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Previous editions of Social Policy Review illustrate Janus-faced dynamics in the UK welfare state. Facing one way are efforts to centralise and standardise means-tested support. Academic critiques of an overly centralised welfare system stretch from the Thatcher era through to New Labour governments (Clegg, 2005). Spicker’s (2013: 3–23) review of the 2010–15 Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s flagship Universal Credit reforms demonstrates how narratives of simplifying, standardising and digitising social security have been tied to a centralisation agenda, a point echoed in critiques of ‘centralised control’across the austerity agenda of the Coalition and Conservative governments of the 2010s (Etherington, 2020: 53).

Facing the other way has been a parallel process of localisation around certain kinds of welfare provision. The contributions on ‘rescaling social policy’in Social Policy …