Is it really such a bad thing that there aren’t “enough” social workers? After all, as Parkinson’s Law of Social Work states that social problems increase to occupy the total number of social workers available to deal with them Yes, that was me being facetious, but the point remains that we don’t need huge numbers of social

The prospect of a cross-party deal on funding social care appeared close to zero after the three main parties accused each other of exploiting the issue for political ends

The Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) has been given proposals (The Social Security - Flexible New Deal Regulations 2008) by James Purnell (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) to consider. They include: One week loss of benefit (sanction) to those who, without good cause, refuse to carry out a jobseekers’s direction which relates to attendance

Worth checking the series of short perspectives from different authors on the future of social democracy being run by Social Europe Journal, in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. This debate follows the “Good society”, a paper by Jon Cruddas MP and Andrea Nahles from the SPD. There are some contributions from people familiar to the

Attempts to reach a cross-party deal on funding social care appear to be dead in the water ahead of a key summit.

A deal has been done on the law to restrict the carbon output of cars sold in Europe. But is it an "empty deal", a noble aspiration savaged by the short-sighted and selfish car industry and car-producing countries, as some environmentalists believe? Or is it "good for industry, good for the environment and good for jobs," as the Socialists say? It's not yet written in stone. The European Parl...

Social Media Affairs has just released a report looking at the political social media landscape in the UK (with, ahem, myself being one of the four people contributing introductory remarks about politics and social media). Any report like this has to deal with all sorts of issues of definition and categorisation but there are some striking

Before and during the election there was a great deal of talk about the Lib Dem use of social media as a way of getting our message across cheaply and effectively. Since then though the Party seems too place very little importance on social media with the result that an important and effective way of

Parental leave will be increased from three to four months and will apply to all employees regardless of the type of contract, according to an agreement signed yesterday (18 June) by social partners in presence of Vladimír Spidla, EU commissioner for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities.

As Nicola says, today’s social mobility White Paper has many good policies, but the more equal a society the more socially mobile it tends to be. But there has always been a political trend that sees social mobility (or equality of opportunity as it used to be known) as a substitute for...