This is a short primer about social policy in the UK. In eight chapters, Pete Alcock discusses the nature of the British welfare state, the range of needs and services in the UK, issues in service delivery and some social issues. The material is briefly and descriptively stated. The headings of the main chapters give a fair idea of the scope of what is covered: “What do we mean by welfare?”, “What are the main welfare issues?”, “How should we deliver welfare?”, “Where should planning and delivery take place?”, “Who benefits from welfare?” and “What challenges does welfare face?” The basic agenda is a whistle-stop tour of issues in social policy, covering familiar topics in 1000–2000 words – there's a bit more on poverty or taxation, a bit less on disability or old age.
The title, the subtitle and the promotional quotations on the cover have little to do with what's inside. This is not a book about why we need welfare: unless you think that the reasons for delivering welfare are self-evident, describing welfare policy or issues in provision are not equivalent to offering a justification for doing it. The international organisations have been bubbling with other arguments for expanding welfare provision, such as solidarity, social capital, basic security, human rights or social cohesion, but they don't get as much as a name-check here. Nor is this a book about the common good: there are only a couple of hundred words on what that might mean, and almost nothing on the theoretical debates behind it. The concluding chapter asserts that welfare is important for social investment and for civil society but adds very little by way of discussion. Alcock claims that this perspective offers us “A new case for collective welfare”, but neither of those positions is at all ‘new’: Giddens was writing about a social investment state in 1998 (Giddens, Reference Giddens1998 p 117), Robson to a welfare society in 1976 (Robson, Reference Robson1976) – Walzer's 1991 essay on “The civil society argument” is also worth considering (in Walzer, Reference Walzer2007). There are no references to the best known writers about collective action or the common good in social policy, such as Titmuss or Bill Jordan (Reference Jordan1989) – the first of those has to be a deliberate choice, because Pete Alcock has previously co-edited an edition of Titmuss's work (Alcock et al., Reference Alcock, Glennerster, Oakley and Sinfield2001). If you wanted a book of arguments in defence of welfare, or hoped to find a developed case for collective welfare provision, you'd need to look elsewhere.
Books need to be reviewed on the basis of what they do, not on what they don't. As it stands, this is a serviceable short textbook about services in Britain. There are many of the standard features of a textbook – paragraphs describing well-known contributions to the subject, bullet lists, recommended readings and short points made in boxes. There's stuff on education, health and social care, and brief coverage of class, race and gender; other staples of social policy such as benefits, housing or child protection get shorter shrift and are touched on only in passing. Those choices may reflect a desire to improve the subject's fit with basic sociology courses – Alcock genuflects in the direction of the ‘sociological imagination’ – but they make the book rather less relevant to professional studies.
The kind of material that is covered is not untypical of an introductory set of lectures in social policy, for people studying the subject along with sociology. Teachers on that kind of course may want to recommend this book as a reasonably succinct, accessible account of British social policy. However, the market for introductory student texts is crowded: this book will find itself in competition with substantial, detailed textbooks covering related ground in much greater depth, with alternative short introductions to social policy (such as the somewhat superior Short Guide, from the same publisher: Hudson et al., Reference Hudson, Kühner and Lowe2015) and with resources on the internet which are accessible and free. There's not enough here either to commend the book in its own right or to distinguish it from the pack.
