BIEN | Opinion

This thoroughly researched survey of European means-tested minimum income protection (MIP) systems – the safety-nets into which households and individuals fall if other earned or benefits income is insufficient – will quickly become an essential research tool for anyone interested in social policy generally and in income maintenance in particular. The more precarious nature of both families and employment has made means-tested safety nets more significant for increasing numbers of citizens, which means that means-tested systems will become more politically important (and this, in turn, is one of the factors that has led to Iain Duncan Smith’s success with Universal Credit). Greater political importance will mean more social policy debate, more need for research, and more need for books such as this one.

Whilst in all of the countries studied in this edited collection the welfare state can be regarded as entering a new age of austerity, the picture that emerges is one of diversity: of different kinds of financial crisis in different countries, of different cultural contexts, and of different effects on welfare provision. For instance: ‘Liberal market economies … are least well equipped in both economic buffers and social solidarity to deal with the impact of a crisis in welfare funding because interests are not shared corporately or between social classes’

This accessible and thoroughly researched book is also a vindication of Fitzpatrick’s conviction that ‘welfare theory’ – the philosophy of social policy – is a discipline in its own right. Welfare theory draws on both ‘social theory (the philosophy of sociology and social science) and political theory (the philosophy of politics and government)’ (p.xv), but it orders things in its own way and develops its own emphases. It is not insignificant that the first chapter is entitled ‘wellbeing’, now a focal concept for welfare theorists and social policy makers.

The number of degree course modules on ‘citizenship’ is increasing, and this book is designed as a core text; but it will be useful not just to teachers and students, but also to social policy practitioners and politicians because the contested and complex concept of citizenship now informs debate on all manner of social policy issues, as this book amply shows.

Stuart Lowe’s The Housing Debate takes a refreshingly broad view of housing and welfare. Rather than a balanced introduction for students to current debates around housing and social policy, Lowe has a clear case to make. ‘There is mounting evidence that housing is not only an important pillar of welfare states, but, looked at in its broadest sense, has become a foundation.’

In this book Daniel Dorling has brought together fifty-two of his academic papers, newspaper articles, magazine articles, and unpublished essays, to create a nicely structured and really quite devastating critique of our unequal society: devastating because so carefully researched.