The title of this volume – Disability Benefits, Welfare Reform and Employment Policy – opens up a massive policy space for examination. Indeed, each one of this trinity would justify separate treatment but by bringing them together Colin Lindsay and Donald Houston have provided us with a very welcome addition to the literature.

The book's starting point is that in the UK and in other countries there is a problem for society and policy – the large and increasing numbers of people who receive sickness and disability benefits and are out of, or on the fringes of, the labour market. In their introductory chapter, Lindsay and Houston present a thesis for why this is the case. The rise in disability benefit recipients they argue is due to three factors – local labour markets, individual employability and personal health. What follows is a series of largely excellent contributions that pick up on this thesis to varying extents in the context of the UK (in Chapters 2–8) and of four other countries, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and New Zealand (in Chapters 9–12). This coherence around a central idea is one thing that makes this an admirable collection. There is much to enjoy and learn from the individual chapters. The standards of writing and clarity are exemplary.

It is impossible to do justice to all the contributions in this volume of course and if I do not mention some individual chapters, it is only because of space. Having said that, several chapters identify individual health as a major influence on the numbers of disability benefit claimants but also on people's capacity to re-enter the labour market (for example, Beatty and Fothergill in Chapter 2, Barnes and Sissons in Chapter 5 and Webster et al. in Chapter 7). The general conclusion is that the scale and scope of health interventions in welfare to work programmes prior to the 2010 election have been somewhat lacking and mainly ineffective.

The four chapters that range beyond the UK are all worth reading as they offer distinct perspectives on disability and employment from within their own countries. In the chapter on Germany, Brussig and Knuth explain why there is no ‘crisis’ of disability benefits (at least when the chapter was written). In contrast, claimant rolls are falling. In Sweden, policy responses to rising claimant numbers have been largely informed by political ideologies about abuse of the social security system. I liked the sentence in Ulmestig's conclusion that begins ‘Despite the lack of evidence the government chose to handle the problem. . .’ (p. 194). Resemblances to contemporary UK policy making are not unnoticed. In van Berkel's chapter, the solution in the Netherlands to what was characterised as the ‘Dutch disease’ (that is high disability payments) will be familiar to a UK readership: tighter eligibility rules and increased conditionality loom large, but these are complemented by obligations placed on employers to contribute to the rehabilitation of workers with health problems. In the chapter on New Zealand, Lunt and Horsfall describe a shift in policy from macro-level to micro-level interventions aimed at particular groups, in specific circumstances within defined labour markets. It is an approach which resonates with the policy recommendations in the chapters by Webster et al. and Beatty et al.

The chapters in the central part of the book not only diagnose the problem of rising disability claimant rolls, there are ideas for policy developments. Beatty et al. (in Chapter 8) provide the most succinct summary of the need for action, arguing for a range of demand side measures including national economic recovery and regional development, and familiar supply side responses such as increasing employability, skills, motivation and health.

There are of course a few things about the volume that raise some questions (at least in the mind of this reviewer). The first is this: where does the notion of a ‘crisis’ in disability benefits come from. The word is used predominantly by the editors in the opening and closing chapters and seems to suggest that this is a given. Certainly, the rise in claimant rolls has been identified in many countries as undesirable but I am not sure what purpose is served by construing a social policy issue as a crisis. Indeed, it is a related, minor gripe with the book that there is a departure sometimes from sober, academic analysis and language (generally one of the strengths of the book) into emotive, often unsubstantiated assertions and polemic. To talk of ‘industrial policy wantonly allowing great swathes of manufacturing and engineering to wither on the vine’ (p. 234) is vague and unhelpful.

If there is a gap in the book, and this is not a weakness more a consequence of timing, it is that the contributors could not engage with the major changes in policy that have been, or are in the process of being, introduced in the UK since the election of the Coalition government in 2010, including the Work Programme and Universal Credit. However, the silver lining here is that there is now an opening for the editors (I am sure they have spotted this already) to compile a second volume that can place recent policy initiatives in the context of developments before 2010 and developments more widely in Europe and beyond. Disability benefits, welfare reform and employment policy is a constantly changing arena – I look forward to the next instalment.