Lone parents and informal childcare: A tax credit childcare subsidy?

The Labour government aims to increase the lone parent employment rate to 70 per cent by 2010. To achieve this aim, it has introduced a state subsidy for childcare in the form of the childcare element of the Working Tax Credit. So far this has been limited to formal childcare despite evidence that lone parents are more likely to use informal childcare. This article investigates the potential of a state subsidy to be extended to support informal childcare. Utilizing evidence from a study of 78 qualitative in-depth interviews with lone parents, it explores preferences for informal care and the way that informal care is negotiated. On the one hand, we found that some lone parents held deeply embedded preferences for informal childcare based on trust, commitment, shared understandings and children's happiness. Thus it can be concluded that it is important for the government to support informal as well as formal care. On the other, we found that the way lone parents actually negotiated informal childcare involved complex notions of obligation, duty and reciprocity, suggesting that a subsidy could potentially intrude upon complex private family relationships. However, the evidence suggests that care was negotiated differently depending on whether it was provided by a grandparent or other family and friends, with lone parents tending to favour paying for childcare provided by other family and friends than grandparents. This has implications for a state subsidy, which needs further investigation

Why are women more likely than men to extend paid work? : The impact of work-family history on a decision to extend working life

Extending working life, and enabling and encouraging people to work longer, is a key policy area. That women are more likely than men to work beyond state pension age indicates that factors other than the state pension age play a role in extending working life. Financial factors are likely to be a key reason why women, and especially divorced women, are more likely than men to extend working life. It is well documented that women are less able to build a pension income due to their role as carer within the family, with their marital and fertility histories impacting upon work history. It therefore follows that gender inequalities over the life course continue into older age to influence need, capacity and desire to undertake paid work after state pension age. This paper explores how work, marital and fertility history impact upon the likelihood of working beyond state pension age, focusing upon differences between men and women. It uses the British Household Panel Survey’s retrospective data from the first 14 waves to summarise work-family histories, and logistic regression to understand the impact of work and family histories on working beyond state pension age. Findings show that, for women, family history is important for explaining a greater propensity to work beyond state pension age, with short breaks due to caring, lengthy marriages, and late divorce and remaining single with children all being important. However, lengthy dis-attachment (due to caring) from the labour market, and thus lowered negotiating power, makes working longer more difficult. For men, even short periods out of the labour market reduce their odds of working longer. This indicates that, on the one hand, policy needs to focus upon reducing the financial need to work longer by tackling gender inequalities in the labour market. On the other, to enable those most in financial need to work longer, more help needs to be given to increase their negotiating power in the labour market

Overlaps in dimensions of poverty

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed. We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another. The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty – the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures

Inclusive citizenship and degenderization : A comparison of state support in 22 European countries

This paper argues that welfare state progress needs to be based upon support for “inclusive citizenship” – the right to care, work and earn. Comparative analyses of welfare have often focused on defamilization to capture these dimensions. But inclusive citizenship requires challenging gender roles in both work (public sphere) and care (private sphere), and thus the paper argues that the concept of degenderization is a more suitable analytical tool. This paper adds to our understanding by operationalizing the concept of degenderization to compare how (far) 22 European countries degenderize. Indeed, it goes further to examine not just how much welfare states degenderize but how – whether they focus on degendering both work and care, crucial for “inclusive citizenship”. To examine how states degenderize, it uses a new way of classifying welfare states by examining policy packages using radar charts. It examines how much they degenderize against a yardstick, using the Surface Measure of Overall Performance approach. Seven welfare types were identified, but none fully supported inclusive citizenship. Indeed, the country clusters identified in this study differ from those found by previous studies, challenging commonly held views about which countries ought to be seen as key exemplars. This reflects the paper's distinctive focus on inclusive citizenship – capturing support for degendering care and work – and that it compares countries on the basis of their policy packages. It also examines how approach to and generosity of degenderization are related to gender equality outcomes

Working beyond state pension age : the impact of income and work-family life history

Preliminary report examing the impact of income and work and family history upon working upon state pension age

Do automated digital health behaviour change interventions have a positive effect on self-efficacy? A systematic review and meta-analysis

© 2019 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Health Psychology Review on 20/01/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2019.1705873.Self-efficacy is an important determinant of health behaviour. Digital interventions are a potentially acceptable and cost-effective way of delivering programmes of health behaviour change at scale. Whether behaviour change interventions work to increase self-efficacy in this context is unknown. This systematic review and meta-analysis sought to identify whether automated digital interventions are associated with positive changes in self-efficacy amongst non-clinical populations for five major health behaviours, and which BCTs are associated with that change. A systematic literature search identified 20 studies (n=5624) that assessed changes in self-efficacy and were included in a random effects meta-analysis. Interventions targeted: healthy eating (k=4), physical activity (k=9), sexual behaviour (k=3), and smoking (k=4). No interventions targeting alcohol use were identified. Overall, interventions had a small, positive effect on self-efficacy (푔 = 0.190, CI [0.078; 0.303]). The effect of interventions on self-efficacy did not differ as a function of health behaviour type (Qbetween = 7.3704 p = 0.061, df = 3). Inclusion of the BCT ‘information about social and environmental consequences’ had a small, negative effect on self-efficacy (Δ푔= - 0.297, Q=7.072, p=0.008). Whilst this review indicates that digital interventions can be used to change self-efficacy, which techniques work best in this context is not clear.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Why the UK complied with COVID-19 lockdown law

In March 2020, the UK introduced a set of rules to ‘lockdown’ the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdown constituted a key feature of governmental efforts to manage the early stages of the pandemic. Evidence suggests that the lockdown attracted high levels of compliance. Yet, a question remains about exactly why the UK public complied. Based on a major empirical study, this article explores what drove legal compliance during the UK’s first lockdown. We find that legal compliance was dominated by normative concerns with the legitimacy of law. Yet, the public’s attachment to the legitimacy of law in general was undermined by concerns about the legitimacy of lockdown law specifically. Such specific legitimacy assessments were informed by people’s rights consciousness, their sense of obligation to others, perceptions of personal health vulnerability and assessments of the rules’ effectiveness in preventing virus transmission. The prospect of peer disapproval for beaching lockdown also proved significant, with the perceived risk of sanctions imposed by the police predicting fear of peer disapproval. The article concludes by considering what lessons might be learned about the use of legal rules to rapidly shape public behaviour in times of crisis

Undermining loyalty to legality? An empirical analysis of perceptions of 'lockdown' law and guidance during COVID-19

This article substantially extends the existing constitutional and legal critiques of the use of soft law public health guidance in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon the findings of a national survey undertaken during the first wave of the pandemic in June 2020, it shows how the perceived legal status of lockdown rules made a significant difference as to whether the UK public complied with them and that this effect is a product of the legitimacy that law itself enjoys within UK society. Based on this analysis, it argues that the problems with the government's approach to guidance, that have been subjected to criticism in constitutional and legal terms, may also be open to critique on the basis that they risk undermining the public's loyalty to the law itself

Law and Compliance during COVID-19

The Law and Compliance during COVID-19 project sought to answer a critical question: what drove public compliance – and non-compliance – with lockdown laws across the UK during the early stages of the pandemic? Our focus was on what people thought the law was, and how they behaved in relation to it. Through surveys, interviews, and focus groups with the public during 2020, our aim was to understand how the public responded to the lockdown restrictions that they believed to be legal rules. This report sets out our key findings