Michael S. Mahoney, 1939–2008

Perhaps the clearest testimony to the scholarly range and depth of Princeton's now‐lamented Michael S. Mahoney lies in the dismay of his colleagues in the last few years, as they contemplated his imminent retirement. How to maintain coverage of his fields? Fretting over this question, the program in history of science that he did so much to build recently found itself sketching a five-year plan that involved replacing him with no fewer than four new appointments: a historian of mathematics with the ability to handle the course on Greek antiquity, a historian of the core problems of the Scientific Revolution, a historian of technology who could cover the nineteenth‐century United States and Britain, and, finally, a historian of the computer-and-media revolution. In his passing we have lost a small department

Discretion as blame avoidance: Passing the buck to local authorities in ‘welfare reform’

This paper argues that central governments can avoid blame for cuts to social security by transferring discretionary powers to local authorities. When making reductions to entitlements, conferring discretion avoids delineating the boundary of who is affected, allowing: for conflicts at the heart of policy formation to be deliberately fudged; decisions to be shielded from the gaze of the public and the courts; and responsibility for the impact of budget reductions to be externalised. Using three ‘welfare reforms’ in the UK as examples – the council tax reduction scheme, discretionary housing payments, and local welfare assistance schemes – four ‘blame avoidance’ functions of conferring discretion are proposed

No children, no DSS, no students : online adverts and “property guardianship”

Purpose: Those seeking a new place to live – especially in the private rented sector – now head online to do so. The platforms they use and adverts they see are an important source of information about the properties they will occupy and how their owners’ seek to project them. This paper aims to argue for the importance of property adverts as a source of data, using “property guardianship” to illustrate the value in the approach. Design/methodology/approach: The study draws on an analysis of 503 advertisements published on SpareRoom.co.uk – a leading property search engine – in July 2018. Findings: The authors put forward four key areas of findings. The first two look at legal understanding, dealing with the context, the advertisement provides for eventual occupation (the “process of construction”) and any indications they provide of legal elements of occupation (“diagnostics”). The final two deal with the broader positioning of the sector, analysing the practice of excluding prospective occupiers, such as the widespread inclusion of “no Department of Social Security” seen elsewhere in the private rented sector, and how the adverts project a certain lifestyle to their viewer. Research limitations/implications: The findings demonstrate that further research into property advertisements would be valuable, particularly into other sub-markets in the private-rented sector, such as student accommodation and “professional” lets. Originality/value: This study is the only analysis of property guardian advertisements and the first dedicated study of private rented sector advertisements in the UK

Awarding Discretionary Housing Payments : Constraints of time, conditionality and the assessment of income/expenditure

As the Discretionary Housing Payment scheme (DHPs) continues to shoulder the considerable burden of mitigating reductions to housing benefit, this paper focuses on how the local authorities tasked with their allocation award these payments. Drawing on a small-scale vignette study with eighteen local authorities and excerpts from an analysis of 242 DHP application forms, it outlines three key problems: the time-limited nature of awards, deficiencies in the assessment of applicant income/expenditure, and the attachment of conduct conditionality to the renewal of awards. These problems in the administration of DHPs add further weight to arguments that this layer of discretionary support is deficient in adequately mitigating shortfalls in housing benefit

The United Kingdom

Analysis of the protection of social rights under the austerity agenda - particularly in the wake of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 - in the UK

Murky Waters: The ongoing evolution of vulnerability under s.189 Housing Act 1996

In the latest instalment of a long line of Pt VII Housing Act 1996 "vulnerability" cases, Mrs Justice Rose observes—seemingly in jest—that perhaps "old Pereira habits die hard". We agree. In the wake of Hotak and Panayiotou, the judgment in Rother demonstrates the continuing challenge of what HH Judge Luba QC described in the course of oral argument in Johnson 5 as "drinking from the pure waters" of s.189(1)(c) of the Housing Act 1996; avoiding the "dangerous … glossing" of the "primacy of the statutory words" that has characterised the interpretation of "vulnerability" in priority need homelessness assessments. Many of those key problems that characterised the "steady stream" of case law in the Pereira test live on with reference to this new Hotak formulation, albeit in a diluted form. In trying to get back to "those plain words" of s.189(1)(c), the pure waters still look decidedly murky. In this case comment, we outline the facts and key focus of the court’s decision in Rother, before reflecting on three further issues: 1) the use of external medical advisors; 2) the lack of consideration of s.149 of the Equality Act 2010; and 3) the position in Wales following the Housing (Wales) Act 2014

Nostalgia narratives? Pejorative attitudes to welfare in historical perspective : survey evidence from Beveridge to the British Social Attitudes Survey

Jensen and Tyler (2015) have powerfully argued that 'anti-welfare commonsense', fuelled by negative political and media discourse stressing welfare dependency and deception, has buttressed support for social security reform in recent years. Along with many other academics they point to the hardening of public attitudes towards welfare state provision and how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' have been reintroduced into popular debates. We identify four distinct threads within this scholarship. First, there is an argument that public attitudes have shifted from an earlier post-war welfare imaginary and settlement to an anti-welfare consensus. Second, this hardening includes a growing prevalence of 'othering'. The third thread is the broadening of this moral and disciplinary gaze to include groups, such as disabled people, who until recently were not subject to the same amount of stigma as other types of benefit recipients. Fourth, is the impact of pejorative welfare discourses on the self-identity and attitudes of disadvantaged groups. While a growing body of evidence makes it increasingly difficult to argue against suggestions that there is a hostile body of anti-welfare sentiment in the UK, what is often implicit in the analysis of pejorative contemporary attitudes to welfare is the view that there was once a 'golden age' of the welfare state when public support was more fully behind a strong set of social security benefits provided as a social right of citizenship. Whether this was the case is a moot point however. Few studies have tried to piece together the attitudes to welfare of the general public during the consensus era. We attempt to undertake such a task here, drawing on ad hoc attitudes surveys and polling data in particular. Specifically, we focus on how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' play out in this data, pointing to some key continuities found in contemporary and historical public attitudes to welfare