This article considers how chauvinistic welfare policies operate as a bordering practice. Taking the UK as an example, it examines a process in which welfare provisions have increasingly been withdrawn from a group of people designated as undeserving. It points out a close link between chauvinism based on ethnicity and that based on class. This relation is explored in detail for the case of social housing culminating in today’s ‘social housing for local people’ approach. A second case, access to social services for unaccompanied minors, is presented to illustrate bordering practices that operate in everyday services despite existing legal entitlements. The cases show that governments and service providers frequently act outside their legal remits to pursue this agenda, despite the UK’s anti-discrimination legislation.

Aquatic organisms can take up toxicants from water (aqueous exposure) and from food (dietary exposure), yet current environmental regulations often fail to consider the toxic effects of dietary exposure. Such unrealistic exposure scenarios may lead to ineffective water-quality standards or discharge consents that fail to provide adequate protection of the receiving water. Both dietary and aqueous exposure routes contributed to the bioaccumulation of zinc by Gammarus pulex, and both influenced the lethal and sublethal effects of zinc exposure. However, little concordance was found between body burden and magnitude of effect on feeding rate, and the duration of the postexposure response differed between exposure routes. Feeding inhibition, resulting from water-only or simultaneous aqueous and dietary exposure, persisted after the contaminant was removed, but feeding inhibition resulting from dietary exposure alone did not. These results imply that whereas aqueous exposure resulted in either irreversible or slowly reversible physiological damage, feeding inhibition in response to dietary zinc exposure involved an avoidance response. Water-only exposure studies underestimated the effects of simultaneous exposure to contaminated food and contaminated water. Therefore, regarding compounds for which dietary exposure is important, regulatory toxicity tests should either incorporate dietary exposure routes or be subjected to an additional uncertainty factor.

This essay explores the role of strategic ignorance in relation to access to legal advice in England and Wales, drawing on the work of Linsey McGoey (2012; 2019; 2020), taking areas of extreme shortage of immigration and asylum legal advice as an example of the wider phenomenon in access to justice. It argues that there is a misplaced belief in market-based procurement to meet advice needs, which leads to a failure to collect evidence to understand whether the market does in fact achieve this. This avoidance of evidence about market functioning and the relationship between demand and provision is facilitated by fragmentation of both policy and operational responsibilities, leaving large gaps for ignorance, in which the accounts and concerns of advice-users are dismissed as not credible. It argues that, in failing to collect adequate evidence about the functioning of the market, the Lord Chancellor is ignoring a statutory duty to secure the availability of legal aid. Keywords: legal aid; advice deserts; strategic ignorance; asylum and immigration; LASPO Act 2012 section 2.

The United Kingdom's Children Act 1989 provides that unaccompanied children claiming asylum in the UK are looked after by the local authority in whose area they first come to attention of the authorities. Unlike adults, they were not subject to dispersal to other parts of the country under the Asylum and Immigration Act 1999. This has created an uneven pattern of asylum-seeker children across the country, who have no choice in where they live and are concentrated in a few geographical areas, typically near ports and administrative hubs. That, in turn, has produced unmitigated pressure on local services while fostering a view in other areas that the children are someone else's 'problem' rather than a shared responsibility for the country. This article maps the distribution of unaccompanied children in England (Different laws apply in Scotland). It considers the effects of this geographical concentration on the care of children, based on qualitative interviews with unaccompanied children and young people and adults working with them. These interviews are analysed through the lens of the requirement in the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child that States must act in the best interests of the child. The support structure around each child is conceptualized as the 'holding environment' in which they live and develop, drawing on an idea developed by the British psychologist Donald Winnicott. It is argued that neither children's legal rights, nor their best interests, are best served by living in areas of high concentration. However, the article also criticizes the language of 'dispersal' and 'burden sharing' in the wider debate on refugee reception. Finally, it analyses responsibilitysharing models from France and Austria and a similar model operating between different boroughs in London, concluding that the laws and practices which exist do not fully comply with the 'best interests' principle, often because of a failure to properly fund transfer and care arrangements.person becomes a refugee. 1 This is of course not to deny children's agency, as Elaine Chase, Ravi Kohli, and others have explored, with research coming particularly from the social work field. 2 This article makes a contribution to the growing academic literature on unaccompanied children by arguing a simple point: unaccompanied children are more likely to have their needs unmet if they are left concentrated in particular geographical areas, which may therefore be unable to provide foster carers, school places, and other aspects of care because of the level of demand. This argument relies on the concept of the 'holding environment', first developed by the British child psychologist Donald Winnicott in the 1950s: I conceptualize the child's accommodation, education, social support and relationships, formal support, legal advice, and leisure opportunities as the environment which holds the child, in the absence of a family.In the UK, section 20 of the Children Act 1989 mandates that a child for whom no adult has parental authority must be ...

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