The Globalization and Re-localization of Material Flows: Four Phases of Food Regulation

Over three phases of regulation, the paper traces a narrow range of regulatory interest in food, focusing largely on food safety and the handling of periodic food crises. We suggest that these crises were early indications of the problems in sustaining increasingly unsustainable modes of food production through global supply chains and that United Kingdom/EU regulation acted in part as a palliative, cloaking the wider systemic disorders. We go on to suggest that, as resource pressures become increasingly apparent in world food systems, a further fourth phase of food regulation will need to pay much greater attention to the resilience, sustainability, and security of food supply.     

The futures of government human resource development

During the next decade, the effectiveness of government agencies will depend on how well they address major demographic, social, political, economic, technological, and managerial trends which affect their workforce. Human resource development can play a major role in helping agencies respond, but to do so it will have to adopt a more proactive, strategic orientation, expand and dramatically alter products and services, and develop the capacity to use new skills, technologies, and work methods. Choosing among various possible futures will demand visionary leadership in government human resource development.     

Tackling Drugs Together: The Possibilities for a Confidential Drug Service

This article explores the exchange of personal information between agencies working with drug users and the 'problems' created by confidentiality. Confidentiality may be conceptualised as a form of information privacy, which in turn derives from a wider idea of privacy. The authors take as a case study the 'Wintercomfort Case', concerning a day centre for drug users in Cambridge. The focus is to look at the legal and practice implications of the case, and to examine in particular the tensions that exist between welfare and justice agencies who may have access to the same information, but who may also have different agendas and objectives in taking action.     

The Employment of Ex-Offenders and the UK's New Criminal Record Bureau

This article outlines the development of the UK's Criminal Records Bureau designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the screening arrangements for potential employees by disclosure of their criminal records to employers. The Bureau builds on existing arrangements that have been in place for a number of years. The authors argue that this development, which includes a much wider availability of criminal records, is an example of a new social policy that has the potential for an unintended consequence of large scale social exclusion, by limiting the prospects of employment for ex-offenders.