Exclusionary employment in Britain’s broken labour market

There is growing evidence of the problematic nature of the UK’s ‘flexible labour market’ with rising levels of in-work poverty and insecurity. Yet successive Governments have stressed that paid work is the route to inclusion, focussing attention on the divide between employed and unemployed. Past efforts to measure social exclusion have tended to make the same distinction. The aim of this paper is to apply Levitas et al’s (2007) framework to assess levels of exclusionary employment, i.e. exclusion arising directly from an individual’s labour market situation. Using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion UK survey, results show that one in three adults in paid work is in poverty, or in insecure or poor quality employment. One third of this group have not seen any progression in their labour market situation in the last five years. The policy focus needs to shift from ‘Broken Britain’ to Britain’s broken labour market

Regulatory inspection and the changing legitimacy of health and safety

The regulation of conduct via law is a key mechanism through which broader social meanings are negotiated and expressed. The use of regulatory tools to bring about desired outcomes reflects existing social and political understandings about¬ institutional legitimacy, the meanings attached to regulation, and the values it seeks to advance. But these contextual understandings are not static, and their evolution poses challenges for regulators, particularly when they reflect political framing processes. This paper shows how inspection has been reshaped as a tool within the United Kingdom’s health and safety system by changes in the meanings attached to the concept of ‘risk-based regulation’. While rates of inspection have fallen dramatically in recent years, the nature and quality of inspection have also been fundamentally reshaped via an increasingly procedural and economically-rational ‘risk-based’ policy context. This has had consequences for the transformative and symbolic value of inspection as a tool of regulatory practice

Welfare conditionality and social marginality: the folly of the tutelary state?

In a contemporarnb 1`vby evolution of the tutelary state, welfare reform in the United Kingdom has been characterised by moves towards greater conditionality and sanctioning. This is influenced by the attributing responsibility for poverty and unemployment to the behaviour of marginalised individuals. Mead (1992) has argued that the poor are dependants who ought to receive support on condition of certain restrictions imposed by a protective state that will incentivise engagement with support mechanisms. This article examines how the contemporary tutelary and therapeutic state has responded to new forms of social marginality. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with welfare claimants with an offending background in England and Scotland, the article examines their encounters with the welfare system and argues that alienation, rather than engagement with support, increasingly characterises their experiences

Plans that work: improving employment outcomes for young people with learning disabilities

This article offers a critical reflection on the function of education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in pathways to employment for disabled young people. We consider ‘the education plan’ as an artefact of special educational needs systems. We problematise the often taken‐for‐granted assumption that such plans are always and only a ‘good’ thing in the lives of disabled young people seeking pathways to employment. At the same time, we consider the rise in demand for plans that are understood by many as a crucial mechanism for achieving support. Following the recent policy reforms in England, we describe a context in which the funding of education is shrinking and in which the promise of employment for disabled young people has yet to be delivered. We conclude by proposing some changes to policy and practice to enhance employment opportunities for disabled young people

The role of law in the control of obesity in England : looking at the contribution of law to a healthy food culture

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article is available from: http://www.anzhealthpolicy.com/content/5/1/21 DOI: 10.1186/1743-8462-5-21Obesity levels in England are significantly higher than in much of the rest of Europe. This article examines aspects of the physical and cultural context of food consumption in England, and the evolution of government policy on obesity, as a background to an analysis of how law might play a role in obesity prevention. Research suggests that individual food choices are associated with cultural and socio-economic circumstances and that they can be manipulated by advertising, food packaging and presentation. This suggests that there might be ways of using law to manage the influences on food choices, and of using law in support of strategies to redirect food choices towards healthy food products. Law is a particularly useful tool in the protection of the individual against the economic power of the food industry, and there is much that law can do to change the physical, economic and social environment of food consumption.Peer reviewe