Five new Flash Reports prepared by the European Social Policy Network (ESPN) are now available and provide information on recent social policy developments in Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Romania and Switzerland.

• The growing number of migrants in Cyprus has raised crucial policy challenges. One of the most urgent problems is their inadequate access to healthcare. Indeed, the current system is marred by health inequalities resulting in increasing unmet healthcare needs, especially among third country nationals. The forthcoming healthcare reform, which is expected to be fully implemented in 2020 and will provide universal coverage, should help to address this problem.
• The new Danish socio-economic investment model (Socioøkonomisk Investeringsmodel, SØM) allows anyone interested to calculate the effects of a social policy measure on the public economy as well as the economic costs and benefits of particular social investments.
• In a context of low pension replacement rate of average earnings, anomalies in the state pension and low public confidence in governance and regulation of supplementary pensions, Ireland has published a roadmap to reform the pension system and to “auto-enrol” workers in a savings scheme for retirement.
• In November 2017, the Romanian government adopted a fiscal legislation package that decreases the level of taxes and includes a new social contribution system. The reforms threaten to increase the already high proportion of uninsured people and widen the benefit gap between various categories of workers.
• To help jobless social assistance recipients back into work, the City of Lausanne (Switzerland) tested a new approach based on collaboration between social assistance services and the public employment services between 2015 and 2017.  After two years, participants were more likely to be employed (+9%) which resulted in a reduction in benefit costs of 11% over the period of observation (22 months). This new approach has now been expanded beyond the City of Lausanne.