This article reports on an exploratory study in the UK on the experiences of social work practitioners and students whose minoritised identities may not be obvious to those they interact with in work and university settings. Study is relevant because people increasingly identify in ways that fall outside singular demographic categories and because there is a dearth of research on their experiences to date. Analysis of the qualitative survey data identifies three overarching themes: experiences of misrecognition and prejudice; fears of being out; and ease with ‘passing’ (successfully presenting oneself in a socially favoured identity rather than an ‘authentic’ one) and ‘code-switching’ (altering language, behaviour or appearance so that it conforms to hegemonic societal and cultural norms). While a small-scale study, experiences of the surveyed practitioners and students provide important illustrations of their ongoing fears about revealing their authentic identities, despite the broader professional commitment to anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory practice.
The biennial conferences on Decisions, Assessment, Risk and Evidence in Social Work have reached a new milestone. Running in Belfast since 2010, the 2024 conference will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, 20–21 June. This article describes the journey to date and provides information for those interested in attending future conferences. This short article also includes some reflective comment on the contribution of the Decisions, Assessment, Risk and Evidence in Social Work conferences to learning and to the research community.
This chapter spotlights the cyclical interest, at a governmental level in England, in design governance, characterised by discrete periods of strong public oversight and relative market freedom. The chapter analyses the failure to deliver a consistent approach to place and housing quality over the last decade – a period in which the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s role in design scrutiny was ended while greater ‘market freedoms’ arrived in the form of an extension of permitted development rights. It notes that while permitted development rights are producing the ‘slums of the future’, a conservative ‘beauty’ ethic that will affect future planned development has been re-rooted in the Office for Place, marking the standard cyclical return to design oversight, though one that leans heavily on traditional urbanism. The chapter argues that the return of oversight, albeit in a very different form, might be cautiously welcomed if it can be evolved to correct at least some of the failings of design governance that have become apparent in the last decade.
The conclusion reviews the findings of the other chapters and returns to a question set up in the introduction, asking whether the issues in planning in England reflect: failings of the planning system, profession and ‘discipline’; failings of the state within which planning has to operate (which then uses planning as a scapegoat for its own failure to deliver); or a combination of both state and planning failure. The conclusion then identifies four cross-cutting themes that recur in the preceding chapters, those of rhetoric, rapidity (of reform), resourcing (or the lack of) and regressive outcomes. Across these four themes, the conclusion summarises how UK government (in)action has caused or exacerbated problems with the operation of the English planning system, and represents an unprecedented failure of that government to design and implement a functioning planning system.
Background:
There are limited studies focused on examining specific types of evidence, like surveys beyond the US and territories with unicameral legislatures and unique contexts.
Aims and objectives:
To measure the extent of survey research being used as evidence in policymaking in Hong Kong.
Methods:
Through document analysis, this study screened and examined Hong Kong Legislative Council documents utilised to enact 569 bills from 2000 to 2022.
Findings:
About 25% of bills utilised surveys as evidence, with differences across 18 policy areas. Health services recorded the highest percentage of survey use in legislation. In the Hong Kong legislature, surveys are primarily used to understand policy issues better. Mode of data collection, sample size, response rates, and representativeness of surveys are not commonly discussed in legislative documents.
Discussion and conclusion:
The study findings reaffirm previous research on the limited utilisation of survey evidence in policymaking in Hong Kong, an Asian context with a unicameral legislation and colonial history. The importance of survey evidence was highlighted in policy areas that directly impact the public, such as healthcare. The findings also highlight the important role of politics in investigating the use of surveys as research evidence for policymaking.
It is widely reported that since the latter decades of the 20th century, there has been an annual shortfall in the number of new homes constructed relative to housing demand. The planning system has often been accused of being the primary cause of this shortage by governments of different political complexions. It is blamed for restricting housing supply and increasing house prices, and for acting as a drag on the free market delivering housing. Yet, it is not clear that planning is the root cause of these problems, and planning is rarely celebrated for its achievements in enabling the nation’s housing. We frame changes in planning policy that have occurred since 2010 in light of longer-term housing trends in England to ask whether state planning for housing has failed.
This chapter introduces the book by first reviewing how a narrative of planning ‘failing to deliver’ has been constructed over recent decades on the island of Britain particularly in England. It reviews the manner in which planning has been critiqued and scapegoated since the 1970s by rightist and liberal critics, the ideas that ostensibly underpin their positions, and the resultant episodes of attempted deregulation of planning. The recrudescence of such critiques over the ‘long 2010s’, including surrounding the ‘radical’ reforms of planning proposed in 2020, is also explored. The discussion then moves to consider the book’s central question of whether many of the issues that the planning system and profession have had to contend with in fact reflect central state ‘failings’, such as endless and accelerating cycles of reform, policy churn, and tinkering by governments, which have rarely allowed one set of planning reforms to bed down before new policy reforms and initiatives have been launched. Finally, the contents and structure of the rest of the book are outlined.
Launched with much fanfare as a new scale and alternative to the regional planning structures established in England under the New Labour governments of the 1990s and 2000s, localism’s most tangible effect on planning has been the rights conferred on local communities and businesses to prepare neighbourhood plans. With the current government agenda for planning veering away from localism and back towards centralism, the chapter reflects on the legacies and lessons of almost a decade of experience of neighbourhood planning and its future prospects. It concludes that poorer areas have been much less likely to produce neighbourhood plans, highlights the regressive consequences of that inequality and suggests that fundamental changes are needed to make it work effectively.
The extension of permitted development rights to make the conversion of buildings to residential use easier presents a typical example of the faith in deregulation as a pathway towards aligning development with demand. But what have been the impacts of this experimentation? Has it resulted in good-quality housing? And what might be the impacts of any extension of such rights on residential quality? This chapter explores the impact of permitted development, with a particular focus on neighbourhood health, providing new evidence of the problematic assumption that housing should be allowed regardless of local amenities and the built environment context of existing buildings.
