This festschrift is dedicated to the late Professor Sally Baldwin, the influential Director of the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York from 1987 to 2002. It has contributions from more than a dozen leading UK social policy thinkers and analysts, as well as five chapters that offer evidence and perspectives on contemporary social policy themes from beyond Britain. With 19 chapters and six parts, the volume focuses on a theme of critical contemporary importance – the ‘twin issues’ of cash and care, and the relationships between them. A Foreword by Jonathan Bradshaw summarises Sally Baldwin's unique contribution to British social policy, and the single chapters by the editors in Parts 1 and 6 introduce and conclude the collection.

The 17 chapters in Parts 2 to 5 present, in turn, ‘new theoretical perspectives’ (three chapters); explorations of ‘traditional forms of disadvantage’ (five chapters); new contributions to understanding of ‘families, care work and the state’ (six chapters); and discussions of contemporary concepts, discourses and policies – three chapters that discuss independent living, empowerment, consumerism, democratisation, citizenship, dignity, human rights and quality of life. All four sections provide thought-provoking reading about welfare systems, social-care arrangements and changing services, and each is timely because of the major transformations under way in Britain's welfare state. These contributions will be important reading for all students of social policy, for social and health-care workers, and for those responsible for funding and planning service developments and reforms. Many will be of interest to the many disabled people, lone parents, older people, carers, and people on low incomes whose roles in challenging the status quo, lobbying for improvements and reform, contributing to new thinking, and voicing demands for responsive services, are evident in the collection.

Part 2 has three chapters on important theoretical developments in thinking about care, gender and social policy: Lewis argues the importance of attention to time, money and services in policy on care which is attentive to the welfare of women; Wærness highlights the richness of multidisciplinary, international research on care and emphasises the importance of the new ‘feminist ethic of care’ as a counterbalance to the ‘mainstream economic and managerial discourse’ that dominates most care policy and planning; and McLaughlin calls for alternatives to a ‘pseudo-democracy’ of public consultation aligned with an ‘apolitical’ evidence-based policy agenda. Several chapters reflect on the way that campaigns, lobbying and research evidence have influenced social-care policy in recent decades, notably Morris's chapter in Part 5 on independent living, which alerts those new to the subject to the role of disabled people in, variously: the struggles for choice and control over services and support, the emergence of cash-for-care policy in the UK, and the conceptualisation of the social model of disability and making it so influential.

There is also material to interest those with other specialist concerns. Understanding of the social situation of lone parents, and of how policy initiatives impact on them, is enhanced by Millar's excellent and strongly empirical chapter on paid work, income security and welfare for lone mothers. Skinner and Finch's balanced assessment of how state subsidy of ‘informal’ childcare might benefit lone mothers, and Ridge's well-crafted essay on children as ‘active caring agents’ in lone-mother families (which conveys the damaging effects of poverty on these families as well as the resourcefulness, thoughtfulness and domestic labour provided by children in the families studied) also deserve to be widely read. Pahl's lucid chapter, which opens Part 3 of the book, offers an assessment of how far research, including Baldwin's own study of income and expenditure in families with a severely disabled child, has influenced social policy. Acknowledging that policy makers are influenced by many other factors – ideology, financial constraints, media scandals, dominant groups – as well as by social research – Pahl calls on researchers to learn the important lesson that research must be disseminated with inventiveness, versatility and skill if it is to have real impact on policy.

Several contributions focus specifically on carers – Arksey and Kemp explore the interaction between paid employment and ‘informal care-giving’; Glendinning evaluates different models of paying family care-givers; and Breda and colleagues examine the Personal Assistance Budget scheme in Flanders. The contributions by Land (Chapter 18) and Kreimer (Chapter 11) will be of particular interest to gerontologists and those interested in late-life. Kreimer outlines recent Austrian developments in arrangements for long-term care, arguing that the allowance introduced in 1993 has not stimulated the market supply of formal care services for older and disabled people. Land focuses on what the ‘independence’ and ‘choice’ agenda mean for older people in England, highlights the care given to others by the ‘older generation’, and explores contradictions and dilemmas in current arrangements for both residential and domiciliary care. This book will be of wide interest, and is a welcome addition to the literature; it addresses questions in social policy that are fundamental to our times.