The issue of housing and health has received growing attention in recent years. This article reviews why this has been the case and presents the results of the authors' study of housing and health in two areas of West Belfast. A large scale household survey was carried out in Divis Flats and part of the Twinbrook estate, both deprived areas of public sector housing, to compare health and housing conditions. The health of children in Divis is shown to be much worse than the health of children in Twinbrook. Respiratory conditions, diarrhoea, vomiting and psychological distress were particularly common. The health of adults in Divis was also markedly worse than in Twinbrook, and the health of women generally worse than men. The authors conclude that Divis Flats is a contemporary public sector slum and support the case for clearance and rehousing. However, it is argued that the health problems of Divis are one, extreme, manifestation of a wider problem of ill health in low income, ‘mass housing’ areas.

It is widely recognised that there are many problems with the community care policy for the mentally ill which has been in operation in England and Wales since the late 1950s. However, many existing accounts of the development of the policy rest upon a variety of erroneous assumptions about how it has evolved, and which in turn affect our understanding of how it might be changed. Some of these assumptions are examined, and it is argued that frequently they fail to acknowledge how both the rhetoric and the reality of the policy have developed. Taking this critique into account, a more accurate assessment of how to understand community care for the mentally ill is offered.

Carers occupy an ambiguous position within the social care system. Services are predominantly structured around the dependant rather than the carer, and this has important consequences for their delivery and evaluation. Many of the problems that arise in thinking about carer issues relate to confusion over the way the relationship between social care agencies and informal carers should be perceived. The paper outlines three models that provide frames of reference for this relationship: carers as resources; carers as co-workers; and carers as co-clients. The tensions between these are then used to explore the contradictions of policy in this field.

This paper provides a case study of the involvement of carers in planning services for mentally handicapped people under the All Wales Strategy (AWS). After describing the structure for consumer participation in the AWS in Gwynedd, reasons for the low level of participation found are examined before considering what can be learnt from these early experiences. Major changes in the planning structure implemented after a review of the system are outlined. The paper ends with a discussion of the major operational principles which might underlie an effective system of consumer participation.

For over 15 years the Centre for Social Policy at the University of Antwerp has been involved in research on social security. More specifically, it has tried to develop research methodologies which would make it possible to quantify the adequacy of the social security system in Belgium, and to assess its impact on the income of households. The first part of this article provides a broad outline of the social security system in Belgium. The second and major part presents the main results of the research. The same methodology and the same standardised presentation of results is currently being used in a comparative study financed by the Commission of the European Community and undertaken by research groups in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Ireland, Spain and Greece.