There is absolutely no way to attack poverty through the transfer of economic resources without also profoundly affecting, for better or ill, the social bond. Definitions of social welfare generally recognize ‘…the mutually supportive obligations of people to each other’. Yet many serious and competent social thinkers apparently deny the significance of reciprocity in those social exchanges that are arranged as a matter of social policy. The predominant view is that social policies are ‘…characterized not so much by exchange by which a quid is gotten for a quo as by unilateral transfers that are justified by some kind of appeal to a status or legitimacy, identity or community’. Titmuss refers to the grant or gift as a unilateral transfer which ‘…is the distinguishing mark of the social (in policy and administration) just as exchange or bilateral transfer is the mark of the economic’. It will be argued here that this view, useful in some ways, also seriously distorts perceptions and has a deleterious effect on the design and implementation of programmes that make up the official helping enterprise in general, and programmes of income maintenance in particular. Most often social policy transactions are erroneously conceived in ideal or pure terms, bearing little or no resemblance to economic or market exchange. In reality, however, the vast majority of all transactions, economic and social, occur on a continuum between these theoretical poles.

The Department of Education defines an immigrant child as one either born abroad or born in U.K. to a parent or parents whose origin was abroad, and who came to Britain less than ten years ago. This definition does not therefore include children born to immigrant parents of long-standing, or to black parents born here. Mrs Thatcher has proposed a new definition of ‘immigrant child’ from January 1972, which will take into account grand-parents’ country or origin. It should thus be possible to estimate the total population of ‘black’ children in British schools with more accuracy after this date.

‘The lines of a great housing policy have been developed as a result of mature deliberations and far reaching enquiries’ said the Report of the War Cabinet for 1918. So they had. The decision to provide Exchequer subsidies for housing was a major development in social policy. It was the result of a prolonged and detailed study which began in the spring of 1916 and was embodied in legislation in the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919.