Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T01:52:22.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2022

Kirstein Rummery
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
Get access

Summary

In this year's Social Policy Review (SPR) we are pleased to be able to both keep to, and break with, tradition, in the time-honoured fashion that makes social policy as a discipline robust and challenging. We have kept our three-part structure, focusing on developments in the welfare state, a selection of papers commissioned from the Social Policy Association (SPA) annual conference, and a final section on the theme chosen by the editorial team – this year our theme is the issue of the rescaling of social policy and the governance challenges that presents to the welfare state. However, we have also taken the opportunity of the sixtieth anniversary of what many commentators recognise as the ‘founding’ of the modern welfare state in the UK – the instigation of the Beveridge reforms to tackle the ‘five evils’ – to commission a series of papers for the first section that take a much broader historical and theoretical overview of welfare developments than our usual annual focus. We hope our readers will find this a particularly useful resource, particularly as the social and economic climates in 2008–09 appear to indicate that the welfare state is about to experience the kind of upheaval we last experienced in the restructuring and rescaling of the 1970s. When our grandchildren come to edit Social Policy Review 81 in 2068 and reflect on the 120th anniversary of the Beveridge reforms, we trust this edition will prove an interesting marker in the development of welfare policy. We hope this is not misplaced confidence in the enduring significance of the welfare state and social policy.

Part One: Tackling Beveridge's ‘five evils’, 60 years onKirstein Rummery

Past editions of SPR have focused on giving readers a considered ‘round-up’ of contemporary developments in the ‘five pillars’ of the UK welfare state: social security, employment, education, health and housing. In the past few years the editors have struggled with this structure, as it no longer reflects the complexity of the modern welfare state, nor the contemporary issues it faces. Rather than trying to broaden the scope of this section to include every branch of the modern welfare state, we have chosen this year to take a more thematic, historical and theoretical approach.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Policy Review 21
Analysis and Debate in Social Policy, 2009
, pp. 1 - 8
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×