Archive for September 2025

It has been more than 14 months since a national housing emergency was declared by the Scottish Government. And while pinpointing an exact reason for the emergency can be difficult, systemic failures are the driving force behind people throughout the country not having a place to call home.

At a time when far-right movements across Europe exploit economic anxiety and social division, abandoning the principle of public provision is both economically shortsighted and politically dangerous. The cost of public infrastructure pales in comparison to the social fractures that result from treating basic human needs as cost-centers. The solution to Europe’s welfare crisis isn’t more creative financing, but regulations and removing essential services away from markets.

When it is not framed around cost savings, discussion of public service reform these days mostly focuses on technology. This is most obvious in healthcare, where medical science drives change all the time: weight loss drugs, genetic cancer tests, and so on. The benefits and risks of AI are another theme, from education to criminal justice. But some of those involved in trying to improve public services are taking a strikingly different tack. Their work centres not on machines but on relationships.

Japan’s government spending requests for next fiscal year will likely set a record for the third consecutive year, a draft of the requests obtained by Reuters showed on Monday, highlighting the challenge the country faces in fixing its dire finances…. The biggest outlay would come from the health ministry, which requested 34.8 trillion yen in spending mostly to pay for rising social welfare costs for an ageing population.

Our work with 81 unhoused and street-involved community members reveals how big-city drug traffickers moving into smaller Canadian communities can wreak havoc. These out-of-town dealers often forcefully take over people’s homes so they can use them as a base to sell and produce drugs. These groups and their home takeovers are a significant contributor to homelessness. Home takeovers force people out of housing and into homelessness, deepening cycles of poverty, housing instability and trauma. Above: A homeless man stays in a warm area after having dinner at a shelter

Recent research from Fordham Graduate School of Social Service Professor Lauri Goldkind, Ph.D., explored how clinical social workers are using—or avoiding—the technology, and their mindsets behind these decisions. In an article titled Clinical Social Workers’ Perceptions of Large Language Models in Practice: Resistance to Automation and Prospects for Integration, Goldkind and her co-authors interviewed 21 clinical social workers and explored how they experience their work in the context of growing LLM use.