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This paper considers the origins and traces the history of the Social Fund, an ideologically-motivated social policy departure of the Thatcher era. It identifies the controversy, in research communities amongst others, which surrounded the establishment of the Fund, and considers the evidence of recurring difficulties in its practical operation over a thirty-year period. It then turns to the Coalition administration in Westminster’s decision to divest itself of responsibility for key parts of the Fund, devolving such obligations to local authorities in England, the Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales. The paper sets out a comparison of the approaches being developed to discharge the Fund’s prior responsibilities in the three nations. It concludes that the essential policy thrust lies in a determination to roll back central state obligations in poverty relief and income maintenance which had hitherto been accepted by all post-war administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon analysis of policy documents and interviews with key policy makers and professionals co-ordinating Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) in various settings, this paper interrogates the socio-political drivers underpinning SRE policy and practice with reference to the contemporary Welsh context. In media output in the UK context and beyond, there have been widespread public concerns about the over-sexualization of young girls, sexual grooming and the increasing commercialization of sex. These issues are also significant in Wales, but a different socio-political culture has led to different public pronouncements and a distinctive SRE approach. In this paper, we outline relatively new Welsh Assembly Government guidance on SRE (March 2010) in the context of a devolved education system. We argue that the characteristics of the Welsh approach to SRE include an emphasis on children’s rights and citizenship values, together with efforts to make SRE delivery more multidisciplinary and integrated. We also identify a different political rhetoric around sexual morality and family values, compared with that of England. This more progressive approach to SRE policy making, implementation and delivery in Wales is contrasted with the more heated pronouncements on the subject emanating from Westminster, particularly in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of anti-social behaviour became prominent in the UK in the 1990s when the Labour government constructed it as an important policy challenge and deployed a series of high profile interventions against it. But anti-social behaviour faded significantly from the political agenda once Tony Blair’s premiership ended in 2007 and its diminution appeared complete when the most high profile of interventions, the Anti-social Behaviour Order or Asbo, was replaced by the more mundane-sounding Injunction in 2014. This commentary argues, however, that far from the anti-social behaviour control regime softening as government priorities shifted elsewhere, legislation passed in 2014, allied to technological innovation, has increased the potential for those whose presence is considered problematic to be ‘eliminated’ from public spaces. This has particular significance for young people, whose discursive association with disorder and greater tendency to congregate in groups make them likely to be the targets of enhanced exclusionary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief article looks forward to the prospects for devolved government in Wales under the third term of a New Labour administration at Westminster. Four different strands are discussed in what follows: the development of devolution itself, including the prospects of a second Government of Wales Bill, the state of the Welsh economy, the development of a distinctively Welsh social policy agenda and the future leadership of the Welsh Assembly Government itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]