As publication number two in a series of introductory student texts entitled ‘Contemporary Social Policy’, this volume might come as something of a surprise. Set alongside housing, health, education and today's inevitable themes of the mixed economy of welfare and community care, surely the title ‘Understanding Equal Opportunities’ is a cuckoo in the nest? Just what is it that a course on social policy needs to do with the theme of equal opportunities (employment opportunities, not service delivery opportunities) and how does it fit within the intellectual frameworks of the field?

Based on contributions to the Conference of the Institute for Research in the Social Services at York in 1994, this volume provides commentaries on the influence and effectiveness of recent policy measures and seeks to illuminate future agendas for policy and research. It is divided into two sections. Under the unprepossessing title of ‘Old Agendas’, the first covers the progress of internal market reforms in the NHS; the effectiveness of policies on alcohol taxation, and of measures for dealing with homelessness and drug abuse; an international overview of means testing for social assistance; and the financing and philosophical underpinnings of community care. The second section, on ‘New Issues’, contains discussions of market testing in social security; accountability in the public services; ethnicity and community care; future prospects for social policy in the EU; and a ‘critical agenda’ for future welfare debates.

In recent years ‘needs assessment’ has become an overused phrase, joining terms such as ‘community care’ in having such a proliferation of meanings and uses as to be meaningless when used without explanation and qualification. It can be used at the policy level to inform resource allocation decisions; in commissioning and planning to guide service development; and to allocate service to individuals. The first two levels are often interlinked.

Traditionally, when government wants to stall on a difficult but politically pressing issue, it establishes a Royal Commission (a technique little used by the bulldozer governments of the Thatcher era). However, despite the widely acknowledged (albeit with differing emphases) political significance of the voluntary sector, there has been no recent government incursion of this kind into the world of the voluntary sector. The only recent public government commentary has been The Individual and the Community which, in 1992, appeared both as part of the Majorite broad push on the Citizen's Charter and a flagging up of his government's desire (during the review of charity law, and the introduction of the community care reforms) to pull the voluntary sector further into the welfare market dominated by the three Es; as Barry Knight has put it, to encompass the ‘delivery of state objectives through voluntary means’.

This book makes a number of interesting points. Historically, Greaves shows how, throughout the twentieth century, cigarette smoking has moved in and out of phase with liberationist imagery, variously associated with the feminine ideal and defiant assertiveness. She does not spare the tobacco industry in their unconcern for women's health: her most valuable point is that the gathering assault on Third World markets, especially in Asia, is only just starting to reproduce on a larger scale the damage left in the West by the post-war smoking epidemic.