With the title The Development of the British Welfare State readers might be surprised to learn that this history essentially begins in 1945. The book is a political and social history of the welfare state since the 1940s with one chapter devoted to the early-twentieth-century ideologies which led to the idea of a welfare state. The first part of the book chronicles the politics and history of the successive administrations. Part II has chapters on the welfare state services while there is a short concluding section which looks at current trends and prospects for the future in which Sullivan discusses the implications of markets and consumerism for the welfare state idea.

Families Behind the Headlines brings together eight papers presented at one of the annual meetings organised by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the aims of recent meetings has been to present ‘fundamentally important scientific material in an intelligible way to wider audiences than the specialist and narrowly academic’. The papers produced as a result of the 1995 meeting certainly take on board this principle. The result is a publication that manages to cover a wide range of issues connected with the family in a concise, readable but challenging way.

The book's subtitle – The New Zealand experiment – a world model for structural adjustment? is more revealing of its contents than the title. The New Zealand experiment was a rapid and radical liberalisation of the economy incorporating: substantial freeing-up of financial, labour, external trade and foreign exchange markets, large reductions in the direct government intervention in every economic and social sphere, all combined with general fiscal and monetary restraint. Specific elements have included: substantial cuts in nominal levels of welfare benefits; removal of trade protections and subsidies; an Employment Contracts Act which emasculated the unions and thence collective bargaining; privatisation of most state enterprises (including all the utilities, railways, forestry and the HMSO-equivalent government publisher); corporatisation of hospitals and government research organisations; and statutory independence for the central bank (which was legislated to focus thereafter on inflation control only). So in just a decade New Zealand, one of the original homes of the welfare state, went from having a more regulated and subsidised economy than Britain, to being more like a stereotypical USA of the South Pacific. What may also surprise JSP readers is that the programme was initiated by a Labour government (1984–90). The National, traditionally Tory government (1990–present) did however significantly accelerate the process.

One of the most striking changes in British society in recent years has been the dramatic increase in income inequality, which is unprecedented by comparison with contemporary international experience or recent domestic history. During the 1980s the number of people living in poverty doubled as the real living standards of those at the bottom of the income distribution stagnated whereas those closer to the top experienced very substantial increases. Public awareness of these developments was heightened by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Inquiry into Income and Wealth (see JSP review, 24:3, pp. 443–6). This book now provides more detailed coverage of many of the key research projects that were supported by the Foundation to investigate trends in the distribution of income and wealth.

The published output of research projects funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has grown considerably in recent years. The research and innovative development reports are aimed principally at policy makers and practitioners, but the academic readership must be substantial. The reports are characterised by sound research presented in an easily accessible form. These three publications do not depart from this well-established formula.

Until relatively recently, the self-employed have been something of a Cinderella group in public policy. They are excluded from various parts of the benefit system and even the official poverty figures show some results excluding the self-employed on the basis that no-one quite knows what the living standards of the low-income self-employed actually are. It is against this background that this book seeks to broaden our understanding of the low-income self-employed.