In a world of nation states, citizenship, or full membership of the social and political community, has a three-fold relationship to the supply and demand of public welfare. First, in the liberal tradition that society exists to serve its members, citizenship offers moral justification for the state's concern for individual citizens (Harris, 1987; Jordan, 1989). Second, since citizenship confers a form of equality of status on members of the community (Marshall, 1963), it must be assumed that the state university applies to these members whatever distributive standards it adopts (Macedo, 1990). Finally, and as a consequence of the other two relationships, citizenship is one of the primary bases for claims on the economic resources of the state (King & Waldron, 1988; Barry, 1990, p. 4).

The article highlights the discordance between the reality and the perception of women's independence and equality. The changes in legislation and increased female participation in the labour market since the 1960s give the impression of considerable progress. Equal treatment of men and women has been proposed. Evidence from national survey data however, shows that women's income is still lower than men's with no matching increase with age and career. Social security policy has always been based on labour market participation but women's labour market participation is quite different from that of men. Because of childcare responsibilities many women work parttime at some time in their working lives. Equal pay legislation has had little influence on the incomes from part-time work. The failure of real income from part-time work to rise over time has been a major cause along with job segregation and the segmentation of the labour market in maintaining the difference between men's and women's incomes. Women's continued lack of personal income has consequences for the support for women and children, particularly evident in the case of lone mothers. The incomes available to a woman are unlikely to be high enough to provide an adequate independent living standard for herself and any dependent children.

The subject of this article is NHS staff accommodation, about which, as with other comparable forms of shared peer group housing, little is known. It is noted that there is no obvious reason why privileges, such as the provision of subsidised staff housing, should continue to be accorded to the professions by government, especially given the contemporary concern of the latter that state agencies should not be landlords on a large scale. NHS recruitment difficulties, and possibly also the need for mutual support felt by those in stressful ‘care’ occupations provide some grounds for staff accommodation to be provided. But it is argued in this article that it is rather the onset of citizenship and displacement of corporatism which implies a civic obligation on residents to take control of developing this sector of housing.

Affirmative action and preferential treatment are group policies. Their desired effects will be on groups of people rather than on individuals. The two main purposes for such race conscious practice are to compensate for past harm and to promote greater equality of opportunity, and arguments in the debate about such practice have often marshalled ideas about group rights to compensation and equality of opportunity. Most rights-talk on the other hand is about individual rights and the idea of group rights sits uneasily with individual liberalism. This article discusses the nature of group rights and whether they can easily co-exist with individual rights in the pursuit of compensation and equality of opportunity.