These three essays from the mid-1960s illustrate Titmuss’s thinking on some of the key issues of social policy, now as well as then. Reading them nearly forty years on, it is striking how many of the issues and the questions he addressed then are still of central relevance to policy dilemmas today, even if the context – and hence some of the answers – have changed. Indeed, there are many ways in which the context has changed precisely because of the influence of his ideas and critique of the state of social policy, broadly defined, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. In other ways, circumstances have changed as a result of some of the social and economic forces he foresaw as of growing importance.

The first chapter, ‘The role of redistribution in social policy’, picks up and develops some of the ideas Titmuss had discussed in what is included here as Part 2, Chapter Two, ‘The social division of welfare’, particularly the arbitrariness of what was seen as a ‘social service’ because it involved public spending, in distinction to other forms of fiscal and occupational welfare.

Titmuss rejects this view of social policy as consisting of public spending in specified areas as both inadequate, because of what it omits, and misleading in implying that welfare provision is unproblematically redistributive from those with more to those with less income. He sees this kind of view as a result of the origins of pre-war British welfare provision in the Poor Law, with its reliance on personal discrimination, dividing the population into “eligible and ineligible citizens”, and achieving redistribution only by being discriminatory and socially divisive. This first part of the chapter provides a powerful statement of the case against services solely delivered to the poor through a means test.

By contrast, Titmuss stresses that post-war social policy had gradually abandoned the use of “discriminatory and overtly redistributive services for second class citizens”. Instead, services like contributory social insurance, universal free secondary education, council housing aimed at all income groups, and the NHS had two aims. One was, to be sure, the redistributive objective, but the second, non-discriminatory objective, was “manifestly [to] encourage social integration”.