Law has not played a central part in the English tradition of social policy studies, although Scotland, with active Public Law Departments in its Law Faculties, is closer to European tradition in this respect. But the pursuit of civil and political rights through the courts, developing out of the European tradition, has now been brought to this country through the Human Rights Act of 1998. With help from various watchdog Commissions, law is now entering the social policy field in a big way – most comprehensively in Northern Ireland. So we need to learn more about it, and Stuart Weir is to be congratulated for a book that will help us do that.

He argues that Britain is already doing fairly well in using the law to extend civil and political rights – with the exception of our laws about Trade Unions, which are still more oppressive than those of any nearby country (a memorial to Margaret Thatcher left undisturbed by Tony Blair). But we have been more reluctant to use human rights law to extend economic and social rights to areas such as housing, health care, education and an adequate income. Judgements about such things are apt to have very expensive implications. They also call for professional knowledge, which courts are ill-equipped to provide. So judges have often said that such issues are ‘not justiciable’. Or, venturing into territory that is likely to provoke conflicts with the Government, they have too readily accepted the plea that this family cannot be rehoused and that patient cannot receive an expensive new drug owing to ‘scarcity of resources’. This, Weir asserts, is characteristic of Britain's paternalistic, top–down political tradition.

In the first third of his book, which takes a strategic view of these issues with help from the experience of other countries, he develops a case for a broader interpretation of human rights law that would give it a more effective purchase on economic and social rights. Ideally, he would like us to have a written constitution or Bill of Rights that would guarantee such things for all of us. But, recognising that we shall not achieve that any time soon, he proposes a system that would enable our courts, and the quasi-judicial Commissions we set up, not to require that this family be re-housed or that patient be given the latest drug (in place of some other family or patient who would have got them) but to require instead that the services concerned show they are working towards a scale of provision that will ensure that all similar families and patients eventually gain these benefits, that they have a plan to achieve that − with targets and dates which have been publicly debated and agreed − and that progress towards these targets will be regularly monitored and publicly reported.

‘Ultimately’, says Weir, ‘people's social and economic rights would not be determined within the courts. . .justiciable socio-economic rights would provide a human rights framework within which government, the courts and the public, especially those in need, could develop shared values, review policies and allocate resources’ (p. 107).

The second, and larger, part of this book consists of chapters by seven different authors who discuss the main fields of social policy: protection from discrimination, income maintenance, housing, health, education, employment and the inequalities to be seen in each. I had hoped these chapters would enable their authors to address the practical dilemmas posed by Weir's more strategic vision.

What priorities will emerge from the wider public debates he calls for when it comes to housing for asylum seekers? – the treatment of mentally ill people who are feared to be dangerous? – employment opportunities for suspected paedophiles? – prisoners of every kind?

Do we know what a ‘right to health’ – a phrase much used in the book – actually means? Will greater reliance on the law increase still further the rising tide of litigation by patients against hospitals and doctors, which is proving so costly to the NHS? Won't the first people to use these rights divert even more resources from other patients thought by the professionals to be in greater need? Will people with learning difficulties and asylum seekers – who are among those most deprived of proper medical care – be among the first or the last?

Did the UN's Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – much quoted in this book – really know better than our own social workers when they berated Britain for making too much use of foster homes and too little use of children's Homes? Did they really know better than our own politicians when they demanded that we impose a legal prohibition on physical punishment of children by their parents?

The book correctly reports that Scotland has gone ahead of most of the world in its services for homeless people. But how much of that achievement was due, not to human rights law, but to the large stock of social rented housing available in a country that has had a declining population? Could London do likewise?

It's true that Britain is among the richer countries of the world, as this book repeatedly reminds us; but are British voters prepared to elect a Party that will tax them to pay for the massive increase in expenditure required by the policies it calls for? Do the authors repeatedly deride Britain's public service mandarins for believing that ‘Whitehall knows best’ because they are convinced that Britain's progressive intelligentsia knows better still?

I'm not suggesting that the answers to these questions will always be bad news; only that they need to be seriously discussed by anyone advancing the arguments contained in this book. None of them is. I hope there will eventually be a new edition which treats them more seriously and takes this very important enterprise further. And, while they are about it, I hope it will include a glossary of the initials of the innumerable human rights committees, courts, reports and commissions which spatter the text.