Book Review: Understanding Social Security: Issues for Policy and Practice
| Author | Pete Alcock,Wim van Oorschot |
| DOI | 10.1177/138826270300500406 |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
BOOK REVIEWS
Jane Millar (ed.),
Understanding Social Security: Issues for Policy
and Practice
, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2003, xxiv + 335 pp., ISBN
1-86134-419-8
This book is one of two new titles opening a new series on Understanding
Welfare: Social Issues, Policy and Practice with Saul Becker (from Loughbor-
ough University) as Series Editor. The book is designed to act as a text for
Social Policy students. There is a considerable need for such a text in the UK
as the main existing text (Social Security in Britain by Stephen McKay and
Karen Rowlingson) was published in1999 and is now somewhat out of date,
having been written before many of the Labour government’s recent
reforms had been developed or introduced. McKay and Rowlingson, as it
happens, are both contributors to the book under review, which provides
extensive coverage of the wide range of developments within social security
that have been introduced by the ‘New Labour’ government in Britain since
it came into office in 1997.
Understanding Social Security is an edited collection. The editor, Jane Millar,
was Director of the Annual Summer School of the Department for Work and
Pensions (formerly the Department of Social Security) from 1996 until last
year, and the contributors have all been tutors at the Summer School. They
are not only specialists on social security but also have experience of
teaching social security staff as well as university students. As Saul Becker
explains in the Foreword, the book ‘cuts through the policy rhetoric to offer
insights into how and why policy is made, how it is implemented, and what
its outcomes are for those at the receiving end.’ (p.xx).
As Jane Millar also points out in her introductory chapter, ‘[s]ocial security
policy is changing both in respect of key goals and the means to achieve
these’ (p.1), and the changes made by ‘New Labour’ since it came into office
in 1997, which have even included dropping the words ‘social security’ from
the name of the Department responsible for social security, have certainly
been extensive. The contributors are well placed to document these
changes, and this they do well. The book is, in our opinion, an excellent and
up-to-date guide to recent developments in social security policy in the UK,
written by those who know a great deal about them. This is the main strength
of the book.
The coverage of the book is wide-ranging: Part 1 focuses on the policy
context and includes a chapter on the global context that all policy now
resides within; Part 2, on ‘changing goals’, focuses on different claimant
European Journal of Social Security, Volume 5 (2003), No. 4 341
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