The scale of the cuts to local government finance, coupled with increasing demand for services, has led to unprecedented 'budget gaps' in council budgets. Arguably, two competing narratives of the trajectory of local government have emerged in which contrasting futures are imagined for the sector-a positive story of adaptation and survival and more negative one of residualisation and marginalisation. Drawing on case study evidence from three English local authorities, the paper distinguishes and provides examples of three strategic approaches to managing austerityefficiency, retrenchment and investment. It demonstrates how and why the balance of these strategies has shifted between the early and later phases of austerity and considers the extent to which the evidence of the case studies provide support for either the survival or marginalisation narrative. The paper concludes by arguing that a third narrative-responsibilisation-captures more fully the trajectory of local government in England.

Social mix policies have become controversial. Claims about the harms caused by neighbourhood effects have been challenged while counter-claims have been made about the potential benefits for low-income households from living in poor communities. This paper examines two aspects of this debate: whether deprived communities provide greater access to social networks and hence resources in the form of gifts, and whether they provide worse access to resources in the form of services. Data come from the largest survey of poverty ever conducted in the UK-the Poverty and Social Exclusion UK Survey 2012. Results do not support either position in the debate. They do not suggest that access to services is worse in deprived neighbourhoods for all services, but only for a minority. While people in deprived neighbourhoods report marginally greater contact with family and slightly higher levels of social support, there is no evidence of greater levels of exchange of gifts or reciprocity through social networks.

Although social exclusion is often described as an outcome of paternal imprisonment, few studies have directly measured the extent of social exclusion in prisoners' families, or benchmarked it against the general population. This paper compares social exclusion among caregivers of children affected by paternal incarceration with overall estimates of social exclusion across the Australian population, and with estimates of social exclusion among a matched subset. Caregivers of children with imprisoned fathers were much more heavily excluded than adults in the general population. Compared to a matched sample, differences were smaller, and mostly related to inadequate financial resources. We propose that single parent status and financial hardship are key mediators of the relationship between paternal incarceration and social exclusion.

Our understanding of the links between social networks and the causes or solutions to poverty have been enhanced through theoretical and empirical research on the concept of social capital. In this paper we discuss how social networks and social capital have commonly been presented as a problem or a panacea in policy regarding neighbourhoods and worklessness and then contrast this with recent evidence. We conclude that policy misrecognises the links between poverty and social networks and social capital and through cuts in public services in the UK, is currently undermining social capital and social networks

There is robust evidence of associations between parental imprisonment and a variety of harms to children, but the consequences of other forms of family imprisonment are largely unknown. Using HILDA, a nationally representative Australian dataset, this article looked at the direct effects of parental imprisonment (PI), household member imprisonment (HI) or close family member imprisonment (CFI) on the social support and mental health of non-incarcerated adults and young people. Recent PI, HI, or CFI had no association with social support. Recent CFI did increase men's risk of poor mental health, but not women's or young people's. We consider the implications of these findings in the context of strong negative effects of paternal imprisonment on mothers in the United States.