Introduction

In 2008, in its third edition and for the first time, The student's companion to social policy, published by Wiley-Blackwell and with a testimonial from the Social Policy Association describing it as ‘an essential text for all social policy students’, examined the ‘role of users in determining welfare policy’ (Alcock et al, 2008, p xix). This contribution was itself written from a ‘service user perspective’ by a member of a service user organisation and movement (Beresford, 2008). This reference to ‘users’, that is to say, people on the receiving end of welfare policy and practice, not only marks a departure for this particular social policy text, but it also contrasts with a broader tendency in academic social policy writing, which has historically tended to be dominated and largely constructed by social policy academics and other professional ‘experts’. This has been to the exclusion of people identifying as coming from the perspective of direct experience as ‘end users’.

The aim of this chapter is to look more closely at the recent contribution of service users and their organisations to the reconceptualisation of social policy. It explores the fresh insights and approaches that they have offered; the complex, often highly ambiguous ways in which these have been addressed and incorporated in public policy; and how this may helpfully be challenged.

An overlooked issue

Typically current and recent social policy textbooks to be found on library and bookshop shelves, even those offered as standard texts or key introductions, tend to have little or nothing to say about, or to report from, people as welfare state service users (for example, Pierson, 2001; Dean, 2006; Lavalette and Pratt, 2006; Pierson and Castles, 2006, Pierson, 2006; Alford, 2009). They seem to have particularly little to say about the organisations and movements developed by such service users. Thus, for instance, a social policy text whose focus is specifically ‘social welfare movements’ acknowledges in its introduction that it ‘barely discusses’ the modern service user movements, like the disabled people's and psychiatric system survivors’ movements (Annetts et al, 2009, p 12). Yet these can be seen as the movements most closely associated with social policy, indeed in some cases, being traceable to and generated by it and in the case of the disabled people's movement, with a history stretching back more than a generation to the 1960s and 1970s (Campbell and Oliver, 1996).