Understanding the Growth in Welfare Benefit Receipt in Britain: A Review of the Evidence

This paper summarises the conclusions from a more extensive report commissioned by the Treasury and the Ministry of Social Policy to provide an explanation of growth in welfare benefit receipt in Britain in the period 1971 to 1997. The study is structured around a simple heuristic model of four sets of influences, 'drivers', the interaction of which helps to explain trends in claimant caseloads: the economy, demography, welfare institutions and belief systems. Four sets of claimants are considered: unemployed people, disabled people, retirement pensioners and children and families. It assembles a widely dispersed literature, in the first comprehensive review of the evidence on this issue. The conclusions reported here are supported in the full report by a wide range of data and analyses. The full report has been extensively edited, updated, reformatted and published in September 2000 by the Policy Press at the University of Bristol, under the title The Making of A Welfare Class? Benefit receipt in Britain, by Robert Walker with Marilyn Howard. Details of this publication may be obtained through the link to the Policy Press website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Publications/TPP/catalog.htm The study concludes that, while caseloads increased across the four domains, they did so for very different reasons. While the process of de-industrialisation provided an important back-cloth to all the changes, it was only directly implicated as a major influence in the growth of unemployment related benefits. The upward trends in disability benefits were principally a reflection of the greater social awareness of the personal costs of disability, while the growth in benefits pertaining to the family was very largely a response to changing social attitudes and sexual behaviour. Demography, notably increased longevity, explains the observed growth in pensioner caseloads although the balance between contributory and means-tested pensions was the result of foresighted policy decisions made between the 1940s and 1970s.

The home use of antibacterial hand soap among women in Clark County, Nevada

The use of antibacterial products in the home is increasing. The broad-based use of these products may lead to antibiotic resistance and adverse health effects of the user due to exposure to the active ingredient(s). A cross-sectional study of Clark County, Nevada women was conducted to examine the relationship between the use of antibacterial soap in the homes of women who reside in Clark County and their knowledge regarding the negative side effects that could result from the use of antibacterial products, especially those containing triclosan; A survey was used to determine: (1) the reason women are using antibacterial products in their homes, (2) if they are aware of the negative outcomes that can result from and if they are under the impression that all bacteria are bad; The survey was distributed to participants at four Nevada Department of Motor Vehicle facilities in Las Vegas. The dependent variable was the use (yes or no) of antibacterial soap. Independent variables were the age (older than 30 or 18--30 years old), the economic status (more than {dollar}46,000 annual household income or less), and the participants\u27 awareness of the real facts about the antibacterial soap including having side effects, casing bacterial resistance, being ineffective against viral infections, and not being a cost effective infection control measure. The majority of the variables are reported as categorical data. SPSS version 13 was used to calculate descriptive statistics from both quantitative and qualitative questions; A large majority of participants used antibacterial soap in their home. Most of the participants who claimed to use antibacterial soap felt that it offered better protection from germs than regular soap. A majority of participants who used antibacterial soap also claimed that it protected them from a cold and the flu; Antibacterial soap is does not offer any additional protection against germs than regular soap. The purpose of band washing is to rid the skin of potentially harmful bacteria, not to destroy all the bacteria that are present