Retirement Policy significantly reduces both grandparental childcare and the fertility intentions of their adult children. The mediating pathway through reduced grandparental care is supported, whereas grandparental economic support plays no significant role. The magnitude of these effects varies by the duration of parental retirement delay, the gender of the parent affected, and whether both parents are impacted. Policy recommendations include promoting flexible retirement age options, expanding parental leave, and increasing the provision of childcare services to supplement intergenerational support.
The article examines the tax policies the UK Labour government pursued in its first year in office in the context of its economic and fiscal inheritance. It presents the promises of the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto and the government's main tax policies to June 2025. The article considers several possible interpretations of the government's tax policies including the desire both to raise revenues and to establish fiscal credibility and assesses whether tax measures have been used to address social policy goals. The article concludes that, while cautious and even conservative, Labour's approach to tax and tax policy making did not appear to be based on a cohesive plan, was not accompanied by a coherent or compelling narrative, and failed to seize the opportunity for a bolder strategy.
Despite shifting attitudes towards men taking up unpaid work, there remains a persistent gender gap in informal caregiving for older adults. We investigate how individual gender role attitudes of women and men influence their provision of care to parents and whether this relationship is moderated by the national context. Using data from the Generations and Gender Survey and logistic regressions with country-fixed effects to a sample of nine European countries, we find that individual gender egalitarian views correspond with a significant decreased likelihood of providing care among women, but not with an increased probability among men. While we find some support for the moderating effect of country contexts for women, their role in increasing male involvement in care appears to be limited. Changing behaviours through shifts in individual gender role attitudes alone may not be sufficient to bring about greater gender equality in care for older people.
In many high-income countries, migrant-native gaps persist in employment, even among second generation migrants. Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP), like occupation-specific training and internships, aim to enhance employability, yet evidence on differential enrolment by migration background remains limited. Using linked register data for Belgium, this study (I) documents differential uptake by migration background, and (II) addresses the extent to which such differentials are related to individual characteristics and coaching by caseworkers. We find significantly lower enrolment in internships and especially occupation-specific training among second generation migrant groups, those of non-European origin in particular. Migrant-native differences in human capital partly explain the gaps, whereas the gap remains largely unchanged when controlling for jobseekers' flexibility. Conversely, the gap would be wider if second-generation migrant groups were not on average coached more intensively by caseworkers. Finally, much of the variation remains unexplained, highlighting a need for future research testing complementary theoretical explanations.
This article explores the capabilities, opportunities, and motivations (COM) for the employment of people with disabilities (PWD) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Norway and the Netherlands. This COM-B (behavior) model provides useful insights for developing demand-side policies aimed at promoting PWD's labour-market participation. Four groups of SMEs are distinguished: inclusive SMEs, non-inclusive SMEs, SMEs with the intention to employ PWD (inclusion-willing), and SMEs with past experience in employing PWD (inclusion-experienced). Based on survey data, we found that whereas non-inclusive SMEs score significantly lower on capabilities and opportunities than inclusive SMEs, inclusion-willing and inclusion-experienced SMEs hardly differ from inclusive SMEs. No significant differences were found regarding motivations of the four groups. In addition, the groups' COM factors hardly differ when they are compared across both countries. Nevertheless, SMEs in both countries do differ with regard to their specific motivations to employ PWD. Implications for policies and employer services are discussed.
Informed by institutional theories of microfoundations, this study elucidates how employment service caseworkers negotiated the configuration of welfare conditionality based on age, thereby establishing a microfoundation for policies aimed at extending job-seeking lives. Through conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-four frontline social workers and a context-mechanism-outcome analysis, the findings uncover how service providers incorporated age-specific considerations and redefined the meanings of work in later life. While organisational adjustments extended the service goals and mobilised extra resources, structural constraints forced caseworkers to adopt pragmatic attitudes towards workfare measures. Consequently, a 'more-than-employment' approach to older jobseekers was formulated concerned with age, relationship, and health. This research contributes to social policy studies by theorising welfare conditionality as a product of negotiated configuration that crafts the microfoundation of activation policies. Empirically, this study enriches the literature by linking extending job-seeking lives and older claimants to welfare conditionality within Hong Kong's work-first model.
Housing policy has been a busy area of activity for the Labour government in its first year. In this paper we critically assess the tensions and contradictions within these housing policy changes, examining whether they add up to a coherent, programmatic response to the 'housing crisis' which can deliver for individuals and households struggling to access and sustain adequate housing after fourteen years of austerity and neglect. In particular, we question the underlying driver of the housebuilding target and ask whether the Labour government's apparent desperation for economic growth is subsuming concerns for social justice, despite the increase in support for social housing - a debate with wide international resonance in the current economic context. Finally, we scrutinise whether the rapid start out of the blocks on housing policy can be maintained for the inevitable marathon that is necessary to make significant changes to the UK housing system.
From manifesto pledges to election victory in 2024, the Labour Party has positioned 'spiralling economic inactivity' as the central employment and welfare challenge. This article critically examines Labour's first year in power, with a focus on employment policies at the intersection of in-work poverty, economic insecurity, and inactivity. We begin by outlining the current labour market context, questioning the narrative underpinning Labour's welfare reform agenda. We then analyse key policy shifts in social security and employment support, especially as they affect marginalised groups. This is followed by a review of Labour's wider labour market strategy, including the Employment Rights Bill, Pathways to Work, Get Britain Working, and the significance of devolution. The article concludes by assessing the current direction of travel, and explores the tension between the structural roots of work insecurity and the incremental policy responses likely to leave the deeper labour market challenges across the UK largely intact.
Previous research has shown that childhood disability incurs higher costs. Welfare state cash support is crucial to guarantee adequate social participation for families of children with disabilities. To properly assess the adequacy of cash support, the needs-based costs of childhood disability must be accounted for. This article investigates the adequacy of a cash support system that is designed to increase with the severity of the child's care needs for four hypothetical children with different types of care needs. Therefore, we build on recently developed reference budgets for adequate social participation for families with disabled children in Belgium. The results show that Belgian cash support is generally insufficient to enable equal social participation for these families, particularly for children with less-visible disabilities. This forces families to make choices about which costs are met by the support measures and which costs are borne by themselves.
This article critically appraises the UK Labour government's early approach to parental leave reform following the 2024 election, comparing pre-election promises with post-election policy directions. Drawing on Daly's conceptualisation of care as a policy good (Daly, 2002), we analyse Labour's reforms across three overlapping dimensions central to their pre-election pledges: access and pay levels, leave design and entitlements, and inclusion of diverse families. We argue that Labour's current approach adheres to liberal welfare principles, with market-oriented reforms prioritising economic productivity over care provision, perpetuating implicit maternalism while systematically excluding working-class, minority ethnic, and self and precariously employed families. In contrast, care-centred approaches pioneered elsewhere in Europe demonstrate that gender equality, social inclusion, and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing rather than competing objectives. Echoing calls from the Women and Equalities Committee for transformative change, we argue that Labour's incremental approach cannot achieve reforms that work for parents or the economy without embracing care-centred policies.
