Difficulties encountered in the transfer of money to a minority group in society are explored. Should benefits for disabled people seek to mitigate earnings loss, functional incapacity or damage? Should they take the form of contingency benefits, merited payment, or compensatory and reparatory ‘gifts’? What are the reasons for the different approaches adopted in the War Pensions, Industrial Injuries, and Invalidity Benefit schemes?

An historical account of the development of these schemes shows that payments related to attributed characteristics or ‘condition’ avoid the pitfalls of undue stress on status, performance and achievement inherent in alternative, and apparently more integrative, benefits. Payments related to condition accentuate ‘difference’ but if they represent a collective liability for society's vicariously caused diswelfares, they need not be experienced as stigmatizing. It may therefore be possible to conceive of a compensatory / reparatory payment for all disabled people, as of right, independent of insurance status, average life earnings, current wage, and other measured achievements. To avoid ‘physiological and psychological means testing’ the basic payment would be assessed on a disabled person's assumed ‘loss of faculty’ but, in the interest of equity, individual measurements of functional limitation may be necessary for additional cash benefits and services.

Means-tested housing allowances have played an increasingly important role in housing policies in a number of European countries in recent years. They have also provoked considerable controversy, particularly when associated with neo-liberal reforms. This has happened in West Germany, where a national scheme was introduced in 1965 as part of a reform programme involving widespread rent decontrol and a substantial reduction in ‘social housing’ expenditures. The discussion in this paper suggests that the new scheme was not very successful, either in preventing financial hardship or in providing a stimulus for house-building. Since 1965 there has been growing resistance to the idea of housing allowances as a primary instrument of housing policy, and the present government has favoured a different approach with the allowances complementing other more direct controls over the housing market.

Different interpretations of the role of housing allowances are examined in the section on France, and there is also discussion of controversial issues of a technical character. In an attempt to adapt aid closely to particular needs the French have developed extremely complex arrangements, which clearly create difficulties for administrators as well as potential recipients. There has also been conflict between an endeavour to use the allowances to improve housing standards and the aim of providing help for the poorest sections of the community.

The article deals with the geographical imbalance of medical manpower in general practice; it describes corrective policies employed in the NHS, some major administrative problems stemming from those policies, and the prospects under reorganization.

First, the problem is seen within the context of inequalities in the distribution of other health and welfare services in the United Kingdom and of medical manpower in other countries. The second section summarizes the three major strategies employed since 1948: the Medical Practices Committee, the Initial Practice Allowances and the Designated Area Allowance. Problems arising from these policies include the fragmentation of responsibility, the lack of agreed objectives and the haphazard nature of the geographical units within which restrictions and incentives operate. The final section deals with the opportunity, presented by the 1973 National Health Service Reorganisation Act, to restructure these unsatisfactory features of the administrative framework. It is feared that the impetus for change is in danger of being lost, and that the establishment of the new health authorities alongside the old, largely unaltered machinery will merely add to the fragmentation of responsibility, thus exacerbating the imbalance of resources.